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8"Harder to kill than a vampire." That is what the sociologist Joel Best calls a bad statistic. But, as I have discovered over the years, among false statistics the hardest of all to slay are those promoted by feminist professors. Consider what happened recently when I sent an e-mail message to the Berkeley law professor Nancy K.D. Lemon pointing out that the highly praised textbook that she edited, Domestic Violence Law (second edition, Thomson/West, 2005), contained errors.
"I appreciate and share your concern for veracity in all of our scholarship. However, I would expect a colleague who is genuinely concerned about such matters to contact me directly and give me a chance to respond before launching a public attack on me and my work, and then contacting me after the fact."
One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack.
by 
Antara on 7-13-2009 8:06 AMLemon's Domestic Violence Law is organized as a conventional
law-school casebook — a collection of judicial opinions, statutes, and
articles selected, edited, and commented upon by the author. The first
selection, written by Cheryl Ward Smith (no institutional affiliation
is given), offers students a historical perspective on
domestic-violence law. According to Ward:
"The history of women's abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year
753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was
accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement. ... The laws
permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its
circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man's
right thumb. The law became commonly know as 'The Rule of Thumb.' These
laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common
Law in most of Europe."
Where to begin? How about with the fact that Romulus of Rome never
existed. He is a figure in Roman mythology — the son of Mars, nursed by
a wolf. Problem 2: The phrase "rule of thumb" did not originate with
any law about wife beating, nor has anyone ever been able to locate any
such law. It is now widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist
professors.
A few pages later, in a selection by Joan Zorza, a domestic-violence
expert, students read, "The March of Dimes found that women battered
during pregnancy have more than twice the rate of miscarriages and give
birth to more babies with more defects than women who may suffer from
any immunizable illness or disease." Not true. When I recently read
Zorza's assertion to Richard P. Leavitt, director of science
information at the March of Dimes, he replied, "That is a total error
on the part of the author. There was no such study." The myth started
in the early 1990s, he explained, and resurfaces every few years.
Zorza also informs readers that "between 20 and 35 percent of women
seeking medical care in emergency rooms in America are there because of
domestic violence." Studies by the federal Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an agency of the
U.S. Department of Justice, indicate that the figure is closer to 1
percent.Few students would guess that the Lemon book is anything less than
reliable. The University of California at Berkeley's online faculty
profile of Lemon hails it as the "premiere" text of the genre. It is
part of a leading casebook series, published by Thomson/West, whose
board of academic advisers, prominently listed next to the title page,
includes many eminent law professors.
Very enlightening clip, thanks.