The difference is my hypothesis has real world plausibility, while your hypothesis does not.

AJ: “If you are going to be consistent, you will have to agree that the charges by the plaintiff (Barton) fail.”
——
By analogy, a court has different standards of evidence for different kinds of cases.
The standard of presumed innocence, unless proved otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt, is used for criminal cases , but the standard for civil cases is to judge based on the preponderance of the evidence, even if a reasonable doubt exists.
Consistency requires the same protocol be used for the same kinds of cases, but not for different kinds of cases.
In the present case, accusations of unethical behavior were made such as, “misleads on purpose,” “truly dishonest,” and. “knows but doesn’t care.”
To me, that requires a different standard of evidence to be placed on the plaintiff than would statements by someone in support of a hypothesis or theory.

“Under [rational basis review]… [Barton is deemed to have a legitimate reason for stopping the chart at 1993] if the court [me in this analogy] can merely hypothesize [a rational basis for him doing so, even if its not the actual rationale Barton used.]”
except you actually haven’t ANSWERED THE QUESTION! Your “approach” to AJ’s question seems to be nothing more than a smoke screen to avoid answering it.

The US murder rate is barely more than HALF what it was 80 years ago, Tom (and I suspect that a higher proportion of [alleged] murders are reported as such these days, though I cannot, of course, know this), So I can see that considering only ’64 – ’80 as being somewhat questionable.

What fact has been obscured?

Honestly, your ridiculous attempts to obscure the obvious can’t be convincing anyone.

smrnda: “Could you provide an explanation as to how you would test your hypothesis? Keep in mind that a hypothesis has to be falsifiable.”
—–
The hypothesis I propose is falsifiable.
If the cost to society was low while the crime rate was also low, that could falsify my hypothesis.
However, a low crime rate at high cost to society equates to a “true” crime rate that is high, in my view.
And so, in my view, a decline in crime could falsify Barton’s theory if the decline in crime was at low cost to society, but it would not falsify Barton’s theory if the decline was at a high cost to society.
If a decline in crime was due to something immoral or despotic like high abortion rates, or a stoned society staying home instead of committing crimes, higher death or disease rates, a high percentage of the population on sedatives, all of that would mean a high human cost to society.
If a decline in crime was due to drones over American cities, or more street cameras, or more police officers, more prisons, more welfare, or more government indebtedness, that would be a high cost to society in terms of lost freedoms, lost income, and more.
In my view, the mere fact society is moving toward more and more of those “high cost” things, means “the total social cost” of removing Christian influence is still rising at considerable speed.
I think Barton might agree that the crime rate reported by government was only intended as a proxy for the overall increasing social cost to society caused by removing Bible instruction from schools.
The real issue was not whether the crime rates reported by government were up or down. That worked fine as a proxy while the crime rate was high, but now its lowered.
The real issue has always been the overall cost to society, which is steadily increasing as we move more and more away from being Christian nation.

Wearin’ me out here, Lea. Your abduction was correct.

If you were interested in the truth, I suppose you would do some research and make a counterargument. Anyone can play epistemological Immovable Object, and even in the face of strong evidence, always has the trap door of “correlation isn’t causation.”
But skepticism is not argument–it’s barely thought. Feh.
BTW, my apologies about the scientist-philosopher CS Peirce. His concept is “abduction.”
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/peirce.html
“As he says, “[a]bduction is the process of forming explanatory hypotheses. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea” (CP 5.172)”
Skeptics are boring. They have their purpose in the testing process, but that means doing some work on their own. Simply shooting spitballs at any idea they don’t like is easy, and lazy. Anyone can shirk burden of proof, and when that’s the game, truth is not the goal, only winning.

ZB: “Given the past history of deceit, and that even Barton hasn’t made any such claim, as plausible as invisible pink unicorns.”
——
Your questions aside, it still seems correct to say Barton’s theory can be hypothetically harmonized with declining crime rates.