I briefly moved this web-log to Geocities because some people at Indiana University disapprove of the views expressed in it. Officially, at least, that has now been worked out. I'll comment at length in a day or two, after I finish some work on the game theory book I'm teaching from. For now, the Indiana Daily Student and Bloomington Herald-Times and, not as fully, the Indianapolis Star stories have some straight reporting on the controversy. Commentary is available at the Volokh Conspiracy and Crooked Timber.

I would like to comment on one distortion I heard on talk radio yesterday from the various people condemning me: that there is no evidence of the ill effects of homosexuality. What I said in my web-log was that I did not have such evidence at hand, and rather than hurry out and research it, I'd wait till I happened to see it float by. Thus, I said, "I have no evidence that homosexuals are child molesters more often than normal people" in the same way as I would also say, "I have no evidence that men are child molesters more often than women" (as I did say in the web-log) or "I have no evidence that smoking causes cancer" or "I have no evidence that the earth is more than 5000 years old." Just because I don't have it at hand doesn't mean the evidence isn't there. And even if exhaustive search doesn't find any evidence that claim X is true, it might at the same time be true that the exhaustive search did not find any evidence that claim X was *not* true. See my August 25 post on philosopher William James's observations on this. As Aristotle says in Book I of the Ethics:

... it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

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