Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Two scholars are furious with James Dobson for citing their research - distorting their research, they argue - in making an argument against gay marriage and gay parenting in a Time magazine article. Here's what Dobson wrote:
According to educational psychologist Carol Gilligan, mothers tend to stress sympathy, grace and care to their children, while fathers accent justice, fairness and duty. Moms give a child a sense of hopefulness; dads provide a sense of right and wrong and its consequences. Other researchers have determined that boys are not born with an understanding of "maleness." They have to learn it, ideally from their fathers.
When Gilligan was informed that Dobson had used her research to justify his anti-gay views, she was livid.
But Gilligan claimed that Dobson distorted her findings, and says that she disagrees with his theory that same-sex couples are unsuitable parents. In a pointed letter to Dobson and released to the press, Gilligan demanded that he apologize and "cease and desist" from quoting her work in the future."I was mortified," Gilligan wrote, "to learn that you had distorted my work this week in a guest column you wrote in Time Magazine."
"My work in no way suggests same-gender families are harmful to children or can't raise these children to be as healthy and well adjusted as those brought up in traditional households," Gilligan asserts.
"I trust," her letter concluded, "that this will be the last time my work is cited by Focus on the Family."
And she was not alone. A second scholar was equally upset to find his work used in this way:
Dr. Kyle Pruett of the Yale school of medicine was equally shocked to discover Dobson's use of his work in the column."You cherry-picked a phrase to shore up highly (in my view) discriminatory purposes," he wrote in a similar letter to Dobson. "This practice is condemned in real science, common though it may be in pseudo-science circles. There is nothing in my longitudinal research or any of my writings to support such conclusions."
In fact, Pruett's work suggests the opposite of Dobson's assertions. "On page 134 of the book you cite in your piece," he points out, "I wrote, 'What we do know is that there is no reason for concern about the development or psychological competence of children living with gay fathers. It is love that binds relationships, not sex.'"
Same sort of thing we see consistently from their creationist allies.
Comments
So, what are the odds that Dobson will actually acknowledge what he did was wrong, or that Time Magazine will even note that Gilligan objects to Dobson's misuse of her findings? Pretty low, I'll bet.
Posted by: Shawn Smith | December 17, 2006 11:19 AM
Well, if I ever had any respect for Time, it's gone now. Any publication that accepts articles by the likes of Dobson is a piece of crap.
Posted by: writerdd | December 17, 2006 11:53 AM
Stress that men and women are inherently so strongly different in morality, Ms. Gilligan, and you can't exactly express too much surprise when people use that as a basis for arguing that children need both a mother and a father.
Posted by: Gretchen | December 17, 2006 12:23 PM
To be fair, if anyone is to be blamed for misusing Gilligan's work, it's Gilligan. Gretchen is right. Gilligan is a disgrace as a researcher: she refuses to release key data behind her claims about gender, uses non-standard methodology (that, again, she refuses to release), and makes all sorts of bizarre new-agey excuses as to how she knows certain things and why other researchers do not that simply don't measure up as meeting standards of evidence (especially, of course, male researchers, with their different ways of knowing statistical techniques). Many of the key claims that made her career were based on personal interviews with a small number of non-randomly selected girls, then generalized to girls as a whole, and she STILL refuses to explain the facts behind even that shoddy methodology. It's all subjective nonsense.
Posted by: plunge | December 17, 2006 1:31 PM
Plunge is right; Gilligan's scholarly malfeasance is well-documented in Christina Hoff Sommers's The War Against Boys, in addition to other pieces by well-respected authors. Gilligan, as an author, is not credible, to say the least.
Yet, as in this case, I get the impression that we wind up having to confront varying degrees of scholarly and intellectual dishonesty, and this creates a difficult situation (for me, at least). Gilligan's work should not be misrepresented, of course, and she should be defended against that. How do we defend her without endorsing the claims of her work (as there are always those who will conflate the two)? Who is more intellectually dishonest here? And perhaps most importantly, how can I get over this terrible apathy that comes on when someone whom I find quite repugnant misrepresents someone whom I find dishonest?
Posted by: ThomasHobbes | December 17, 2006 10:35 PM
Could be.
Posted by: Skemono | December 18, 2006 1:27 AM
ThomasHobbes, while I don't think you are wrong to questions all this, it seems pretty clear to me that Gilligan's scholarly incompetence is no excuse for Dobson's. It's ironic and kind of amusing course, but I don't really see any problems with it. You just call them both unethical, incompetent creeps. :)
Posted by: Leni | December 18, 2006 1:11 PM
Skemono -
I am finding it harder and harder to understand claims by many of my lefty friends that TIME is a conservative rag. Certainly the writing is closer to the McNewspaper, USAToday, than it is to Atlantic monthly or Utne. But they tend to bring a lot of very progressive ideas to an audience that probably spends very little time or energy on politics. For that matter so does the McNewspaper. Not to say that either could be considered liberal either. I rarely pick up either (waiting rooms, when I foolishly forget my own reading material) but I really appreciate them.
Posted by: DuWayne | December 18, 2006 1:26 PM
I see the Colorado Springs Values crowd is out in force here to turn the conversation away from "does James Dobson misrepresent research for discriminatory purposes?" to "attempt to attack and discredit anyone who objects to Dobson's 'research'.
This story is not about Dr. Gillian or Dr. Pruett (and another so-to-be-announced author whose work was *horrendously* misrepresented), it's about the misrepresentation of research for discriminatory purposes. Clearly it is deliberate discrimination that is at issue.
Posted by: Mr. Foster | December 18, 2006 2:39 PM
You must not spend much time on Ed's blog, or you'd know that there is pressure little love lost (understatement of the year) for Dobson and his ilk here. My point was simply to note a bit of irony in the fact that "difference feminists" such as Gilligan who push so hard the idea that men and women have fundamentally different natures when it comes to things like morality shouldn't be surprised when it comes back to bite them in the ass when people draw the "wrong" conclusions from their work.
Posted by: Gretchen | December 18, 2006 3:10 PM
Yes, Mr. Foster, the notion that those who criticized Gilligan's work are part of the "Colorado Springs Values crowd" is quite absurd. The folks who have been critical of Gilligan are hardly the kind of people who would defend Dobson, not in this lifetime. Both things can be true simultaneously, of course; Gilligan may be a horrible thinker and Dobson might be distorting her work.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | December 18, 2006 4:03 PM
I should also add that according to the quote from Dobson's writing, it sounds like he didn't actually distort Gilligan's work at all, but rather that she's just angry that he was using her work to support a political position she doesn't support herself. Rather than demanding that he apologize and "cease and desist" quoting her, perhaps she could write a letter or column for Time explaining how her work doesn't support the idea that kids would do better with both a mom and a dad.
Posted by: Gretchen | December 18, 2006 5:09 PM