Attorney General Eric Holder: “The facts are clear. Intimate partner homicide is the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 15 to 45."

And he's right that the facts are clear. The facts are clear that Holder is wrong.

As that Volokh Conspiracy blog post explains (corroborating a column by Christina Hoff Sommers), homicide is not the most common cause of death of African-American women ages 15 to 45. It's the 5th most common. And those are homicides by anyone, including strangers; only a fraction of them involve domestic violence.

Sommers adds:

Holder's patently false assertion has remained on the Justice Department website for more than a year.

How is that possible? It is possible because false claims about male domestic violence are ubiquitous and immune to refutation. During the era of the infamous Super Bowl Hoax, it was widely believed that on Super Bowl Sundays, violence against women increases 40%. Journalists began to refer to the game as the "abuse bowl" and quoted experts who explained how male viewers, intoxicated and pumped up with testosterone, could "explode like mad linemen." During the 1993 Super Bowl, NBC ran a public service announcement warning men they would go to jail for attacking their wives.

In this roiling sea of media credulity, one lone journalist, Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle, checked the facts. As it turned out, there was no source: An activist had misunderstood something she read, jumped to her sensational conclusion, announced it at a news conference and an urban myth was born. Despite occasional efforts to prove the story true, no one has ever managed to link the Super Bowl to domestic battery.

Snopes has a longer takedown of the Super Bowl myth. Snopes concludes:

The ensuing weeks and months saw a fair amount of backpedalling by those who had propagated the Super Bowl Sunday violence myth, but — as usual — the retractions and corrections received far less attention than the sensational-but-false stories everyone wanted to believe, and the bogus Super Bowl statistic remains a widely-cited and believed piece of misinformation. As Sommers concluded, "How a belief in that misandrist canard can make the world a better place for women is not explained."

A facade of voicelessness for the voiced

This ad campaign in support of same-sex marriage featuring Cindy McCain is hard to fathom. The Advocate says that Cindy McCain and others were "photographed with duct tape over their mouths to symbolize that their voices aren’t being heard on the subject of marriage equality."

My mom says:

I get that she supports same-sex marriage, but what does that have to do with anybody forcibly silencing her? If you have something to say, lady, just say it and quit blaming others.

It's generally better, in political discourse, to focus on substance than process unless there actually is a process problem that's too important to ignore. And I don't see one here. Who's being silenced about same-sex marriage? I'm not -- I can say whatever I want about it on this blog. If I have a voice, then Cindy McCain -- a multimillionaire who's married to a US Senator -- definitely has a voice.

Kasey Nicholson-McFadden has a voice. He says:

It doesn’t bother me to tell kids my parents are gay. It does bother me to say they aren’t married. It makes me feel that our family is less than their family.

He made that statement to the New Jersey legislature, and it was reported in the New York Times. He's only 10 years old. If he can be heard making a substantive point in this debate, then rich celebrities can be heard too. If they want to.

This is essentially the same problem that keeps coming up when people like US Attorney General Eric Holder complain about America's supposed failure to have a national conversation about race. As John McWhorter aptly said in response to Holder (which I blogged at the time):

I suspect those who call for this "conversation" know the claim has become more gestural than concrete. Otherwise, they would state their case directly rather than asking to "talk." ... What, or who, would determine that we had finally "talked" enough?

If you want the country to engage in a particular substantive discussion, lead by example.

Perhaps there's an implicit populism in Cindy McCain's protest. If unspecified, impersonal forces have prevented genuine debate on the issue from occurring, then the public can't be blamed for not being more supportive of same-sex marriage. But if this is the intended message, it's condescending in addition to being wrong.

The case against calling for a "frank conversation on race"

John McWhorter has the perfect response to Attorney General Eric Holder's recent speech in which he called America a "nation of cowards" for not having a "frank conversation" on race.

Read the whole thing, but here are a couple key points:

[1.] The idea that black uplift requires a Very Special kind of "conversation" in 2009 entails a hothouse fragility antithetical to any coherent conception of black strength. . . . It is unclear to me what purpose this brand of sensitivity serves. You must joke with us delicately. You must engage in ticklish "conversations" with us about what's wrong with you. . . .

[2.] I suspect those who call for this "conversation" know the claim has become more gestural than concrete. Otherwise, they would state their case directly rather than asking to "talk."  . . . What, or who, would determine that we had finally "talked" enough?

RELATED: A Jonah Goldberg classic: "Honesty is not the best policy."