from Ethical Issues

If Science is Our Guide,
Why Don't the Conclusions Fit the Evidence?

In an editorial published by the Tampa Tribune and Times, the Family Research Council described a bizarre discovery: high-school textbooks often honestly describe the difficulties of single parenting, including the enormous negative repercussions for children. However, these textbooks typically then conclude by saying that "each type of family is as acceptable as another."

If the facts show single parenting is associated with family stress and poverty, along with greater propensity for crime, poor school performance and teenage pregnancy among the children, then why do these textbooks reassure the reader that every type of family arrangement is equally valid?

The FRC editorial based its information on a new study, "The Course of True Love: Marriage in High School Textbooks," produced by the Insititute for American Values.

FRC reported: "Such value-neutral fluff is contradicted by the weight of social-science evidence, which finds that children from broken families are at far greater risk of abuse and of damaging behaviors. Seeking to shield the children of fragmented femilies from greater emotional pain, they do them a disservice by affirming the living situations that are harmful to them. In addition, by offering subjective conclusions that contradict the findings of social scientists and their own analysis of divorce and single parenting, the book sends the message that there's no relationship between fact and conclusion."

On the subject of homosexuality, we often see the same odd logic: in spite of the overwhelming evidence of health risks and traumatic, anatomic incompatibility in gay male sex, social scientists refuse to consider that there is any inherent disadvantage in a gay lifestyle. Thus educators send the message to children that -- as FRC's Policy Analyst says -- "there's no relationship between fact and conclusion," while continuing to affirm homosexuality as equivalent to heterosexuality.

"By offering unsupportable conclusions, presenting factual inaccuracies and omitting critical information," FRC says of school textbooks, students are "unprepared for future family and civic responsibilities."

Looking at the situation from another angle, we might say that when society has only one moral absolute--"tolerance"--meaning uncondional approval of every lifestyle choice, then the conclusions must be made to fit the philosophy, even if the facts simply don't support it.