Day: May 26, 2002

More from Bennett

Everyone else getting as tired of this as I am? Good. Like bloody pulling teeth, it is.

Anyway, Mr. Bennett has deigned to provide us with an actual source of data to substantiate his arguments. He posts the following his page in response to my last assessment of his responses:

“Maybe this will help. Twenty percent of lesbians died of murder, suicide, or accident–a rate 487 times higher than that of white females aged 25-44. The age distribution of samples of homosexuals in the scientific literature from 1989 to 1992 suggests a similarly shortened life-span.”

All-righty then. We’ve now got two documents on the table available for fact-checking; and gee, I only had to ask twice.

With that, I’ve accomplished my objectives from my original challenge: first, to ensure that his reprehensible comments did not go unanswered and to make my opinion of them and his conduct clear; and second, to encourage him to put some actual facts on the table to support his statements (or, alternatively, to demonstrate that he had no facts to provide.) Now, both his readers and mine can make that judgment for themselves (and I encourage anyone interested to check the source he provided on partner abuse among lesbian couples as well. ) Justice is served.

I don’t intend to spend any further time on the matter; to be frank, I’m skeptical regarding the veracity of the sources Mr. Bennett provided, but fair is fair: he has provided them, so that’s worth something. Again, the key is that now anybody interested can check for themselves. As it happens, I’m not actually all that interested (never was): my interest was in getting Mr. Bennett to put his cards on the table; not in spending the next few weeks debating this issue.

I encourage anyone interested in further pursuing this matter to continue checking Bennett’s page; I’m sure he’ll have a nice dose of invective about my ending this conversation; probably something along the lines of declaring victory and claiming that he’s proven his case. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that bringing assertions to the table of discussion is the beginning of productive argument and debate; not the end of it.

This will be my last post on this issue barring extraordinary occurrences; in the immortal words of Ms. Rosenberg: “Bored now.”

Update (Monday): I won’t be investing any more of my time in this, but I will post any (reasonable) information readers send my way, out of courtesy to those investing their time. On that note, Jody over at NakedWriting pointed me to this page by UC Davis Professor Gregory Herek, which at first blush, appears to give a thorough Fisking to the source Bennett quoted. For the record, Bennett has now withdrawn the citation on his site after folks pointed him to the same resource. Update Redux: Alex Elliott points out this piece by Andrew Sullivan, which provides some additional debunking. Kinda figured Andrew would have something to say about this fellow.

New page header for a day or so, but I suppose that’s obvious. I believe it speaks for itself.

Evil Lesbian Update

In own comments section, Bennett has responded to my challenge as follows (I include my original questions, Bennett’s responses in quotes, and my own commentary)

1) Women who choose other women as sexual partners are more likely to inflict domestic abuse on their partners than heterosexual males.

Bennett: “See Violent Betrayal: Partner Abuse in Lesbian Relationships by Claire M. Renzetti. It reports that fully one-half of lesbian relationships are violent; the corresponding figure for straight relationships is around 1-3 percent, depending on how you define “violent.”

Okay, we have one source; it’s a start, I suppose. And it’s on Amazon, so it must be true.

In seriousness, though, I have not read Ms. Renzetti’s work so I can’t comment on it positively or negatively. I’d welcome feedback from any readers with additional information or opinions, certainly. But let the record show that Mr. Bennett has honorably provided us a source to investigate for this claim.

(Note: I replaced Bennett’s link to the $83.95 hardcover edition with a link to the nice cheap $29.95 paperback edition. Oh, and if you use my link you won’t be kicking back cash to Mr. Bennett, either, which I believe the original link would have).

2) Women who choose other women as sexual partners are more likely to suffer from the following potentially fatal diseases: X, Y, and Z. (I leave Bennett to fill in the blanks).

Bennett: “Life-span data is easy to come by, and it supports my other claims, which didn’t come out of thin air.”

Trust me, Richard, thin air isn’t where I thought they came out of. But I’m sorry, you get zero points for this answer: vague hand-waving that data is “easy to come by” doesn’t cut it.

BearPower Revealed!

Following TTLB exclusive regarding Mr. Bennett’s hypocrisy with regard to matters linky, it appears that Bennett has quietly redesigned his right navbar to no longer separate out ‘pro’ journalists from bloggers (the very offense for which he castigated Virginia Postrel).

Coincidence? We think not; particularly since TTLB sent Mr. Bennett an email referring to the aforementioned post which he acknowledged receipt of.

Let the record also show that said navbar changes occurred without any public acknowledgement of TTLB’s comments (or links to the post on the matter), which, if I understand Bennett’s own standards correctly, makes him a bloghole.

TTLB is now flush with triumph, and we see near-endless possible uses for this newfound power to inflict site redesigns at will (which, we promise, will be used only for Good, not Evil). The dilemma is simply which to affect first. Should we convince CNN that five characters is too goddamned small to make a search dialog? Dissuade Ain’t It Cool News from vomiting up pop-up ads like a drunken sailor? Or simply convene an intervention with Jacob Weisberg to assure him that no, those slide-out ads that cover the whole page are not the coolest thing since Microsoft Bob ?

Possibilities, possibilities.

PS – I promise to leave Mr. Bennett alone for at least a little while (‘cept maybe responding to any follow-ups he might lob my way re: evil lesbians). I’m starting to go all Sullivan-Krugman-y on him, I know…

Mr. Roboto vs. The Lesbians

“Mr. Roboto” Bennett is trolling for hits, and has decided to beat up some lesbians to get ’em.

Ok, I’ll bite, although I should probably know better (Bennett’s comments are arguably of the “best left just ignored” variety).

Bennett picks up on a question raised by Eugene Volokh and followed up by Charles Oliver: why don’t more fathers want their daughters to be lesbians? Bennett enlightens us as follows:

Charles has the answer, but allow me to summarize, as a father of three young women and one who’s had the experience of doing battle with lesbians for several years in the California legislature as they relentlessly stick their noses into the corpus of family law even where it doesn’t remotely concern them: lesbians are gross.

They don’t look like normal women and they don’t act like normal women. They beat up their partners more often than men do, they suffer from a myriad of life-shortening diseases, and they believe an entire universe of things that aren’t true, even abstractly true. They’re bitter, twisted, and miserable, and they want others to share their pain. I’d rather my girls be prostitutes, heroin addicts, or Mormons than lesbians.

I don’t particularly care for the term “homophobe”, so if you are waiting for that word to pop up here, sorry. My preferred label for folks who fling broad insults towards large groups of individuals is simply “asshole”, and I think it sums up my assessment of Mr. Bennett’s rude behavior more precisely.

Bennett is fond of statistics and nice graphs when they suit his purpose, so I challenge him here to back up the following claims with scientific research or other cold hard facts:

1) Women who choose other women as sexual partners are more likely to inflict domestic abuse on their partners than heterosexual males.

2) Women who choose other women as sexual partners are more likely to suffer from the following potentially fatal diseases: X, Y, and Z. (I leave Bennett to fill in the blanks).

And by the way, even if we take Bennett’s claims at face value and accept, for an intellectually painful moment, his assertions that lesbians “beat up their partners more often than men do, they suffer from a myriad of life-shortening diseases, and they believe an entire universe of things that aren’t true” — does Bennett really mean to say he’d rather have his daughters become heroin addicts (which to my understanding has a high probability of wrecking your life entirely) than suffer an increased risk of spousal abuse and disease, and/or — even worse! — believe things Bennett disagrees with? Sheesh, to think he was criticizing Glenn Reynolds for poor fatherhood.