One of the problem with peer reviewed sources is that the writing tends to be *terrible*, which makes them a lot of work to clean up and make high-school (or even just human) readable. They also tend to run *really* long (I’m supposed to keep articles between 1,000 and 3,000 words; most academics can’t say *Hey baby; where you going after this?” in less than 5,000 words and 47 footnotes). In the Online Porn book I ended up using several articles from peer-reviewed journals because it was the only way to responsibly include some pretty controversial views. For example, I used an excerpt of Diamond, Jozifkova, Weiss’s “Pornography and Sex Crimes in the Czech Republic” (first published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior), in which the researchers found a correlation between unfettered access to pornography (including child pornography) in the Czech Republic from 1971-2007 and marked *decrease* in all sex crimes, especially sexual violence targeting children. A claim like “broad access to kiddie porn decreases new sex crimes against children” is pretty insanely inflammatory, and so including it really called for tracking down the most unimpeachable possible source.

As for the mechanism of political pressure in textbook publishing: You’re right that the pro-Jesus-ate-a-pteradactyl Texans only enter the scene *after* a book is published (to the best of my knowledge, at least; I’ve never heard of a politically motivated group seriously approaching a textbook publisher in advance to guide content creation in what is otherwise being sold as a secular, impartial textbook). But the fear I often hear reiterated in the media is that these after-the-fact complaints will guide what happens in the next revision. All *I’m* saying is that I’ve *never* seen any evidence that “market pressures” of these sorts politically bias what ends up in a textbook. On the other hand, restrictive reprint policies from folks like the Journal of the American Medical Association or individuals like Andrea Dworkin basically guarantee that their work (or work they shepherd) won’t end up in a textbooks, and that can be a real shame.

I had the impression that the political process happens after publication, when a committee of anti-scientists in Texas decides which textbooks will actually get bought and used by the schools. How big a factor is that?