In a whistfully wonderful way, The Daily Caller has a gotten a new Right Wing OUTRAGE on the blogosphere. OUTRAGE I TELL YOU!!!! With this wonderfully salacious title, how could you not help but be absolutely outraged!

Feds pay for study of gay men’s penis sizes

I have to admit, it caught my eye as a gay scientist working for NIH. Mostly because I was hoping to see a couple of gay penises. Alas, I was disappointed. Anyway, here is why they are so outraged, and why you should be too! RIGHT!?!?!?!

The research, titled “The Association between Penis Size and Sexual Health among Men Who Have Sex with Men,” began in 2006 and surveyed 1,065 gay men. Among its key findings: Those gay men who felt they had small or inadequate penis sizes were more likely to become “bottoms,” or anal receptive, while gay men with larger penises were more likely to identify themselves as “tops,” or anal insertive.

Another discovery from the research: men with smaller penises were more likely to be psychologically troubled than those with larger genitalia. The goal of the study was to understand the “real individual-level consequences of living in a penis-centered society.”

The researchers at Hunter College Center for HIV/AIDS Educational Studies Training (CHEST) got taxpayer money as part of an NIH grant that went to Public Health Solutions and the National Development and Research Institutes, Inc. (NDRI).

NDRI has received taxpayer money since 1985 for “behavioral science research on drug abuse, AIDS and crime.” NIH records show that NDRI has received more than $15 million since 2000.

The gay men penis-size study falls under the NDRI’s drug abuse, AIDS and crime research category. In 2006, the year the organization started funding the penis-size research, it received $899,769 in taxpayer money.

So, ewwww. Not only have the mentioned sodomy and wasteful government spending, two things that GOPers hate more than a lot of other things I can think of off the top of my head, except maybe Obama himself, but they’ve done some great twisting here. It’s not the first time I’ve seen them do this either, especially with extramural NIH funding; that is, government funding entrusted to NIH that a board within NIH then gives to Universities and private companies that apply for grants or students that apply for funding for pre- or post-doctoral fellowships.

For reference, and your own understanding why the study was done, here is the paper. They may blow it out of proportion, but there is a rationale behind it that isn’t important to the point of the article I’m writing now, so far as to say that the more “normal/average” a man thinks he is, the less likely he is to be engaging in reckless sex and get STDs, something that plagues my community, unfortunately.

Anyway, I digress. The Daily Caller says the study received nearly a whooping $900K in gov’t funding in 2006! WOW! That’s a lot of money for a surveying men about their penis size, right? It also sounds pretty silly for the government to fund it right? That’s because the government funding they quote here is a post-doctoral training grant, like the one I mention above. It is for one of the clinical investigators of the trial, and it is clearly mentioned in the acknowledgment section of the article. As a matter of fact, most of the funding came from private sources that are listed in that section. It did not directly fund the project itself, but one of the scientists. As a scientist at NIH, I know how little we get paid, and trust me… that grant is listed in a number of people’s CV’s (do a quick google search for the grant number, and you’ll see). No money from that grant was being used directly for that study. It was used to train staff and build scientists, but subsidize the obviously controversial nature of the study, no. Here is more info on the T32 grant from NIDA. Each subdivision of NIH has a different focus for their T32, but almost all are training for pre- and post-doctoral fellows.

Shut up Daily Caller. You clearly have a small cock, and we all know it.