The first study purported to show that children who spend time in Day Care are "more aggressive" than children who remain home to torture their parents until kindergarten. The more time in Day Care the more aggressive behavior a child exhibits, or so the headlines indicated.
I was personally relieved. At last there was an explanation as to why Jacob Price insisted on beating me up in grade school, from 1958 to 1962. He must have been the victim of some experimental communistic Day Care, pre-school, head-start pilot program funded by the Eisenhower administration.
Now we know, I thought, how communal child rearing by the K'chung tribe of the Kalahari desert was responsible for Adolph Hitler. And evidently it took a village to raise Genghis Kahn. Then I read the story under the headlines and learned that burdened by a liberal arts education I had mistaken the word "aggressive" to mean "violent." According to the academic definitions used by the social scientists themselves: "aggressive" means you stretched your data to win a grant approval; while "violent" means the graduate student you've been plagiarizing finally took a shot at you.
The scientists knew the assumptions the public would leap to and they knew they could count on the press not to correct those misunderstandings - the news biz has always been more profitable when Armageddon was imminent as proven by the fact that only in journalism is it common to refer to the end of the world in the past tense.
The whole thing was just a sick joke perpetrated by bored academics and published by a non-discriminating press. I confess once I figured out the punch line I had a pretty good laugh, myself. I just hope the kids around the country who had their lives upended when their panicked parents jerked them out of Day Care also found some humor in the situation.
The second study insisted that contrary to previous studies, children raised by homosexual parents are "different" than children raised by heterosexuals. Social conservatives must have been salivating when they read that headline (which is what the headline writer intended, of course) thinking they finally had liberals by their statistical shorts. But the conservative hopes were to be dashed on the rocks of Ph.D. Joke island.
In the fine print of the study the Ph.D.'s explained that by "different" they meant "just a tiny little bit, and not in a bad way, either". The study went on to claim that boys raised by gay parents are only slightly more likely to admit to being homosexual then boys raised by homophobic maniacs. Boys raised by female couples tended to treat women nicer and start fewer bar fights than boys raised by "normal" parents, i.e. with at least one but only one dad in the family. One of the scientists even suggested with a smirk that this may be because lesbians parents are less likely to put their children into Day Care than heterosexual parents, but even then the reporters dutifully refused to notice their legs were being yanked.
Now if concerned parents were to put these studies together they might believe the world was on the brink of Armageddon because heterosexuals are producing children they are not qualified to raise without the assistance of a lesbian operated Day Care center. (There is no such listing in the yellow pages, I looked.)
But, before we start lynching hetro's from the lamp posts, allow me to point that although Judas Iscariot, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot were all heterosexuals, J.Edgar Hoover was gay. And none of these guys attended Day Care as a child. It's all just a joke.
A few more academic pranks like these and people will stop believing the news altogether. They will begin wrapping fish in the front pages of their newspapers and start referring to cable news services as "reality based programming". And if the Ph.D.'s lose their gullible audience what kind of damage will these bored nutty professors be driven to then? Maybe proposing something as silly as a $20 trillion missile defense system. Don't laugh; what if we somehow get a president who doesn't know it's a joke?
Whose laughing now?
Kimit Muston's columns appear regularly in the Los Angeles Daily News. If you have any comments regarding his columns he may be reached at inditer.com
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