From the religious perspective, Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment is, his response was love (in the sense where love is a general respect for humanity). Jesus is supposed to be the embodiment of God, he helped anyone who needed help regardless of their life choices and background. That is not at all consistent with the church of today. Things have improved but we have a long way to go still.

Organizations like “Act Up” and “Bash Back” are effective precisely because they teach GLBT youth that they have a right to defend themselves even if they are gay. The prevailing religious and social environment with its millennia bias against gays does all it can to deny them that right.

Though I am confident that social worker Caitlin Ryan’s research is well intended and well funded it falls short in intellectual rigor. It is intellectually dishonest to rubber stamp it merely because it agrees with our opinions. That is foolish and silly.

That is not science.

That said, the sampling was still much too small. The attempted suicide rate for Ms. Ryan’s study would have been five out of 244 (not a half a person as I previously stated). It would have been accurate if she had merely stated that five subjects attempted suicide. Instead she said that the suicide rate was eight times higher.

There is a danger of extrapolating that “eight times” to larger and different populations. Ms. Ryan does not mention the use of a control group with the same demographics. So my guess is that she is comparing these 244 young people to a national norm. There is nothing wrong with that but it should at least be mentioned.

As a serious scholar I would want to know if these subjects shared any common traits other than GLBT (east coast for LGBT). For instance, if they came from the same community some other factor may have played a role. Two copy-cat suicide attempts within a close knit group, for instance, would more than double the instances in this small a sampling.

So no, Nancy, it isn’t that I think a small sampling is useless for a scientific study. But at best, in this case, it suggests the need for further study with a much broader sampling. As for Sigmund Freud’s studies; those were case studies. They did not pretend to provide statistical probabilities.

I have no doubt that gay youth are much more at risk than the general population. But Ms. Ryan’s study is hardly groundbreaking or newsworthy.

I have no doubt that kids rejected by their families are more likely to have mental health problems than those who are accepted. But it is hardly “science” when those conclusions are drawn from surveys of a tiny sampling.

The first problem is that the conclusions are based on the subject’s own perceptions. Doesn’t it occur to the researchers that a young person who is depressed or suicidal might feel rejected when in fact he or she is not?

Now let’s do the math. According to The National Institute of Mental Health there are about 250 suicide attempts for every 100,000 people. That’s 2.5 per ten thousand. Social worker Caitlin Ryan’s sampling of 224 subjects would result in one half of an attempted suicide based on her “eight times as likely” scenario.

Clearly half a person did not report a suicide attempt. Nor is it likely that a whole person reported a half a suicide attempt.

Give me science. Please.