Ethics

Rowe Fisks Barber

By Ed Brayton

Jon Rowe shows how utterly dishonest Matt Barber, another one of those men who run the group Concerned Women for America, is in handling data on gay lifespans in this post at Positive Liberty. Barber sites the famous IJE study on the lifespan of gay men in Vancouver, Canada, which initially concluded that their lifespans were shortened by an average of 8 to 20 years because of AIDS. But that study was in 1997 and most of the data was from the time when AIDS was usually fatal within 10 years, something no longer true.

In fact, the authors of that study did a follow up study in 2001 with newer data from a time when treatments for AIDS had vastly increased the lifespans and changed the disease from an inevitable death sentence to a chronic condition that can be controlled by medication. And the conclusions changed completely. But Barber knew this because he actually quoted that follow-up study in his article:

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on April 22, 2008 (boomark / email).