On the difference between bogus and science – a reply to Sirpa Pietikäinen and Sophie in ‘t Veld

By J.C. von Krempach, J.D. | May 17, 2013

Why can’t those nasty conservatives not just be reverently silent when the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) solemnly pontificates on “LGBT discrimination”? Why can’t they stop using critical thought??

Some days ago I reported on the “LGBT Survey” conducted by the FRA, calling it “bogus research yielding bogus results”. This has aroused the anger and hatred of some among the European Parliament’s fervent promoters of sexual diversity.

One of them is Sirpa Pietikäinen, the Vice-President of the LGBT Intergroup, who angrily commented:

Sirpa respects freedom of opinion

 

“I respect conservative Catholic groups’ freedom of opinion, including on women’s and LGBT rights—but I don’t appreciate their way of criticising research even before it is published. In any case, they receive very little attention, even from centre-right MEPs.”

Well, we obviously did receive considerable attention not only from Mrs. Pietikäinen herself, but also from the her much more flamboyant colleague Sophie in ‘t Veld, who said:

Sophie is sad

“I find it sad that these groups find any reason to criticise the work of the Fundamental Rights Agency whenever it promotes the rights of women or LGBT people. Their knee-jerk reflex shows that this survey is highly needed, and that unfortunately, equality still has a lot of opponents.”

Whoever has read our comments on the Survey will see that what we have criticised (with solid arguments that the two LGBT ladies from the European Parliament do not seem even remotely able to refute) is the methodology that was used. To criticise the methodology of a survey you do not need to know the results. Indeed, it was much better not to await the results, so that no one could reproach us for having criticized the Survey because of those results. It is sufficient to look at the questionnaire and on the way in which the Survey was conducted (with open access on the internet and no firewall to prevent one person from submitting multiple answers) to conclude that this Survey has not the faintest claim of yielding relevant scientific results. It merely serves a political purpose: to misinform and manipulate public opinion and to prepare the ground (supposedly this is why the LGBT bigots call it “groundbreaking”) that will radically curtail civil liberties of citizens, cost a lot of taxpayer’s money, and undermine the institutions of marriage and family.

And of course we do not oppose “equality”, if that term relates to the equal treatment of what indeed is equal. Nor do we criticise the FRA for promoting the rights of women or LGBT people. We criticise the FRA for its phoney and scientifically unsound work. In other words, we defend reason and critical thought against the bigotry and irrationality of the LGBT fanatics.

And given that Sophie and Sirpa apparently are among the most assiduous readers of this blog, let me use this occasion to explain to them what distinguishes real research from bogus research.

I probably don’t need to spend much more lines on bogus research. Just read my previous blog entry.

But what would a serious survey on the same issues look like? (N.B. I am not saying that the problems of LGBT or other people shouldn’t be made the object of research. I just think that such research should follow a scientific methodology.)

First, you would have to take a sufficiently big sample of the population to be researched. If the survey covers the entire EU, respondents should be distributed across all 27 Member States according to the size of each country’s population. There also should be a gender balance, and a balance according to other relevant criteria, such as education, income, religion, age marital status, etc. Only in this way you get a sample that can be described as representative. Social science has its rules of procedure, and this is one of them.

The second step would be to ask all participants to answer the same questions. In our case, those questions might refer to experiences of harassment, hate speech, physical threats, and all other negative experiences of which it is claimed that gays and lesbians are disproportionally often the victims. Then(ideally at the end of the interview) you ask some further questions to find out which of the respondents actually identify as gay, lesbian, transgender, etc.

And as a final step, you compare the responses given by those LGBT persons to those given by non-LGBT persons.

The reasons why a serious-minded survey must be conducted in this way are fairly self-evident. I suppose even Sirpa and Sophie will agree.

victims of harassment and discrimination

But nothing of this is found in the FRA Survey, which actually seems to have been set up in order to provide some kind of “confirmation” for pre-ordained assumptions that LGBT people are the victims of discrimination. Indeed, whoever looks at the methodology of that Survey will find that actually it isn’t a survey. It is simply a mailbox for LGBT people who believe they have been the victims of discrimination, and who are allowed to tell their story twice, three times, or even more often, each time improving their score.
Maybe that provides them with some consolation. But it does not provide us with any insight into the actual situation of LGBT people (as compared to the rest of society). For 370.000 Euro, this is not really an impressive result.

So maybe the FRA could next year spend some money on a real survey following the scientific standards set out above.

With this, I send my friendly greetings to Sophie and Sirpa. If they have any substantial argument to offer on why the FRA bogus Survey should be taken seriously, I will gladly read it on their blog.

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