So I'm drowning in books researching for one of my summer school classes and I came across this
"In October 2003, during a major committee meeting, a member of the U.S. House of Represenatives, Rep. Mike Ferguson (R-NJ), waved a list of research projects funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH) that he claimed were ridiculous and a terrible use of taxpayer's money. As it turned out, the hit list had been compiled by the Traditional Values Coalition, a right-wing religious group, which asserted that U.S. taxpayers' would deplore these "smarmy" projects. Earlier in July, Rep. Patrick Toomey (R-PA) had introduced a measure dubbed the Toomey amendment to halt the funding of five specific grants, effectively trying to stop the research. The amendment was defeated by a narrow margin of two votes.
One of the projects on the list was a study conducted at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, in which physiological responses of sexual arousal were studied in the laboratory. The rationale for the Kinsey Institute study involved the fact that some some serious problems in society today such as pedophilia, adult sexual attraction to children, involve people being aroused by inappropriate stimuli. If we are to do something about this social evil, we must understand the basic processes of sexual arousal and identify the stimuli that elicit arousal, which were exactly the issues this research worked on. The Tradional Values Coalition, however, could not understand the merits of the research.
Some members of Congress stood up to their colleagues, especially Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) accusing the Traditional Values Coalition of scientific McCarthyism.
(Hyde, Delamater - Understanding Human Sexuality10th edition 2009)
So, here are my questions for ya'll ~
How can we fight such problems as the AIDS epidemic or pedophilia when we lack the accurate knowledge of the factors that contribute to them? Should politicians be permitted to interfere with the integrity of the scientific peer review process? Are elected officials qualified to judge the difference between high-quality and low-quality research?
I found it particularly interesting, and I'm all for sex research, heck I'll participate in sex research (not the pedophilia thing yuck! but others....)