Betraying Your Origins

Yeah, yeah, I know attacking a position by criticizing its source is a poisoning the well fallacy, but this is just too easy....

You might have heard about the report a few months ago that students who took "virginity pledges" had equal or higher rates of STD's, unprotected sex, etc. was those who didn't. Upset by this conclusion, the Heritage Foundation has published research claiming the opposite. According to them abstinence education really does work. They don't get into many details, but the NYT reports that there are serious flaws with Heritage's paper.

The article doesn't get into many details, but you must agree that the results are suspicious from an organization full of people who want to work as corporate lobbyists when they grow up(as pointed out by David Sirota and Paul Waldman). It' s not surprising that an organization dedicated to pursuing an ideological agenda might abandon good science in the name of politics.

So while we set up this liberal infrastructure we've been talking about for months, can we be careful not to become as bad as they are? Let's preserve room for uncomfortable truths. Pretty please?