Study: Correlation Between Wal-Mart Stores and Hate Groups

From the Christian Post:

The president and CEO of a national women's organization expressed her outrage this week over a study from Penn State University which indicates that the existence of hate groups in a particular county is correlated to the number of Wal-Mart stores.

Penny Nance, CEO of Concerned Women for America, expressed her anger with the study in an article titled "Elitism of the Left," which appeared on her organization's website on Monday.

"Penn State must have had to do amazing mathematical gymnastics to correlate that the hard-working families who shop at Wal-Mart are members of hate groups," wrote Nance. "But that's the trouble with leftist elites. They hold fast to their egotism and preconceived notions, dismissing everyone who opposes their ideologies as ignorant and bigoted."

The study, titled "Social Capital, Religion, Wal-Mart, and Hate Groups in America," appeared in the April edition of Social Science Quarterly and was conducted by Stephan J. Goetz of Penn State University, Anil Rupasingha of New Mexico State University and Scott Loveridge of Michigan State. The hate group statistics used in the study came from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a Mongtomery, Ala.-based civil rights organization.

Goetz, a professor of agricultural and regional economics, told The Christian Post on Thursday that Nance was wrong about the study in that it doesn't associate any particular demographic with hate groups.

[...]