Homosexuals adopting

[Philosophos]

I wasn't sure where to put this thread and how exactly to name it, but anyway.

We have these so called productive depates in our university and generally with friends and acquaintances here and there and they can't seem to understand that science has concluded that homosexuality isn't a choice, but a mix of genetics and environment.

Now the thing is that I'm generally aware of what happens with homosexuality, but I'm not familiar at all with any studies which show that raising a child has to be from a heterosexual couple. What I basically mean is that kids need love to be raised properly and what matters the most is the parents to be good parents and good people, not to be a man and a woman.

Suprisingly there are people who agree and disagree, but almost all of them keep on saying that the child needs a mother and a father figure to grow properly.

If for example a boy is raised without a father (cause he dies or whatever else reason) he will have problems with authority figures, he will be insecure with his masculinity and feel uncomfortable with having just male friends and so on (not necessarily all of them or any of them by any means of course).

So practically I'm searching for studies which show that the child doesn't need necessarily a male and a female figure in its direct environment as a father or mother and can find let's say these father/mother figures to someone else, maybe outside the family for example a teacher let's say etc. Also any studies/polls/research and so on which directly show that gay couples can adopt children without them having any "oh my god this child is messed up" effect ,just because the parents are gay, are welcomed. Last but not least I would like to read a couple of researches which show that a child might not even need a father or mother figure at all.

Any other study or research which goes around the same ideas is also welcomed.

Thanks in advance

[The Feral Underclass]

The problem with what you're asking is that it operates within a framework that children in homosexual parent families would be worse off. What is there to demonstrate? On what basis are heterosexual parents better parents?

[cyu]

To you, two people may appear to be the same gender. But you really have no clue what those two people appear to one another. Maybe one of them thinks the other looks like Abraham Lincoln, while the other thinks their mate looks like Michelle Obama :wub:

Or maybe to you, it looks like they're having sex, but to them, they're posting on an internet forum xD

[Sewer Socialist]

When people say this, they usually don't actually mean that a child needs a mother and father - is there some kind of parenting that women inherently are capable of, which men are not? Or vice versa?

This is usually some kind of coded language to say that homosexuals should not be around children. Obviously, this is nothing more than bigoted garbage, and they are afraid to be so openly bigoted.

[cyu]

I once dreamed I was an Asian male. I eventually became deathly afraid that I'd wake up from the dream, look in the mirror, and see a white woman staring back at me :wub:

[The Feral Underclass]

I once dreamed I was an Asian male. I eventually became deathly afraid that I'd wake up from the dream, look in the mirror, and see a white woman staring back at me :wub:

What on Earth are you talking about?

[cyu]

When you look in the mirror, do you think you're the gender you're supposed to be?

Maybe one day, I'll wake up and everybody will look just like Michelle, except one person in the whole world, who looks like what I had originally thought I looked like, but is someone else. That would be kinda scary to me.

[Philosophos]

The problem with what you're asking is that it operates within a framework that children in homosexual parent families would be worse off. What is there to demonstrate? On what basis are heterosexual parents better parents?

I completely agree with you, that's why I asked for studies if there are any, to show to these people I'm talking to, that science has proved it.

I believe that if I tell them in that way they will at least see that what they are saying is not true.

If I ask them "on what basis are heterosexual parents better parents" they will answer with something like "thats how nature works" or something else from the same spectrum of bullshit.

Since they quote "scientific" work that they can't really cite, I decided to find an actual source that says the opposite of what they support. I'm not trying to convince them, I just want to rub it in their faces let's say.

[Philosophos]

When you look in the mirror, do you think you're the gender you're supposed to be?

Maybe one day, I'll wake up and everybody will look just like Michelle, except one person in the whole world, who looks like what I had originally thought I looked like, but is someone else. That would be kinda scary to me.


I once dreamed I was an Asian male. I eventually became deathly afraid that I'd wake up from the dream, look in the mirror, and see a white woman staring back at me :wub:


To you, two people may appear to be the same gender. But you really have no clue what those two people appear to one another. Maybe one of them thinks the other looks like Abraham Lincoln, while the other thinks their mate looks like Michelle Obama :wub:

Or maybe to you, it looks like they're having sex, but to them, they're posting on an internet forum xD

I have no idea what you are talking about :)

[Thirsty Crow]

So practically I'm searching for studies which show that the child doesn't need necessarily a male and a female figure in its direct environment as a father or mother and can find let's say these father/mother figures to someone else, maybe outside the family for example a teacher let's say etc.
I think you're looking for the wrong thing. It seems such a study would be very hard to find if it did exist, but the problem is also different when it comes to the specific argument about the need for a mother and a father as the only basis for healthy development.

The basis for the views you're arguing against is the idea of biologically innate differences between sexes whereas there would be a division of labor in the household - the mother equipped to offer emotional support and loving care, and the father to lay the hand down and offer firm guideance and authority. The two don't mix as women are innately different from men.

So in fact, you're arguing against a deeply entrenched ideology of sex and gender.


When people say this, they usually don't actually mean that a child needs a mother and father - is there some kind of parenting that women inherently are capable of, which men are not? Or vice versa?

I think many people who say it, actually mean something very close to what you're describing. The reasoning behind it being that innate psychological capacities make certain parts of overall parenting a domain of one sex.

[cyu]

that science has proved it

In my universe, we use a different name for science - it's Michelle - it is the filter through which we get all our information. Some people have a scientific filter, others a religious filter, and some maybe a hallucinogenic filter ;)


I have no idea what you are talking about

That's why I love you ;)

[Philosophos]

When people say this, they usually don't actually mean that a child needs a mother and father - is there some kind of parenting that women inherently are capable of, which men are not? Or vice versa?

This is usually some kind of coded language to say that homosexuals should not be around children. Obviously, this is nothing more than bigoted garbage, and they are afraid to be so openly bigoted.

Well the situation in the two countries I have been living the last years, is that they are very concervative and homophopic. Young people on the other hand tend to rely on science much more than the previous generations, but the thing is that they know half things. They actually believe something that a pop-psychology for example, site has said and they take it as scientific proof.

In these two cases I mentioned, university and hang out debates, people have been quoting/"quoting" something "scientific" that they couldn't back up. I'm only asking for sources on this subject to show them that Science, that thing they believe in, says the different thing of what they are saying and they only hold this belief because they are somehow bigoted as you said.

[The Feral Underclass]

I completely agree with you, that's why I asked for studies if there are any, to show to these people I'm talking to, that science has proved it.

What is it that you agree with? My point was that asking for the studies is redundant and implies that children in homosexual parent families are worse off.

You want studies, but I am asking you why?


I believe that if I tell them in that way they will at least see that what they are saying is not true.

If I ask them "on what basis are heterosexual parents better parents" they will answer with something like "thats how nature works" or something else from the same spectrum of bullshit.

Right, but that would then imply that heterosexual parents were universally better parents, and that is demonstrably untrue. For that to be true, every single person raised in a heterosexual parent family would do so without abuse, without trauma, without addiction etcetera and end up being a self-possessing, well-adjusted, functioning human. You only have to go into the world and open your eyes to see that this is false.

Unless heterosexual people can demonstrate that all of their children are completely "normal" and free from any kind of emotional, physical, sexual, cultural, psychological or social trauma then they can shut the fuck up. Since the world is dominated by heterosexual people from heterosexual families, I think we can safely say the thesis that heterosexuals somehow provide universally better parenting than any one else is bullshit.


Since they quote "scientific" work that they can't really cite, I decided to find an actual source that says the opposite of what they support. I'm not trying to convince them, I just want to rub it in their faces let's say.

Well what scientific work is this?

[Quail]

I suppose the entire question is based on the assumption that a mother and a father have distinct and irreplaceable roles when it comes to rearing children, and that only a woman can fill the "mother" role and only a man can fill the "father" role.

In fact, children just need stability and people who love and provide for them. Even in a family with heterosexual parents, there are times when the mother will do traditionally masculine things (earn money at work, etc) and the father will do traditionally feminine things (care for the child when they're ill, cook dinner, etc). The idea that children "need a mother and a father" is inextricably tied to the existence of rigid gender roles.

There is a study somewhere that found children of gay parents were less likely to report abuse, but I don't know if I can find a link to it. I suspect with that kind of research, there are all sorts of confounding factors though, such as poverty and discrimination.

[Philosophos]

What is it that you agree with? My point was that asking for the studies is redundant and implies that children in homosexual parent families are worse off.

You want studies, but I am asking you why?



Right, but that would then imply that heterosexual parents were universally better parents, and that is demonstrably untrue. For that to be true, every single person raised in a heterosexual parent family would do so without abuse, without trauma, without addiction etcetera and end up being a self-possessing, well-adjusted, functioning human. You only have to go into the world and open your eyes to see that this is false.

Unless heterosexual people can demonstrate that all of their children are completely "normal" and free from any kind of emotional, physical, sexual, cultural, psychological or social trauma then they can't shut the fuck up. Since the world is dominated by heterosexual people from heterosexual families, I think we can safely say the thesis that heterosexuals somehow provide universally better parenting than any one else is bullshit.



Well what scientific work is this?

Answering the "why I want to see studies". I'm not implying anything, I'm asking for sources that show that there is no correlation between sexual orientation and being a good parent. I know that for a logical person it's quite simple to grasp the idea that being a good person makes you a good parent (with various different factors but that's the main concept) and that sexual orientation makes no difference to raising a child properly, but there are lots of people who fail to understand it. I assumed that there are studies about this from scientists (psychologists etc) who wanted to scientifically prove to the people who fail to grasp the idea, that this thing doesn't matter. I'm sorry if I made myself unclear, but still I have no idea how you concluded that I imply something like kids raising with gay parents, have somehow a disandvantage to the straight family kids.
I don't want this studies for myself, I want to show them to these people I have been having these conversations (look 1st post) with, that what they're saying is wrong with scientific background. If someone told you for example that earth is flat, while you kept saying that it's round, you would be able to convince him by showing him scientific data that the earth is round or at least make him shut the hell up.

About your second paragraph, I know these things I might not be the smartest person in the world, but I have my fair share of decent intelligence to observe it by myself. The thing is that the idiots I have been talking to, have this idea that the child is destined to have a bad adulthood, with problems etc, if they are raised in a gay family. Now I can go on and on to them about the things they're saying is bullshit, but it wouldn't have much of a difference. On the other hand if I showed them a scientific study that proves them wrong, then they have to be complete idiots that don't deserve any attention to begin with if they deny it. Do you see now why ask for studies?

About your question about their 'scientific' studies, I have asked them lots of times, to provide me with links or names of the studies to find them and see for myself, if what they are saying is true, but they always find an excuse like "i can't remember the name" and stuff like that. Now as we all know, in a debate, if the one party fails to prove their opinion and the other party finds solid evidence (aka scientific proof) the second one wins the argument.

Does this look like I'm indicating, that I believe homosexuals are worse parents than heterosexuals?

[Philosophos]

There is a study somewhere that found children of gay parents were less likely to report abuse, but I don't know if I can find a link to it. I suspect with that kind of research, there are all sorts of confounding factors though, such as poverty and discrimination.

Well everything that has to do with humans has a large number of counfounding variables that need to be taken care of, but even the slightest evidence is something.

[Бай Ганьо]

G. Gates's study "Marriage and Family: LGBT Individuals and Same-Sex Couples" is the most recent one I could find. His conclusions:


[...] same-sex couples are as good at parenting as their different-sex counterparts. Any differences in the wellbeing of children raised in same-sex and different-sex families can be explained not by their parents' gender composition but by the fact that children being by raised by same-sex couples have, on average, experienced more family instability, because most children being raised by same-sex couples were born to different-sex parents, one of whom is now in the same-sex relationship.

That pattern is changing, however. Despite growing support for same-sex parenting, proportionally fewer same-sex couples report raising children today than in 2000. Why? Reduced social stigma means that more LGBT people are coming out earlier in life. They're less likely than their LGBT counterparts from the past to have different-sex relationships and the children such relationships produce. At the same time, more same-sex couples are adopting children or using reproductive technologies like artificial insemination and surrogacy. Compared to a decade ago, same-sex couples today may be less likely to have children, but those who do are more likely to have children who were born with same-sex parents who are in stable relationships.

In the past, most same-sex couples raising children were in a cohabiting relationship. With same-sex couples' right to marry now secured throughout the country, the situation is changing rapidly. As more and more same-sex couples marry, Gates writes, we have the opportunity to consider new research questions that can contribute to our understanding of how marriage and parental relationships affect child wellbeing.

The Future of Children, Vol. 25, No. 2, Marriage and Child Wellbeing Revisited (FALL 2015), p. 67.

[The Feral Underclass]

Answering the "why I want to see studies". I'm not implying anything, I'm asking for sources that show that there is no correlation between sexual orientation and being a good parent. I know that for a logical person it's quite simple to grasp the idea that being a good person makes you a good parent (with various different factors but that's the main concept) and that sexual orientation makes no difference to raising a child properly, but there are lots of people who fail to understand it. I assumed that there are studies about this from scientists (psychologists etc) who wanted to scientifically prove to the people who fail to grasp the idea, that this thing doesn't matter. I'm sorry if I made myself unclear, but still I have no idea how you concluded that I imply something like kids raising with gay parents, have somehow a disandvantage to the straight family kids.
I don't want this studies for myself, I want to show them to these people I have been having these conversations (look 1st post) with, that what they're saying is wrong with scientific background. If someone told you for example that earth is flat, while you kept saying that it's round, you would be able to convince him by showing him scientific data that the earth is round or at least make him shut the hell up.

I'm not accusing you of anything. What I'm trying to get across is that you don't need a study to prove that they are wrong. To be honest, I don't think such a study exists.


About your second paragraph, I know these things I might not be the smartest person in the world, but I have my fair share of decent intelligence to observe it by myself. The thing is that the idiots I have been talking to, have this idea that the child is destined to have a bad adulthood, with problems etc, if they are raised in a gay family.

So the response to that is not to go and look for studies, it's to reject their premise because their premise is false. Their premise is that the wellbeing of a child is dependent on the sexual orientation of the parents. That's the basis of their argument; that's where they are starting from...Do you see what I'm saying? Well that's wrong. The wellbeing of a child has little to nothing to do with the sexual orientation of your parents.

They could say that all homosexual families will inevitably create bad children and that being in heterosexual families only creates bad children some of the time, but that's not a coherent argument for them to make. That's just nonsense. For a start, they would have to provide you with evidence that corroborated that assertion, which is clearly not going to be possible. There are numerous adults from gay families that are well adjusted and functioning adults, so that whole argument just collapses on itself.

The reality is that, actually, it has nothing to do with the orientation of a family. The general well-being of a child is dependent on a whole range of things, most importantly economic. Children from poorer and deprived families are going to have more problems, irrespective of the sexual orientation of their parents.


Now I can go on and on to them about the things they're saying is bullshit, but it wouldn't have much of a difference. On the other hand if I showed them a scientific study that proves them wrong, then they have to be complete idiots that don't deserve any attention to begin with if they deny it. Do you see now why ask for studies?

But you can't show them a scientific study that proves them wrong, because their entire premise is false. You can't prove to them that homosexual parents make just as normal children, because that's not true either. The success of parenting has nothing to do with the sexual orientation of the parents.


About your question about their 'scientific' studies, I have asked them lots of times, to provide me with links or names of the studies to find them and see for myself, if what they are saying is true, but they always find an excuse like "i can't remember the name" and stuff like that. Now as we all know, in a debate, if the one party fails to prove their opinion and the other party finds solid evidence (aka scientific proof) the second one wins the argument.

Well then it is clearly the case that their whole framework is ideological and not factual. They just don't like gay people. There's nothing you can do to argue against that.


Does this look like I'm indicating, that I believe homosexuals are worse parents than heterosexuals?

No, not at all. I don't think that. I'm just trying to interrogate their argument, which if you look at it, is basically just incoherent nonsense.

[Philosophos]

I'm not accusing you of anything. What I'm trying to get across is that you don't need a study to prove that they are wrong. To be honest, I don't think such a study exists.



So the response to that is not to go and look for studies, it's to reject their premise because their premise is false. Their premise is that the wellbeing of a child is dependent on the sexual orientation of the parents. That's the basis of their argument; that's where they are starting from...Do you see what I'm saying? Well that's wrong. The wellbeing of a child has little to nothing to do with the sexual orientation of your parents.

They could say that all homosexual families will inevitably create bad children and that being in heterosexual families only creates bad children some of the time, but that's not a coherent argument for them to make. That's just nonsense. For a start, they would have to provide you with evidence that corroborated that assertion, which is clearly not going to be possible. There are numerous adults from gay families that are well adjusted and functioning adults, so that whole argument just collapses on itself.

The reality is that, actually, it has nothing to do with the orientation of a family. The general well-being of a child is dependent on a whole range of things, most importantly economic. Children from poorer and deprived families are going to have more problems, irrespective of the sexual orientation of their parents.



But you can't show them a scientific study that proves them wrong, because their entire premise is false. You can't prove to them that homosexual parents make just as normal children, because that's not true either. The success of parenting has nothing to do with the sexual orientation of the parents.



Well then it is clearly the case that their whole framework is ideological and not factual. They just don't like gay people. There's nothing you can do to argue against that.



No, not at all. I don't think that. I'm just trying to interrogate their argument, which if you look at it, is basically just incoherent nonsense.


Ok now it's clearer. Sorry about thinking that, but most people here make me believe that I'm not being understood and then accuse me of stuff I never said in the first place.

[The Feral Underclass]

Ok now it's clearer. Sorry about thinking that, but most people here make me believe that I'm not being understood and then accuse me of stuff I never said in the first place.

Yeah, that's basically RevLeft :p

[Sewer Socialist]

I think you're looking for the wrong thing. It seems such a study would be very hard to find if it did exist, but the problem is also different when it comes to the specific argument about the need for a mother and a father as the only basis for healthy development.

The basis for the views you're arguing against is the idea of biologically innate differences between sexes whereas there would be a division of labor in the household - the mother equipped to offer emotional support and loving care, and the father to lay the hand down and offer firm guideance and authority. The two don't mix as women are innately different from men.

So in fact, you're arguing against a deeply entrenched ideology of sex and gender.


I think many people who say it, actually mean something very close to what you're describing. The reasoning behind it being that innate psychological capacities make certain parts of overall parenting a domain of one sex.

And yet, the idea of single parenting is not so controversial - no one proposes to ban it, no one wants the state to confiscate the children of all single parents, etc.

Single mothers do have plenty of bullshit - called "welfare queens," they do often have their children taken away, but no one considers this outright immoral - no one outright says, should single women be allowed to be mothers?

[Guardia Rossa]

It is hopeless to convince a conservative to change his ideas with scientific studies.

I have a friend that was stuck between conservatism and social-democracy. Thanks to me, he is now stuck between conservatism and communism.

But all his ideas, his inner and deepest thoughts, are conservative, half of his family is composed of reactionaries. I know I will never be able to convince him without some deep change of his way to see the world. His only communist trait is thinking that a communist society would be better for everyone, and adopting something of Marxist method (Like taking class theory seriously) (And again, thanks to me, it didn't come from within him and will probably disappear soon.)

Nevertheless, I also know that if I didn't attempt to convince him, he would go "full Bolsonete" (Bolsonaro is the Brazillian Trump, but he has more political experience then Trump) and I wouldn't be able to be his friend. His patriarchalism still annoys and disgusts me.

[Zoop]

From the fact that it happens.

Like, all the time.

LGBT children are far better off being raised by same-sex parents, although this still assumes that the family unit is a good thing in the first place, which is evidently bullshit.

[Thirsty Crow]

And yet, the idea of single parenting is not so controversial - no one proposes to ban it, no one wants the state to confiscate the children of all single parents, etc.

Single mothers do have plenty of bullshit - called "welfare queens," they do often have their children taken away, but no one considers this outright immoral - no one outright says, should single women be allowed to be mothers?
Unfortunately...I had the opposite experience. Yeah, some people are of a very firm opinion that the lack of either of the biologically inevitable parts of the overall deal, the child suffers. Though, the "criticism" wasn't couched in terms of legal sanctions, but yeah a single mother should also commit to finding a suitable father for the child no doubt :rolleyes:

I suppose this whole problem depends on just how vicious and thoroughgoing is this acceptance of ideology. But yes, there is a crucial distinction to be made with respect to state enforced bans and legal prohibition.

[Comrade #138672]

We have these so called productive depates in our university and generally with friends and acquaintances here and there and they can't seem to understand that science has concluded that homosexuality isn't a choice, but a mix of genetics and environment.Or that it doesn't even matter whether it is a choice or not. There is nothing inherently wrong with it.

Suppose it's something you choose. Then what? You suddenly lose your rights?

[Luís Henrique]

In my universe, we use a different name for science - it's Michelle - it is the filter through which we get all our information. Some people have a scientific filter, others a religious filter, and some maybe a hallucinogenic filter ;)

By looking at you through the mirror, it seems that you have been abusing the latter.

But who knows, perhaps I am thinking that I am posting to you in an internet forum, but to others it looks like I am trying to dance the tango with a panda.

Take care, man. You are intelligent and sensible enough that it would be a pity to loose you to the Dark Side of the Force.

Luís Henrique

[blake 3:17]

What does the scholarly research say about the wellbeing of children with gay or lesbian parents?

IE167-005
Overview: We identified 77 scholarly studies that met our criteria for addressing the wellbeing of children with gay or lesbian parents. Of those studies, 73 concluded that children of gay or lesbian parents fare no worse than other children. While many of the sample sizes were small, and some studies lacked a control group, researchers regard such studies as providing the best available knowledge about child adjustment, and do not view large, representative samples as essential. We identified four studies concluding that children of gay or lesbian parents face added disadvantages. Since all four took their samples from children who endured family break-ups, a cohort known to face added risks, these studies have been criticized by many scholars as unreliable assessments of the wellbeing of LGB-headed households. Taken together, this research forms an overwhelming scholarly consensus, based on over three decades of peer-reviewed research, that having a gay or lesbian parent does not harm children.

Below are 73 studies concluding that children of gay or lesbian parents fare no worse than other children. Click here to jump to the 4 studies concluding that children of gay or lesbian parents face added disadvantages.

CLICK ON ANY THUMBNAIL TO VIEW ITS ABSTRACT; CLICK BELOW EACH THUMBNAIL TO VISIT THE SOURCE WEBSITE. go here: http://whatweknow.law.columbia.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-wellbeing-of-children-with-gay-or-lesbian-parents/

[blake 3:17]

What We Know—Really—About Lesbian and Gay Parenting
193
By Nathaniel Frank

Last week a new study was published, concluding that Dutch adolescents with lesbian moms “showed no significant differences” from their peers with opposite-sex parents. This week, another new study was published, concluding the opposite: “Emotional problems were over twice as prevalent … for children with same-sex parents than for children with opposite-sex parents.”

The new research is timely, because the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on same-sex marriage this spring, and last time it looked at this issue, in 2013, questions arose about the impact of gay marriage on children. In those hearings, Justice Antonin Scalia stated that there was “considerable disagreement among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a single-sex family [are], whether that is harmful to the child or not.” Justice Anthony Kennedy, however, opted to focus on the “immediate” injury to the 40,000 children in California with same-sex parents. “The voice of those children is important in this case,” he said, “don’t you think?”

So what—really—does the research say about how gay parenting affects kids? And what, if anything, is the link between gay parenting and whether gays and lesbians deserve the right to marry?

In a project launched last month, a team I direct at Columbia Law School has collected on one website the abstracts of all peer-reviewed studies that have addressed this question since 1980 so that anyone can examine the research directly, and not rely on talking heads or potential groupthink. Even when we might not agree with a study’s conclusions—with how a researcher interpreted the data—we still included it if it went through peer review and was relevant to the topic at hand. Peer review, of course, isn’t perfect, but it’s one of the best ways the world has to ensure that research conclusions are at least the product of good-faith efforts to get at the truth.

The Columbia project is the largest collection of peer-reviewed scholarship on gay parenting to date. What does it show? We found 71 studies concluding that kids with gay parents fare no worse than others and only four concluding that they had problems. But those four studies all suffered from the same gross limitation: The children with gay parents were lumped in with children of family breakup, a cohort known to face higher risks linked to the trauma of family dissolution.

Scalia’s sociological “disagreement” is entirely manufactured. As our collection makes clear, and as the American Sociological Association concluded in its 2013 brief to the Supreme Court, the consensus of serious scholars on the matter is overwhelming. And the handful of researchers purporting to show harms from gay parenting are not brave Galileo-like outliers speaking truth to groupthink; they are ideological opponents of gay equality who are part of an orchestrated campaign to influence the Supreme Court with scare stories and bogus scholarship. Its backers seek to discredit genuine research with deceptive talking points and to make sweeping anti-gay claims that their own flawed research simply does not support. Indeed, Scalia (no friend of gays himself, of course) appears to have fallen for their stunts hook, line, and sinker.

The scare stories and the research all share the same deceptive tactic of knowingly conflating children of gay parents with children of family breakup. It’s an easy, but reprehensible, thing to do: Even using the data of anti-gay researcher Mark Regnerus, a minuscule portion of children he classifies as having a gay parent were actually raised by a stable same-sex couple—less than 1 percent. The vast majority of gay parents have likely split up from their child’s other biological parent, and so the vast majority of children with a gay parent are children of divorce.

Yet the study published this week, written by Paul Sullins, a married Catholic priest and a fellow at a religious institute affiliated with anti-gay hate group the Family Research Council, draws a wholly irresponsible conclusion from his data: that “children in same-sex families are at 2.38 times the risk of emotional problems compared to children in opposite-sex families.” Without separating out split families from gay ones, this is simply not a claim his data support.

The latest string of scare stories is meant to put faces on the fake research. In amicus briefs, open letters, and blog posts, four adult children who have a gay parent but oppose gay marriage and who all have a history of anti-LGBT zealotry, are pleading with the courts to uphold gay marriage bans because their own personal histories show that, surely, anyone with a gay parent will suffer as they did. “Each child is conceived by a mother and a father to whom that child has a natural right,” writes Katy Faust, who has a gay mom but opposes gay marriage. “When a child is placed in a same-sex-headed household, she will miss out on at least one critical parental relationship and a vital dual-gender influence.”

This notion that an opposite-gender parental configuration has anything to do with child well-being is flatly contradicted by the research. But Faust’s argument, if we can call it that, has nothing to do with facts; her entire case rests on her own experience with a gay mom. And what that turns out to really be about is, no surprise, the collapse of her mother and father’s relationship. “My parents’ divorce has been the most traumatic event in my thirty-eight years of life,” she writes, adding that she would have given anything “to have my mom and my dad loving me under the same roof.” It’s a heartbreaking story, but one that has literally zero to do with gay parenting, and even less to do with same-sex marriage. After all, it was the dissolution of an opposite-sex marriage that shattered Katy Faust.

Faust’s story is being publicized by the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative religious group that helped steer and fund the National Organization for Marriage’s campaign, as exposed in court documents, to artificially “raise the costs of identifying with gay marriage” by linking it with pornography and a threat to children, and to fund a “media campaign to support the idea that children need mothers and fathers.” The effort sought to “commission polling and other studies to document consequences of gay marriage” and “identify and nurture a worldwide community of highly credentialed intellectuals and professional scholars, physicians, psychiatrists, social workers, and writers to credential our concerns” about gay marriage and parenting. Never mind what the actual research says; you can always hire people to “credential your concerns.”

As part of her effort to block gay marriage, Faust tries to discredit the scholarly consensus that gay parenting doesn’t harm kids by resorting to a popular canard favored by social conservatives: “The opposition will clamor on about studies where the researchers concluded that children in same-sex households allegedly fared” well or better than their peers, she writes. Those studies, she claims, are marred by “methodological problems,” and, anyway, their conclusions couldn’t possibly be true, because everyone knows that for gay couples to get kids, they must wrench them away from at least one of their “real” parents.

What critics are referring to when they speak of methodological “problems” or “flaws” are the small, non-random sampling pools known as “convenience samples” that are often used in gay parenting research. But using convenience samples is not a methodological flaw; it’s simply a distinct methodology, with assets and limitations. All research has limitations, none more so than the studies trumpeted by religious conservatives, which conflate having a gay parent with having endured family breakup. In fact, small, qualitative, and longitudinal studies have certain advantages over probability studies, and for that reason they are often favored by those conducting genuine child development research rather than politicized hit jobs: They can allow investigators to notice and analyze subtleties and texture in child development over time that large, statistical studies often miss.

Indeed the new Dutch study, which looks at only 67 subjects with a lesbian parent, actually uses a stronger sampling method than any of the studies claiming to find that gay parenting causes harm. Written by scholars at the University of Amsterdam and The Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, the study drew its data from the Dutch Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, begun in 2000 to trace the experiences of children with same-sex-parents over time. It compared Dutch adolescents in planned lesbian families with adolescents in heterosexual-parent families and found no significant differences. What it did find was that where problem behavior occurred in those with lesbian moms, it was linked to homophobic stigmatization, something anti-gay researchers perpetrate relentlessly in the name of caring about kids.

One of the significant advantages of the new study, explains Nanette Gartrell, a co-author, is its use of a 1-1 “matched sample.” That means that the 67 children with lesbian moms were matched to 67 children with different-sex parents so that extraneous variables like age, parental education, and—most important—family stability don’t throw off the data. This is the only way to compare apples to apples, and is often impossible with large, random sampling methods, as Regnerus found when he artificially inflated his sampling pool in order to wring anything relevant out of his data.

In any event, not all gay parenting studies use the convenience sampling method. A 2010 study by Stanford researcher Michael Rosenfeld, for instance, used census data to examine the school advancement of 3,500 children with same-sex parents. When he matched the comparison set to control for parental background, he found no significant differences between gay and straight households. Another study, by Daniel Potter, drew on data that was both nationally representative and longitudinal. Using a sample of more than 20,000 children, it identified 158 children living in a same-sex parent household. When he controlled for family disruptions, those children showed no significant differences in school outcomes relative to their peers.

The inane retort of anti-gay conservatives was to actually take out the controls these researchers had put in place to make their comparisons valid and conclude that when you compare apples to oranges you find that, well, they are entirely different fruits! Failing to control for family instability, these researchers draw damning conclusions about children who happen to have a gay parent but who, in most cases, suffered the trauma of family breakup before they lived with same-sex parents. If you must blame something, your culprit here is not same-sex parenting or marriage but those vaunted opposite-sex marriages that social conservatives seem to want to force gay people into.

It’s true that the “no differences” research, like all research, has limits. But when you string together 71 scholarly studies from the last 35 years that all reach the same conclusion—having gay parents doesn’t harm kids—and compare them to four bad-faith efforts to discredit gay families, you’ll see for yourself what we know—really—about lesbian and gay parenting.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/02/12/what_we_know_about_lesbian_and_gay_parenting_makin g_sense_of_the_studies.html

[blake 3:17]

What We Know—Really—About Lesbian and Gay Parenting
193
By Nathaniel Frank

Last week a new study was published, concluding that Dutch adolescents with lesbian moms “showed no significant differences” from their peers with opposite-sex parents. This week, another new study was published, concluding the opposite: “Emotional problems were over twice as prevalent … for children with same-sex parents than for children with opposite-sex parents.”

The new research is timely, because the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on same-sex marriage this spring, and last time it looked at this issue, in 2013, questions arose about the impact of gay marriage on children. In those hearings, Justice Antonin Scalia stated that there was “considerable disagreement among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a single-sex family [are], whether that is harmful to the child or not.” Justice Anthony Kennedy, however, opted to focus on the “immediate” injury to the 40,000 children in California with same-sex parents. “The voice of those children is important in this case,” he said, “don’t you think?”

So what—really—does the research say about how gay parenting affects kids? And what, if anything, is the link between gay parenting and whether gays and lesbians deserve the right to marry?

In a project launched last month, a team I direct at Columbia Law School has collected on one website the abstracts of all peer-reviewed studies that have addressed this question since 1980 so that anyone can examine the research directly, and not rely on talking heads or potential groupthink. Even when we might not agree with a study’s conclusions—with how a researcher interpreted the data—we still included it if it went through peer review and was relevant to the topic at hand. Peer review, of course, isn’t perfect, but it’s one of the best ways the world has to ensure that research conclusions are at least the product of good-faith efforts to get at the truth.

The Columbia project is the largest collection of peer-reviewed scholarship on gay parenting to date. What does it show? We found 71 studies concluding that kids with gay parents fare no worse than others and only four concluding that they had problems. But those four studies all suffered from the same gross limitation: The children with gay parents were lumped in with children of family breakup, a cohort known to face higher risks linked to the trauma of family dissolution.

Scalia’s sociological “disagreement” is entirely manufactured. As our collection makes clear, and as the American Sociological Association concluded in its 2013 brief to the Supreme Court, the consensus of serious scholars on the matter is overwhelming. And the handful of researchers purporting to show harms from gay parenting are not brave Galileo-like outliers speaking truth to groupthink; they are ideological opponents of gay equality who are part of an orchestrated campaign to influence the Supreme Court with scare stories and bogus scholarship. Its backers seek to discredit genuine research with deceptive talking points and to make sweeping anti-gay claims that their own flawed research simply does not support. Indeed, Scalia (no friend of gays himself, of course) appears to have fallen for their stunts hook, line, and sinker.

The scare stories and the research all share the same deceptive tactic of knowingly conflating children of gay parents with children of family breakup. It’s an easy, but reprehensible, thing to do: Even using the data of anti-gay researcher Mark Regnerus, a minuscule portion of children he classifies as having a gay parent were actually raised by a stable same-sex couple—less than 1 percent. The vast majority of gay parents have likely split up from their child’s other biological parent, and so the vast majority of children with a gay parent are children of divorce.

Yet the study published this week, written by Paul Sullins, a married Catholic priest and a fellow at a religious institute affiliated with anti-gay hate group the Family Research Council, draws a wholly irresponsible conclusion from his data: that “children in same-sex families are at 2.38 times the risk of emotional problems compared to children in opposite-sex families.” Without separating out split families from gay ones, this is simply not a claim his data support.

The latest string of scare stories is meant to put faces on the fake research. In amicus briefs, open letters, and blog posts, four adult children who have a gay parent but oppose gay marriage and who all have a history of anti-LGBT zealotry, are pleading with the courts to uphold gay marriage bans because their own personal histories show that, surely, anyone with a gay parent will suffer as they did. “Each child is conceived by a mother and a father to whom that child has a natural right,” writes Katy Faust, who has a gay mom but opposes gay marriage. “When a child is placed in a same-sex-headed household, she will miss out on at least one critical parental relationship and a vital dual-gender influence.”

This notion that an opposite-gender parental configuration has anything to do with child well-being is flatly contradicted by the research. But Faust’s argument, if we can call it that, has nothing to do with facts; her entire case rests on her own experience with a gay mom. And what that turns out to really be about is, no surprise, the collapse of her mother and father’s relationship. “My parents’ divorce has been the most traumatic event in my thirty-eight years of life,” she writes, adding that she would have given anything “to have my mom and my dad loving me under the same roof.” It’s a heartbreaking story, but one that has literally zero to do with gay parenting, and even less to do with same-sex marriage. After all, it was the dissolution of an opposite-sex marriage that shattered Katy Faust.

Faust’s story is being publicized by the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative religious group that helped steer and fund the National Organization for Marriage’s campaign, as exposed in court documents, to artificially “raise the costs of identifying with gay marriage” by linking it with pornography and a threat to children, and to fund a “media campaign to support the idea that children need mothers and fathers.” The effort sought to “commission polling and other studies to document consequences of gay marriage” and “identify and nurture a worldwide community of highly credentialed intellectuals and professional scholars, physicians, psychiatrists, social workers, and writers to credential our concerns” about gay marriage and parenting. Never mind what the actual research says; you can always hire people to “credential your concerns.”

As part of her effort to block gay marriage, Faust tries to discredit the scholarly consensus that gay parenting doesn’t harm kids by resorting to a popular canard favored by social conservatives: “The opposition will clamor on about studies where the researchers concluded that children in same-sex households allegedly fared” well or better than their peers, she writes. Those studies, she claims, are marred by “methodological problems,” and, anyway, their conclusions couldn’t possibly be true, because everyone knows that for gay couples to get kids, they must wrench them away from at least one of their “real” parents.

What critics are referring to when they speak of methodological “problems” or “flaws” are the small, non-random sampling pools known as “convenience samples” that are often used in gay parenting research. But using convenience samples is not a methodological flaw; it’s simply a distinct methodology, with assets and limitations. All research has limitations, none more so than the studies trumpeted by religious conservatives, which conflate having a gay parent with having endured family breakup. In fact, small, qualitative, and longitudinal studies have certain advantages over probability studies, and for that reason they are often favored by those conducting genuine child development research rather than politicized hit jobs: They can allow investigators to notice and analyze subtleties and texture in child development over time that large, statistical studies often miss.

Indeed the new Dutch study, which looks at only 67 subjects with a lesbian parent, actually uses a stronger sampling method than any of the studies claiming to find that gay parenting causes harm. Written by scholars at the University of Amsterdam and The Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, the study drew its data from the Dutch Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, begun in 2000 to trace the experiences of children with same-sex-parents over time. It compared Dutch adolescents in planned lesbian families with adolescents in heterosexual-parent families and found no significant differences. What it did find was that where problem behavior occurred in those with lesbian moms, it was linked to homophobic stigmatization, something anti-gay researchers perpetrate relentlessly in the name of caring about kids.

One of the significant advantages of the new study, explains Nanette Gartrell, a co-author, is its use of a 1-1 “matched sample.” That means that the 67 children with lesbian moms were matched to 67 children with different-sex parents so that extraneous variables like age, parental education, and—most important—family stability don’t throw off the data. This is the only way to compare apples to apples, and is often impossible with large, random sampling methods, as Regnerus found when he artificially inflated his sampling pool in order to wring anything relevant out of his data.

In any event, not all gay parenting studies use the convenience sampling method. A 2010 study by Stanford researcher Michael Rosenfeld, for instance, used census data to examine the school advancement of 3,500 children with same-sex parents. When he matched the comparison set to control for parental background, he found no significant differences between gay and straight households. Another study, by Daniel Potter, drew on data that was both nationally representative and longitudinal. Using a sample of more than 20,000 children, it identified 158 children living in a same-sex parent household. When he controlled for family disruptions, those children showed no significant differences in school outcomes relative to their peers.

The inane retort of anti-gay conservatives was to actually take out the controls these researchers had put in place to make their comparisons valid and conclude that when you compare apples to oranges you find that, well, they are entirely different fruits! Failing to control for family instability, these researchers draw damning conclusions about children who happen to have a gay parent but who, in most cases, suffered the trauma of family breakup before they lived with same-sex parents. If you must blame something, your culprit here is not same-sex parenting or marriage but those vaunted opposite-sex marriages that social conservatives seem to want to force gay people into.

It’s true that the “no differences” research, like all research, has limits. But when you string together 71 scholarly studies from the last 35 years that all reach the same conclusion—having gay parents doesn’t harm kids—and compare them to four bad-faith efforts to discredit gay families, you’ll see for yourself what we know—really—about lesbian and gay parenting.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/02/12/what_we_know_about_lesbian_and_gay_parenting_makin g_sense_of_the_studies.html