My former GayNZ.com colleague Chris Banks wrote a piece about three years or so when peculiar Investigrunt editor Ian Wishart made free association between foetal and infantile soy intake and later male homosexuality. Chris couldn't find any evidence-based research to substantiate Wishart's inferential jumps all over the place and poor comprehension of the science of endocrinology. Neither the Plunket Society, Sanitarium, the New Zealand Ministry of Health, or the Endocrine Society could turn up any causal relationship between intake of soy milk, and male homosexuality. The New Zealand Ministry of Health cautions against feeding babies soy milk, because infants get more nutritional value from breastfeeding or cows milk. Probably due to the fact that Christmas is the 'silly season,' Wishart trotted out the same old story, associated with World Net Daily, a US online right-wing news service, slammed for its sensationalism and inaccuracy by mainstream professional journalists. It was derived from one Jim Rutz, fundamentalist minister at Megashift Ministries. The WND article does not mention whether Rutz has any qualifications in the fields of prenatal medicine, early infant development, child nutrition or endocrinology. Nor does it provide any mainstream academic journal citations to substantiate Rutz' claims about 'gay soy.' To be sure, neither does one pseudonymous "Dana Scully," at the liberal OpEd news site, but she sure as hell has a lot of fun pointing out Rutz' howlers when it comes to comprehension of the role of human endocrine secretions. And then there's the matter of WorldNetDaily itself. Curious about this right-wing 'news' website, I had a look at Wikipedia's background information on this media provider. It turns out that they have a history of sensationalism and unsubstantiated claims related to the Twin Towers collision tragedy, misreport Middle East news items due to ideological preferences of their pro-settler Israeli correspondent, and engaged in harsh attacks on Michael Schiavo, husband of permanent vegetative status patient Teri Schiavo, who turned off his dependent wife's life support system given her lack of cerebral functioning- but not before outbursts from the Christian Right, at the behest of Terri's conservative Catholic parents. Is there any reason why we should take this media outlet seriously? Why did Wishart return to this weirdness? Conspiracy theorists are prone to do this. Instead of citing mainstream academic and professional evidence-based research, they resort to 'suppressed' or 'discredited' or 'alternative' sources of 'knowledge' that a heinous professional 'elite' have suppressed, usually with condemnation of mainstream professional research methods from someone with no professional expertise in the field that they criticise. Hence, Wishart returns to this strange but unsubstantiated fantasy of the origins of male homosexuality. Why do people give credence to this odd little fellow? Recommended: "Dana Scully" "That's Soy Gay!" OpEd: 16.12.06: http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_dana_scu_061216_that_s_soy_gay_21.htm Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Net_Daily World Net Daily entry Not Recommended: The Barking Mad Room (Wishart's blog): http://www.tbr.cc Jim Rutz: "Soy is making kids 'gay': World Net Daily: 12.12.06: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53327 Craig Young - 18th December 2006