In early 21st century America, science is a touchy subject. For one thing, school board members like me have to make sure that every student in the district meets the state standards in science, but you're held accountable to those standards by a president who's none too keen on book-learnin' in general and all that scientifical stuff in specific. Science, after all, is the Miracle-Gro feeding some of the biggest thorns in the president's side, like stem cell research, global warming, birth control, and military intelligence.

And then there's Kansas. The statewide school board, which determines what Kansas students will be tested on, flaps around on the issue of teaching evolution like a vestigial appendage in the political wind. Last month, the board chose to reverse its 2005 decision that required teachers to tell children that evolution was merely a "controversial theory." The February decision was the fifth revision to the science standards on evolution in eight years. The National Center for Science Education, a pro-evolution advocacy group, keeps track of the ups and downs of science in schools on its website (www.natcenscied.org), where the Kansas "Events" page reads like a smarmy soap opera script.

But it's not only No Child Left Behind, or Kansas, or evolution, or even junior chemistry sets that make science and children an explosive mix.

This week, I'm feeling the pain of the social science researchers who have just set up a website protesting misuse of their research by the anti-gay Focus on the Family (FOF) organization. At www.respectmyresearch.org, child psychiatrists, sociologists, and other researchers are challenging FOF's pattern of using their work to allege that children are harmed by having gay parents or by being gay themselves. Some of the researchers, all well credentialed social or medical scientists, have posted their disclaimers and letters to FOF's founder James Dobson on the site.

RespectMyResearch.org notes that for a long time, anti-gay right-wing organizations had a cadre of "disreputable or pseudoscientific sources" whom they could cite in their campaign to undermine LGBT families. After years of embarrassing excesses - like recommending that gay people be placed in concentration camps to protect public health - these hacks have been discarded in favor of twisting the findings of bona fide scientists.

Case in point: In a 2006 TIME Magazine op-ed, Dobson misrepresented the research of Yale medical school professor Dr. Kyle Pruett to bolster Dobson's charge that children of same-sex couples are in grave developmental danger. Pruett wrote to Dobson: "You cherry-picked a phrase to shore up highly (in my view) discriminatory purposes. This practice is condemned in real science, common though it may be in pseudo-science circles."

"Circles" is the right word, Dr. Pruett. I'm hoping we can pull ourselves out of the anti-science whirlpool before we all spin down the drain.