The Birth of a Meme

from Anglican Curmudgeon by A. S. Haley

This is how a meme starts: a scholarly study is published, and makes its way to the Internet. In this case, the study is based on surveys of attitudes toward legislation of the kind that has become more notorious in recent years, given all the clamor and activism of one segment of society to draw attention to its "victimhood." The surveys go back in time for a period of ten years, and note how "progress" (or not) has been made in each of the fifty States toward enacting pieces of legislation to "protect" the group from its self-defined "discrimination" by the rest of society. (In today's hyperpolitical world, if a group defines itself by the degree to which it is removed from the norms of society, then the next step is for it to claim that society's inertia against any broadening of its norms is a form of "discrimination," and to seek court rulings and legislation which penalize the "discriminators" -- who in their unenlightened state simply embody society's norms.)

Now, please take note: the study says absolutely nothing about any kind of inevitability of the "progress" which it attempts to document. It simply documents what states have enacted which pieces of legislation, and measures this degree of legislative action against surveys of political attitudes in that particular state. Its methodology is thus to compare how attitudes measured by surveys of the state's populace track with the enactment of specific legislation in that state.

Here is a link to the study in question, entitled Gay Rights in the States: Public Opinion and Policy Responsiveness. Set aside, for the moment, the oxymoron represented by the juxtaposition of the two words "gay" and "rights", and accept that the study simply takes what the gays claim at face value, and then attempts to measure the response of the society at large to those claims, state by state. It is written by two professors at Columbia University, who appear to know what they are doing. They employ all the standard statistical measures and techniques for evaluating their data, and draw the appropriate conclusions from those evaluations.

One will simply have to overlook one highly obvious methodological flaw in their study -- highly obvious, that is, to anyone who does not, like our two professors, live in the City of New York. Remember, they are tracing society's reactions, in the form of legislation enacted, to claims about "gay rights" and "discrimination" across the whole United States. One yardstick they use to measure the gap between what a society "says" (in response to survey questions) and what it "does" (through the laws its legislators and governors enact) is what the authors call the "salience" of a given "gay issue."

For the rest of this essay, including graphs and other visual displays, go to:
http://accurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2010/05/birth-of-meme.html