Faulty Logic

Or, Why Rick Santorum Is King of the Douchebags

Via Andrew Sullivan, I see this gem from Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum:

It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.

But why stop there?

A 2001 article from Slate points out some more problems:

More people live below the poverty line in the old Confederacy than in the Northeast and Midwest combined. You are three times more likely to be murdered in parts of Dixie than anywhere in New England, despite a feverish devotion to "law-and-order" that has made eight Southern states home to 90 percent of all recent U.S. executions. The South has the highest infant-mortality rate and the highest incidences of sexually transmitted diseases, while it lags behind the rest of the country in terms of test scores and opportunities for women. The Confederate states rail against the tyranny of big government, yet they are the largest recipients of federal tax dollars. They steal business away from the North the same way that developing countries worldwide have always attracted foreign direct investment: through low wages and anti-union laws. The flow of guns into America's Northern cities stems largely from Southern states.

But, wait a minute - these states all went for Bush in the last election!

Here's a great site which collocates a lot of good information of this sort. Red states produce more teen mothers than blue states. Fewer adults have college degrees. There's a strong correlation between voting for Bush and higher rates of chlamydia infection. Same with divorce.

In other words, there's a strong correlation between living in a state won by Bush and being divorced, being a teen mother, being uneducated, and having the clap.

One might even go so far as to say that while there are no excuses for these appalling numbers, it is no surprise that states won by Bush, the core of academic, political and cultural conservatism, lie at the center of these storms.

Maybe being conservative makes you more likely to get divorced or catch the clap. Or maybe being the kind of person who gets divorced or catches the clap makes you more likely to vote conservative.

Or, and I know this might sound crazy, or Santorum could be making an incredibly foolish logical fallacy: mistaking correlation for causation. Simply because two happen near one another, in time or space, does not mean they must have anything to do with one another. Amazingly enough, and I know this might be hard for some people to accept, but there might be something out there which is totally unrelated to the political leanings of the people nearby.

(I have a feeling that Santorum knows this, and is saying this purely for political reasons. Does that make this smear better, or worse?)

Because if Santorum wants to believe that child molestation happens because of liberalism, he must then also accept that divorce and chlamydia infections happen because of conservatism.

And if this were the case, I'd like to take a look at rates of child abuse across the country. I bet, even if a lot of the headline-grabbing cases happen to be taking place in Boston, we might find some interesting numbers for those red states.

Update: Well, I'll be the first to admit when I'm wrong. Here are some stats by state. The states with the highest rates of child abuse include such red states as Alaska and South Dakota, but also blue stalwarts Connecticut and Washington, DC - plus Florida, which is a pretty evenly-divided state. States with the lowest rates include red Mississippi and blue New Jersey. Without doing some serious statistical analyses of the numbers, of which I am pretty much incapable of doing, it would appear that there's basically no correlation between child abuse rates and who won a state.

Interestingly, poor Mississippi has low rates, while wealthy Connecticut has high rates - I would think this would be reversed. Is Connecticut just better at reporting incidents? Or is there something else at work here?