In a nutshell, the "scientist" used by the religious right lobbying group Family Research Council to help thwart further stem cell research is charged with grossly distorting the true science in this field.
This doesn't surprise me. I'd done a great deal of research on the Family Research Council's anti-gay documents in the early 1990s. We got all their documents, and then went through all the footnotes and pulled up the original sources. It was the biggest pack of misinformation and distortions you'd ever read. I remember in one document the FRC quoted some study or court case that was incredibly damning to the gay cause. The thing is, we couldn't find the quote anywhere. Well, guess what happened. FRC quoted some innocuous sentence from the document, "forgot" to end the quote with a final quotation mark, and then added their own blistering summary of what the quote "really" said. The thing is, since they didn't close the quote, it looked like their blistering sentence was part of the quote.
Let me give you an example of the kind of thing FRC did. Here's a quote by Lincoln that I've taken and then applied FRC's "style" to it:
Abe Lincoln said in his famous Gettysburg address: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. But most certainly our fathers never dedicated that liberty to gays and lesbians.Get it? If you don't look closely enough, you'd think Lincoln smeared gays in the address.
I am not exaggerating when I say that an unbelievable number of the footnotes in the Family Research Council anti-gay documents were messed up. At the time I'd suggested that someone plop down some money and do a massive study of their research in order to show that they're fast and loose with their "scientific facts" and that reporters should stop quoting their "science."
My proposal remains out there. It wouldn't take that much money to hire a smart researcher to do just that.
