“Officials” reacting in this LA Times story on the new abstinence study say, quite correctly, that government policy should ideally not be based on one study, no matter how well-designed.
So I would like to propose this as the new minimum standard for government-backed social programs: not one dime unless you can show at least one random-assignment study that demonstrates effectiveness. Oops, there goes Head Start. Oops, there goes, er . . . most of the budget deficit?
Ross Douthat’s thoughtful and even-handed tone in his column endorsing federalism as the answer conceals the imbalance here: Abstinence education was one of the very rare instances of using the federal government to affirm the values of social conservatives — and only after several decades of massive, government-funded intrusion on social conservatives’ sacred values.
Would social conservatives take a deal where Washington stops funding liberal ideas for remaking the sexual culture in exchange for an end to federal abstinence-education funding? Well, most likely, but no deal like that is on offer.
The standards of science are trotted out only to swat down policies that support sexually conservative ideas. They are almost never applied to progressive ideas. And never to sexually liberal ideas, ever.
To repeat myself: Can anyone identify for me a study that uses a nationally representative sample, follows children raised from birth by two lesbian mothers to adulthood, and compares how they do to children in other family forms? Is there any research at all on how children do raised by two gay fathers? Does anyone care?
The trope that science is on the side of progressivism is always upheld, regardless of the evidence, by changing the standard of what kind and quality of evidence is required, depending on whether progressives like the policy.