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.