Sometimes kooky anti-science positions are academic; you have to fight against them because there is a slippery slope and social authoritarians will ban ten things if you let them ban one - because banning one is acceptance that they are 'right'.
Banning Big Gulps, for example, is ultimately pointless. You might as well ban spoons and think that will cure the obesity problem. I have never bought a Big Gulp in my life but I still object to banning them because Big Gulps do not cause obesity. If the product has done no harm, it is unfair to penalize it. I mean, Jenny McCarthy thinks she cured her child's autism - by taking him off gluten - articles and speeches by her should be banned, yet an anti-science crank has freedom of speech and a company making a product people want to buy is getting banned despite doing nothing wrong.
BPA is another 'I got no dog in that fight but I have to resist banning it because anti-science goofballs will go after something else next' rationale. Yes, I can find a scientist or two that says HIV and AIDS are not related, I can find a few that claim who the LHC is going to create a black hole and suck us into it. You can find some people who will trot out a 'study' claiming BPA is harmful and these are the same people who trotted out studies showing a correlation between vaccines and autism.
How to put 'no harm' from BPA in context? 40,000 kids are hurt by batteries each year, notes Alex Berezow at Real Clear Science. Heck, car accidents killed 1,300 kids last year and electric cars are both cars and have batteries.
Yet the same people out to ban BPA think it is a good idea to subsidize electric cars.
Not if science, or even statistics, is part of the debate on whether or not we care about kids.
