Is scientific evidence being confused with political correctness?

It's become fashionable for those on the Left to fault the Right for being anti-scientific troglodytes. Creationism, global warming skepticism, and a while range of other examples of supposed scientific folly are cited to support the conclusion that conservatives are anti-scientific yahoos.

You'd never know that the history often cited by climate scientists (as in "the warmest year in history") only goes back a little over a hundred years (when we started keeping records), or that the APA's decision to "normalize" homosexuality was a political rather than a scientific decision (it took place when a homosexual majority on the APA board voted to normalize themselves, and the theft of the APA mailing list and its acquisititon by a homosexual activist group enabled a well-financed campaign to suppress the vote in the subsequent association-wide referendum on overturning the decision).

Now the uproar over Mark Regnerus and his study questioning whether the liberal article of faith that children raised by gay parents show no adverse affects has once again raised the question of whether the Left's much-vaunted regard for science is really about science at all. We seem to have reached a crisis point not so much in the way religion relates to culture as in the way in which science relates to it.

We will know that emperical evidence and deductive reasoning are once again the hallmarks of Western science when challenges to the politically correct orthdoxy of the supposed scientific consensus on various issues when the Left starts reacting to dissent from it by citing evidence, rather than by calling the dissenters stupid or bigotted or other such ad hominem labels. Until that time, one can be forgiven the impression that science itself has reached a crisis in which the assessment of scientific validity depends less on truth than on ideology.

And that's even worse for science than for society.

HT: Real Clear Religion