As you probably heard by now, the Boobquake results are in and there were no changes in the number of earthquakes we had vs. the number expected just because American women dressed in a sexy manner. What? You didn’t hear about Boobquake?

It all started with a nut Iranian cleric by the name of Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi who said that the reason there are earthquakes is because women dress too sexy. Yes, we all laughed because no one in the west is silly enough to believe something like that except that… 1) Pat Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition, warned Orlando, Florida, that it was courting natural disaster by allowing gay pride flags to be flown along its streets. “A condition like this will bring about … earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor,” Robertson said. He also blamed the Haiti earthquake on voodoo. 2) Jerry Falwell blamed Hurricane Katrina on immorality and anti-Christian groups. So let’s keep that in mind as we continue.

Anyway, after the Iranian cleric’s statement, a group of American women (or maybe it was men) decided that American women should all dress in a sexy fashion one day to see if they could stir up some earthquakes or “boobquakes” as they were called*. Boobquake day was this past Monday and the result was that American women are not very good at getting the Earth excited enough to do any quaking.

As I was reading through some post-boobquake articles, I ran across an article written nine years ago in response to Pat Robertson’s attempt to correlate gay people and natural disasters. I would like to sum up some of the points in that article written by Janis Walworth, co-founder of the Center for Gender Sanity.

She takes a look at tornadoes as the natural disaster of choice. According to Robertson, states where gays are given more support and recognition should have more tornadoes. But the opposite seems to be true. The numbers show a negative correlation between the number of gay groups and the number of tornadoes. Based on this observation, a state like Alabama could avoid two tornadoes per year by doubling the number of gay groups within the state.

Next she looks at religious affiliation and here she finds a very high correlation. Jewish and Catholic populations seem to have a nearly zero correlation with tornadoes but the number of Protestants has a very high correlation with the number of tornadoes that a state will endure. This is especially true for states with a high Baptist population. Texas could cut its number of tornadoes in half by sending a few hundred thousand Baptists to Alaska (where there are no tornadoes). Interestingly, an examination of the numbers of gay religious groups reveals no significant relationship with tornadoes. So if Texas could convince those few hundred Baptists to become gay, that would also reduce the number of tornadoes.

So the statistical evidence would say that God likes gay people. It’s Baptists that he doesn’t like. Of course, correlation doesn’t prove causation so it is possible that Baptists just like tornadoes so they move to states that have lots of them but in any case, if leaders of the Protestant church are going to claim that tornadoes are caused by people that offend God, then they might want to check the data to make sure they know who exactly is offending God.

*Boobquake was actually invented by Jennifer McCreight, a science student and blogger from Indiana who, apparently, has a good sense of humor.

Update: Here’s Jennifer’s article from The Guardian on the results of Boobquake Day.