Are Democrats really the party of science?

Marches on Washington suddenly seem to be all the rage. There apparently is now in the works a Scientists’ March on Washington.

A temporary website reports that there has already been an “incredible outpouring of support” for a march.

The organizing group indicates that the march will be “nonpartisan,” but there may be room for doubt. Here is what the group says about its motivation: “There are certain things that we accept as facts with no alternatives. The Earth is becoming warmer due to human action. The diversity of life arose by evolution… An American government that ignores science to pursue ideological agendas endangers the world.”

{mosads}If the march is being organized less than a week after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, and one of the things its organizers worry about is an American government that “ignores science” and “endangers the world,” that looks to me as if the criticism is being leveled at the new president.

That does not mean, of course, that the criticism is based on party affiliation, but it sure looks like the target is the new Republican occupant of the White House.

Lots of people (many of them Democrats) think of the Democratic Party as the party of science, and, in fact, an overwhelming number of professional scientists do typically vote for Democrats. Still, there’s reason to believe that the question of which party is “the party of science” (assuming either party qualifies), has not been settled with finality.

Consider, for a moment, the subject of human biological reproduction. This is a subject scientists study. Biology teaches that, with respect to the overwhelming majority of human beings, their reproductive functions and capacities are fixed by their genetically determined sex. 

A tiny fraction of human beings are born with ambiguous genitalia, but the vast majority are not.

Yet, last year, former Pres. Obama’s Justice Department filed a lawsuit in North Carolina attacking the state’s so-called “bathroom law,” which requires people to use bathrooms appropriate for their sex as assigned to them on their birth certificates. (Federal law prohibits only discrimination based on sex; no federal law even addresses discrimination based on gender identity.)

The Justice Department’s suit asserts that “gender identity” is “an individual’s internal sense of being male or female,” and that, if a person’s gender identity does not match his or her sex, then that person’s sex is determined by his or her gender identity.

It is one thing to believe, as I do, that the North Carolina law is ridiculous. It is another thing to assert that a person changes his or her sex whenever his or her “internal sense of being male or female” changes.

That notion is as ridiculous as the North Carolina law itself, but that is what the prior Democratic administration claimed. Somebody just flunked Biology 101.

Or, for another example, take the minimum wage. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and a flock of other Democratic Senators have been leaders in the “Fight for $15” campaign, advocating a nationwide minimum wage of $15 per hour.

You can listen to every speech they have made, and read every op-ed they have written, and you will be hard put to find a single mention of an undeniable economic fact: raising the minimum wage will put some currently employed people out of work, and will also prevent some unemployed people from getting work. 

If economics is a science, that is a scientific fact.

Of course, it may be that the net result of raising the minimum wage is a good thing, but that doesn’t change the fact that some people will be out of work if the minimum wage goes up. I can’t remember ever hearing a Democratic politician say that.

Finally, let’s consider climate change. There is a difference between saying that burning fossil fuels contributes to the warming of the Earth, and saying that the U.S. ought to immediately stop burning fossil fuels. Even if every American were 100 percent certain that burning fossil fuels is a significant causal factor, there would be very reasonable disagreement as to what the U.S. should do.

China is the world’s biggest polluter, producing almost twice as much CO2 as the U.S. At the same time, the U.S. economy is more than 60 percent bigger than China’s, so the U.S. is running a much cleaner economy on a per dollar basis. China’s output of pollutants is growing, while the U.S. output is shrinking.

With all these factors in play, it is not obvious what course the U.S. should follow to deal with the problem. What is obvious is that the U.S., acting alone, can’t solve the problem. 

Recognizing that fact should not convict a person of being a “climate denier.”

David E. Weisberg is an attorney who has published writing in the Social Science Research Network and The Times of Israel.

The views expressed by Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.