Gay science gone bad: Gay conversion canvassing study published in Science was a fabricated, agenda-driven propaganda campaign disguised as science

Friday, May 22, 2015
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Tags: gay science, retraction, propaganda agenda

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(NaturalNews) Proving once again that "scientists" can make up any loony, whacko conclusion they want and get it published in a prestigious science journal, a celebrated study on gay marriage views that was published in Science has now been exposed as a complete fabrication.

One of the study's authors, it turns out, just made the whole thing up.

The paper, entitled "When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality," was authored by Donald Green of Columbia and Michael LaCour, a graduate student at UCLA. The journal Science bills itself as "The world's leading journal of original scientific research..." and has so far not posted a message of retraction on its website.

We now know the study was pure fiction, just like all the biotech industry studies claiming GMOs and glyphosate are safe, too. As originally published in Science, the study claimed that individuals' views on gay marriage could be radically altered merely by meeting and chatting with a gay person. As printed in the study abstract:

Contact with gay canvassers further caused substantial change in the ratings of gay men and lesbians more generally. These large, persistent, and contagious effects were confirmed by a follow-up experiment. Contact with minorities coupled with discussion of issues pertinent to them is capable of producing a cascade of opinion change.

In other words, the study claimed that "gay enlightenment" was contagious, and that once people had their own views changed to be more positive about gays and lesbians, they would then function as "human convincers" and run around their local communities, convincing others to change their opinions on gay marriage, too.

Remarkably, even though the entire study was fabricated with fake data, the abstract claims, "These large, persistent, and contagious effects were confirmed by a follow-up experiment." Apparently, the faked data were confirmed by faking them a second time. That's the kind of science that appears in the journal Science. And just as we've seen in the "science" realms of vaccines and GMOs, the best way to confirm their original faked studies is to fake them a second time!

Lamestream media lapped up the fraud

Typical liberal publications fell for the ruse, declaring that "simply talking to people about gay marriage changes their views." These are all the same mainstream propaganda publications that waged an attack on Doctor Oz, joining the efforts of the felony criminal doctors and fake corporate front groups who tried to silence Oz over glyphosate and GMO labeling.

Almost everybody in the liberal media reported this research as being true for the simple reason that they WANTED it to be true. Vox even described the findings as "kind of miraculous."

But as DailyCaller.com points out, "As it turns out, that's exactly what they were, because they were apparently made up."

Questions arose after someone tried to duplicate the study

What's especially astonishing here is that everybody accepted the study as true until someone tried to duplicate it. In that attempt, they were unable to replicate the results, and they started asking questions of the original authors.

When the scientists attempting to replicate the study tried to contact the original company that supposedly carried out the original work, they were in for quite a shock. As Retraction Watch reports:

The survey firm claimed they had no familiarity with the project and that they had never had an employee with the name of the staffer we were asking for. The firm also denied having the capabilities to perform many aspects of the recruitment procedures described in LaCour and Green (2014).

Ultimately, the questioning led to the full retraction of the paper by its original authors. Even in the retraction, they didn't directly admit to committing scientific fraud. Here's how you say, "Yeah, we just made all that s##t up!" in science-speak: (bold added)

I write to request a retraction of the above Science report. Last weekend, two UC Berkeley graduate students (David Broockman, and Josh Kalla) who had been working on a research project patterned after the studies reported in our article brought to my attention a series of irregularities that called into question the integrity of the data we present. They crafted a technical report with the assistance of Yale professor, Peter Aronow, and presented it to me last weekend. The report is attached. I brought their report to the attention of Lynn Vavreck, Professor of Political Science at UCLA and Michael LaCour's graduate advisor, who confronted him with these allegations on Monday morning, whereupon it was discovered that the on-line survey data that Michael LaCour purported to collect could not be traced to any originating Qualtrics source files. He claimed that he deleted the source file accidentally, but a Qualtrics service representative who examined the account and spoke with UCLA Political Science Department Chair Jeffrey Lewis reported to him that she found no evidence of such a deletion. On Tuesday, Professor Vavreck and [sic] Michael LaCour for the contact information of survey respondents so that their participation in the survey could be verified, but he declined to furnish this information. With respect to the implementation of the surveys, Professor Vavreck was informed that, contrary to the description in the Supplemental Information, no cash incentives were offered or paid to respondents, and that, notwithstanding Michael LaCour's funding acknowledgement in the published report, he told Professor Vavreck that he did not in fact accept or use grant money to conduct surveys for either study, which she independently confirmed with the UCLA Law School and the UCLA Grants Office. Michael LaCour's failure to produce the raw data coupled with the other concerns noted above undermines the credibility of the findings.

I am deeply embarrassed by this turn of events and apologize to the editors, reviewers, and readers of Science.

In other words, UCLA researcher Michael LaCour just fabricated all the data, a point which is now totally obvious in examining the unusual conformity of that data. LaCour, by the way, is slated to become an assistant professor at Princeton University in July, according to Retraction Watch. No doubt he will use his position at Princeton to fabricate yet more fake studies pushing his own personal agenda while hiding behind the label of "science."

Why the study was obviously a fraud from the get-go

The entire point of the scientific fraud was to try to paint people who oppose gay marriage as uneducated and totally out of touch with society. As the study promised, these people were merely "one conversation away from enlightenment" ... i.e. realizing that gay marriage was awesome and that all gay people were also awesome.

If you ponder the so-called science for even a minute, you should realize it was complete bunk to begin with. The very premise of the study reeks of fraud, claiming that a gay person could, for example, show up at a conservative Christian church and merely chat with church people for a few minutes, miraculously changing their minds about gay marriage.

Some of my friends are openly gay couples, and I also have many good friends in the Christian church community. Because I've been around lots of people from both of these worlds, I can assure you that the conservative Christians aren't going to waffle on this point just by having a conversation with a gay person. To those who lead deeply religious lives, gay relationships are seen as a sin against God. A religious person's loyalty to their principles of divine belief are not open to negotiation... especially not from someone they see as a "sinner."

Obviously, there are other Christian-oriented churches (such as Unity) which are open to gay couples, but they don't need convincing in the first place because they're already declared as open to all sexual orientations (LGBT). Yes, many gays and lesbians go to church, too.

My point is you're not going to march a gay person into an anti-gay church and change everybody's minds with a few minutes of chatting. The very idea is ludicrous, yet it was the fundamental assertion of the "science" paper -- published in the journal Science -- which has now been retracted by at least one of its authors. As DailyCaller.com explains it:

The study, among other things, lent support to the notion that those opposed to gay marriage simply don't know or interact with open homosexuals. More broadly, it was seen as an important development in the science of how people can be convinced to change their minds on ideologically-charged issues.

As it turns out, however, this study was really an experiment into how easy it is to commit scientific fraud on ideologically charged issues. If the community WANTS somebody's fraudulent research to be true, they will treat it as if it were true, regardless of whether it's really based on genuine science.