UNIFORMITY IS DIVERSITY
FAVORITISM IS EQUALITY
BIGOTRY IS TOLERANCE
As any one who frequents this blog knows, my regard for social science as it is perpetrated by the media is not high. The expression "a study has shown ..." is now used like some kind of incantation, imputing to the thing on behalf of which it is uttered a kind of magical legitimacy.
It may be the most abused phrase in the English language.
I have also argued that whenever you hear gay rights advocates make what sound like scientific statements, you should immediately dismiss them as political statements until it has conclusively been shown otherwise. These are the same people, after all, who can still be found appealing to the Kinsey studies as scientifically authoritative.
In recent years studies have been trotted out to show that gender doesn't matter in the rearing of children and that children raised by gay parents are just as well-adjusted as those raised by a biological mother and father. When these studies come out, gay rights activists shake their pom-poms and shout, "Go team!" while the academics who cooked them up do their end zone dances.
So what happens when a study finds the opposite?
Mark Regnerus is a hateful bigot. He’s an ultra-conservative with links to Opus Dei. His new research paper on same-sex parenting is “intentionally misleading” and “seeks to disparage lesbian and gay parents.” His “so-called study doesn’t match 30 years of scientific research that shows overwhelmingly that children raised by parents who are LGBT do equally as well.” His “junk science” and “pseudo-scientific misinformation,” pitted against statements from the American Psychological Association and “every major child welfare organization,” deserve no coverage or credence.
That’s what four of the nation’s leading gay-rights groups—the Human Rights Campaign, the Family Equality Council, Freedom to Marry, and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation —declared in a joint statement this week. Flanked by a mob of bloggers, they’re out to attack Regnerus’ motives, destroy his credibility, and banish his study from the scientific record.Have a nice day.
Regnerus, a University of Texas sociologist published a paper that studied the affects on adult children of same-sex parents and found that they were more likely to experience emotional and social problems.
You would have thought that he had just advocated the attempted revival of Adolf Hitler. The chorus of denunciation was deafening. When self-proclaimed gays like Simon Levay releases research that just happens to confirm his own clear prejudices, they are lauded as paragons of scientific rectitude. But release a finding that flies in the face of the Politically Correct establishment and you are ...
Investigated.
The University of Texas has now launched an investigation of Regnerus. Why? Because a gay blogger who doesn't even publish under his real name sent a letter to UT President Bill Powers. The blogger, Scott Rose (really Scott Rosensweig):
alleged that Regnerus had committed scientific misconduct because he had created "a study designed so as to be guaranteed to make gay people look bad, through means plainly fraudulent and defamatory." Rosensweig also pointed out that the study was funded by the conservative Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation, writing that Regnerus had taken "money from an anti-gay political organization for his study."We're absolutely positive that Rose(ensweig) gets this upset when similar research is done under the auspices of institutions or researchers who have a know pro-gay bias (insert index finger in mouth and pretend to gag here).
A university launches a professional investigation of one of its faculty because of the complaint of a partisan blogger? For real?
Just go to your friendly local university and you will find the equivalent of Orwell's Ministry of Truth, each devoted to the stamping out of thoughtcrime.
The message in the Regnerus case is plain: If you come up with findings that in any way militate against the prevailing PC view of human sexuality, keep it to yourself or you will be publicly savaged and your professional reputation will be destroyed. The standards by which other studies in the field finding opposite results will be dispensed with and new standards never before applied to anyone else will be applied to you.
If you want to communicate with Regnerus, do it now before they haul him off to Room 101 to convinced that 2 + 2 = 5.
4 comments:
'In recent years studies have been trotted out to show that gender doesn't matter in the rearing of children and that children raised by gay parents are just as well-adjusted as those raised by a biological mother and father. When these studies come out, gay rights activists shake their pom-poms and shout, "Go team!" while the academics who cooked them up do their end zone dances.
So what happens when a study finds the opposite?'
Umm, the problem here is that the study didn't find the opposite. I quote from the same source you link to in you article (Slate.com, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2012/06/new_family_structures_study_is_gay_parenthood_bad_or_is_gay_marriage_good_.html):
'To understand the study, you have to read the questionnaire that defined the sample. It began by asking each respondent, as the child of this or that kind of family arrangement, his age. If the respondent was younger than 18 or older than 39, the survey was terminated. This means the entire sample was born between 1971 and 1994, when same-sex marriage was illegal throughout the United States, and millions of homosexuals were trying to pass or function as straight spouses.
The survey went on to ask: “From when you were born until age 18 … did either of your parents ever have a romantic relationship with someone of the same sex?” If the respondent said yes, he was put in the “gay father” (GF) or “lesbian mother” (LM) category, regardless of subsequent answers. But if he said no, a later question about the relationship between “your biological parents” was used to classify him as the product of an “intact biological family” (IBF) or of an “adopted,” “divorced,” “stepfamily,” or “single-parent” household. In other words, broken families were excluded from the IBF category but included in the GF and LM categories.
This loaded classification system produced predictable results.
(...)
In short, these people aren’t the products of same-sex households. They’re the products of broken homes.
(...)
The study’s main takeaway, according to Regnerus, is that kids of gay parents have turned out differently from kids of straight parents, and not in a good way. I’m sure that conclusion will please the study’s conservative sponsors. But the methodology and findings, coupled with previous research, point to deeper differences that transcend orientation. Kids do better when they have two committed parents, a biological connection, and a stable home. If that’s good advice for straights, it’s good advice for gays, too.'
So you can clearly see how the study was flawed and doesn't actually show what you think it shows - all it does is provide evidence that children from families in which one parent had a homosexual affair fared worse than those who came from families where neither parent had an affair. Now call me crazy, but I think you'd get the same results if you looked at children of parents who had a heterosexual affair as opposed to no affair at all.
So I think Slate is perfectly right in saying that, as long as we read the results accurately, there is no problem. But, if you try to spin them to claim that gay parents do a worse job than straight parents or that children suffer in such an environment, that is not what the data supports.
Once again, because we have actual empirical data, we can settle this argument quite easily, and I agree that the GLBT community might be getting a bit too excited about this. On the other hand, the fact that you have - inadvertently, maybe - already falsely claimed this study to show that gay marriages are bad for children - then they may have a point.
Martin,
You are correct that these sorts of studies should not form the basis for granting LGBT people equal rights. LGBT are entitled to equal rights under the Constitution of the United States. Unless we are going to change the Constitution to allow the state to require everyone to get parenting licenses before they can have children, the state shouldn't be discriminating against law abiding people based on its judgment of whether they would make good parents or not.
From:
Scott Rose
Contributor
The Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism
I am the Scott Rose referenced in the your post.
You have improperly referred to me, however, throughout your post as “Scott Rosensweig.”
Rosensweig was indeed my given German-Jewish family name at birth. However, Scott Rose
is the name I have used my entire adult life. Across literally thousands of by-lines published over the course of decades, I have only ever been known as "Scott Rose."
I am proud of my family’s heritage; I am a regular contributor to the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism.
However, as happens, almost universally, anti-gay-rights "Christian" writers and publications refer to me with “Rosensweig.”
By contrast, virtually no pro-gay-rights sites use my German-Jewish last name instead of referring to me as “Scott Rose," the name that always appears as my by-line.
It appears more than evident, that the anti-gay-rights "Christian" site abusing my name that way, are doing so to say to their readers "He's a Jew!"
The National Organization for Marriage's top brass got the Regnerus study funded. They have no hesitations about "driving a wedge" and fanning anti-minority hostility; their own strategy documents released only through court order described, with those exact words, plots to "drive a wedge" between African-Americans and gays, as though those groups were mutually exclusive.
In one of her recent newsletters, NOM's Maggie Gallagher openly addressed "Christian" readers, and invited them to continue their political gay bashing, but instead of referring to our president as "president," Gallagher called him "Barack Hussein Obama."
Clearly, Gallagher was leading her readers to think "Muslim!" in a negative sense, the same way that whoever is using my German-Jewish last name is using it – (as you are using it, instead of calling me "Scott Rose,") to say, in a negative sense: "Jew!"
NOM frequently has appealed to anti-Semitism in the populace, when it perceived it could gain some anti-gay-rights political advantage by doing so. For reference, here is the article: "Anti-Semitism Also Part Of NOM’s Hateful Wedge Strategies"
http://tinyurl.com/6r62jrn
Scott Rose
Hmmm...
I rather suspect that, if we were to compare Christian families in, say, Harlan county that rent their housing with non-Christian families in zip code 10021 that own their housing, we would find that the Christian families have a much lower median income, their children have a lower level of educational achievement and lifetime earning potential, they are more likely to come from broken homes, are more likely to abuse drugs, are more likely to have children as teenagers out of wedlock, etc., etc., etc....
Using the reasoning Martin employs, then it's clear that Christians should not be permitted to raise children.
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