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June 25 Issue?
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Is Gay Parenting Bad for the Kids?
Children of gay couples are disadvantaged ? because of family instability.
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Sociologist Mark Regnerus
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In his new?Social Science Journal?study, Mark Regnerus poses a question: ?How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships?? The answer to this ? in both the academic literature and the imagination of the American public ? has changed dramatically in less than a generation. ?Fifteen years ago,? Regnerus explained at an event at the nonpartisan Institute for American Values, biological, heterosexual families were ?reflexively regarded as the best environment for children.? This subsequently gave way to the notion that there were ?no meaningful differences? in outcomes for children raised in non-traditional arrangements. Finally it was suggested that children ?might actually be better off being raised by a gay couple.?
Although there is little hard evidence to support such a conclusion, advocates of same-sex marriage and gay adoption have declared the science to be settled. Most famous, perhaps, of such declarations is the 2010 paper by social scientists Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz, who contended that ?based strictly on the published science, one could argue that two women parent better on average than a woman and a man, or at least than a woman and man with a traditional division of family labor.? This contention ? that homosexual parenting is either neutral or better than traditional family structures ? has found its way into our academic, legal, and cultural conversation and is rarely questioned. Hence the Ninth Circuit?s declaration: ?Children raised by gay or lesbian parents are as likely as children raised by heterosexual parents to be healthy, successful, and well-adjusted. The research supporting this conclusion is accepted beyond serious debate in the field of developmental psychology.?
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Regnerus?s study was designed to reexamine this question ? a difficult task, to say the least ? by expanding the sample size and improving upon the methodology of previous surveys. The U.S. Census, for example, collects a lot of useful information but, because it does not ask questions about sexual orientation, much of its contribution to the topic must be inferred. Conversely, many academic studies that use the small-sample-size ?snowball technique? ? a process by which current subjects of a study recruit others from among their acquaintances to take part in it ? can be misleading. One such study, discussed in Regnerus?s paper, sampled women who frequented lesbian bookstores, events, and newspapers; the problem with this popular approach is that it narrowed down the samples to the educated, probably affluent, and socially similar, and it produced a limited understanding as a result. Such studies have proliferated in recent years.
In search of his answers, Regnerus screened 15,088 people. From these, researchers found 175 people who had been raised for some of their childhood by a mother who was in a lesbian relationship, and 73 people who had been raised for some of their childhood by a father who was in a gay relationship ? still a relatively small group.
The first thing that Regnerus found is that gay households with children are located in the same geographical areas as the households of straight couples raising kids. Contrary to stereotypes, there is no real concentration of children where gays tend to live en masse. For example, as there are few children in San Francisco?s households overall, there are also few children living with gays in San Francisco. In fact, Georgia is the state that has the most children living with same-sex couples. Despite being allegedly less gay-friendly, Middle America is very well represented in the gay-couple-with-child demographic. And consistent with general trends, Latino gay couples have more children than do white gay couples.
Regnerus found that children in the study rarely spent their entire childhoods in the households of their gay parent and partner. Only two of the 175 subjects who reported having a mother in a lesbian relationship spent their whole childhood with the couple, and no children studied spent their entire childhood with two gay males. The numbers drop off pretty sharply as time progressed, too: For example, 57 percent of children spent more than four months with lesbian parents, but only 23 percent spent more than three years. This is interesting in and of itself, but it has serious implications for the study ? implications to which I will later return.
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I am mindful of a Canadian study among youths who did not declare themselves to be gay, which showed a positive correlation between the youths having experienced same-gender acts and having riskly lifestyles (drugs, etc.) The unwarranted conclusion was that closet gay youths were driven to a riskly lifestyle because society did not accept them. Yet an equivalent conclusion would have been that substance-abusing youths are willing to engage in same-gender acts to get a fix, and that gay adults are no more sympathetic to such youths than are hetero adults.
The NRO article didn?t say whether one of the LGBT adults was the biological parent of the child. I would assume so. They should be compared to hetero couples where only one is the biological parent of the child. It?s my understanding (not based on research) that children have the greatest problem when mom re-marries or has a live-in boyfriend. However, those may be situations where mom needs (financial) support, whereas in the case of LGBT no support is needed. Hard to compare.
However, none of this has anything whatever to do with court cases regarding the constitutionality of banning same-gender marriage, whether by statutory law or referendum. If same-gender marriage is a constitutional right, then it would still be a right even if LGBT beat their kids. And if it is not a constitutional right, then it still isn?t a right, even if all LGBT-parented kids go to Harvard in those few places that allow same-gender marriage. That?s the real problem with all these court cases: actually learning the truth is not worth our effort.
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?Richard
?Indeed, one should concede that people could legitimately employ Regnerus?s study to justify gay marriage on the grounds that societal disapproval of unmarried gay parents leads to the very instability that causes their children to experience negative outcomes: Marriage between gay partners will enhance the family?s stability and therefore be good for the children.?
Exactly. The divorce rate argument is a lame argument. I almost feel it a waste of time to rebut. The divorce rate is higher in the African American community. That is not an argument that African Americans should not marry. Single parenting is a problem, if they have kids, they should get married and try to make it work. And a mom and a dad might be better than having 2 moms or two dads, but I haven?t seen anyone argue that, everything else being equal, having one parent is better than having two parents.
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?blsdaniel
I don?t think that what you say about the study in question is right. As I understand it, other studies have used the method you describe. In this one, they just grabbed a random group of people and started asking them if their parents had ever had a lover of the same gender. Near as I can see, this is about as good a sampling method as you can get.
The biggest issue I see here, as others here have mentioned, is exactly what is being compared to what. I have no doubt that the children who are raised by their two biological parents who stay married the entire time come out better than other children, such as those who are raised with a heterosexual step parent present, or by a straight single parent. Nor do I much doubt that the same would be true in the case of homosexual parents who are single, remarried, etc. You need to compare apples to apples (e.g., children of straight single parents to children of gay single parents, etc.). It should also be kept in mind that gays are often denied the chance to adopt exept in for the extreme hardluck cases (i.e., children who nobody else wants).
Still, it should never be forgotten that other studies almost always have samples that are completely non-random, so they also should be taken with an enormous amount of salt as well.
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The study is so biased and your commentary so baseless I?m amazed this even made its way into an article. Will children raised by same-sex couples turn out differently? Most definitely. Social stigma does not only apply to areas where same-sex marriage is/was illegal. In fact, it would be downright idiotic to assume that such stigma goes away with the legal validation of marriage ? people will lash out, and same-sex couples and their families suffer for it.
?Less than 2 percent of children from intact, biological families reported experiencing sexual abuse of some nature, but that figure for children of same-sex couples is 23 percent. Similarly disturbing is that 14 percent of children from same-sex couples have spent some time in foster care, compared with around 2 percent of the American population at large.?
The first statistic is easily not the result of parenting, but yet again the result of social stigma. You phrase it as if it were the parents who committed ?sexual abuse,? when I guarantee a majority of the cases were people lashing out at the children for their parent?s sexuality. The second statistic is easily answered by the fact that gay parents are the most willing to become foster parents or adopt. Obviously a couple which can not conceive in a completely natural way will turn to such methods. Secondly, gay parents are more likely and willing to take in older children, minorities, and kids who have problem behaviors.
Lastly, the survey itself is so biased I can?t even comprehend why it would be considered valid. If you simply take a look at the data collected, it?s easy to see why the results are so skewed. The questions are designed to intentionally target same-sex relationships which have not been life-long, while intentionally using heterosexual couples and children who have been in ?stable? households (when the national rate of divorce is around 50%, albeit lower for couples with children).
Overall, I?m disappointed in much of the commentary here. Mr. Cooke, I hope you take more time to analyze such things in the future.
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To quote the author of this rebuttal, the study was comparing apples to elephants?
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Mr. Cooke, there is an attendant pall that hovers over any criticism of the Gay-marriage issue. I applaud your, and notably, Mr. Regnerus? wading into the currents of unacceptable inquiry. The injury of political correctness is not sufficiently accounted for by our cultivated social strata, for unstated reasons from them, but it is not merely here that harm is done, but in a host of other inquires as well. So I thought I would pull a quote on the issue from Mr. Kenneth Minogue in his article, From Morals the servile mind.
?Our inherited moral idiom is thus being challenged by another, in which individuals find their identifying essence in supporting public policies that are both morally obligatory and politically imperative. Such policies are, I suggest, ?political-moral.? Such an attitude dramatically moralizes politics, and politicizes the moral life. It feeds on our instinctive support for good causes. Yet it also suggest that the most important sign of moral integrity, of decency and goodness, is not found in facing to one?s responsibilities, but in holding the right opinions, generally about grand abstractions such as poverty and war. This illusion might be fingered as the ultimate servility.?
From Morals the servile mind by Kenneth Minogue in THE NEW CRITERION (URL here: External Link?, June 2010 (p, 8).
All well and good say you, gentle reader, but what is pertinent about Mr. Minogue thesis you ask?
Well for instance, to attend to a matter at hand: Gay marriage is in opposition to truth. It isn?t so much that I am against Gay-marriage, but rather that Gay-marriage is impossible. The indispensable condition of marriage inheres in the irreducible truth that marriage is between a man and a woman. All other conditions are add-ons?variables of one sort or another, none of which are absolutely necessary. And for speaking this immutable truth, I should be ostracized from polite company; regarded as a pariah; given the boot, say the howling wolves. I should be reeducated, or fined, or worse for daring to buck the ordered complicity of the social lie; for denouncing the yoked obeisance to falsehood that will undermine social/civil society precisely because it is a Big Lie tethering one and all to its truck. Or do you think society can dismiss the pernicious effects of a social lie? Perhaps some believe we can quarantine its overt and suffused decay in the social body, if so, how?
For extended remarks on the impossibility of Gay-marriage, go to my place, here: External Link?
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Mr. Cooke, there is an attendant pall that hovers over any criticism of the Gay-marriage issue. I applaud your, and notably, Mr. Regnerus? wading into the currents of unacceptable inquiry. The injury of political correctness is not sufficiently accounted for by our cultivated social strata, for unstated reasons from them, but it is not merely here that harm is done, but in a host of other inquires as well. So I thought I would pull a quote on the issue from Mr. Kenneth Minogue in his article, From Morals the servile mind.
?Our inherited moral idiom is thus being challenged by another, in which individuals find their identifying essence in supporting public policies that are both morally obligatory and politically imperative. Such policies are, I suggest, ?political-moral.? Such an attitude dramatically moralizes politics, and politicizes the moral life. It feeds on our instinctive support for good causes. Yet it also suggest that the most important sign of moral integrity, of decency and goodness, is not found in facing to one?s responsibilities, but in holding the right opinions, generally about grand abstractions such as poverty and war. This illusion might be fingered as the ultimate servility.?
From Morals the servile mind by Kenneth Minogue in THE NEW CRITERION (URL here: External Link?, June 2010 (p, 8).
All well and good say you, gentle reader, but what is pertinent about Mr. Minogue thesis you ask?
Well for instance, to attend to a matter at hand: Gay marriage is in opposition to truth. It isn?t so much that I am against Gay-marriage, but rather that Gay-marriage is impossible. The indispensable condition of marriage inheres in the irreducible truth that marriage is between a man and a woman. All other conditions are add-on
?variables of one sort or another, none of which are absolutely necessary. And for speaking this immutable truth, I should be ostracized from polite company; regarded as a pariah; given the boot, say the howling wolves. I should be reeducated, or fined, or worse for daring to buck the ordered complicity of the social lie; for denouncing the yoked obeisance to falsehood that will undermine social/civil society precisely because it is a Big Lie tethering one and all to its truck. Or do you think society can dismiss the pernicious effects of a social lie? Perhaps some believe we can quarantine its overt and suffused decay in the social body, if so, how?
For extended remarks on the impossibility of Gay-marriage go to my place here: External Link?
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Article source: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/302319/gay-parenting-bad-kids-charles-c-w-cooke
Tags: gay, glbt, lesbian, lgbt
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