Santorum Attacks Gay Parents: Says Dad in Prison is Better Than a Gay Dad

The foul nastiness of Rick Santorum just seems to know no end when it comes to denigrating LGBT citizens and LGBT headed families. Part of me would just love to have a story leak out that he beats his wife, has had and affair or is soliciting blow jobs in rest rooms. The man is just vile. In his latest attack on gays, Santorum made the statement that a child would be better off with a father in prison than he/she would to have a gay father. In the straight part of my life I knew quite a few fathers against whom I'd stack up my parenting record any day. Think Progress reports on this latest effort to dehumanize gays and their families. Here are some highlights:

On the campaign trail, Rick Santorum rarely passes up an opportunity to pontificate on his favorite subject: the evils of gay marriage and parenthood. Speaking at a boarding school in New Hampshire on Friday, Santorum cited an unnamed “anti-poverty expert” to claim that children are better off having a parent in prison who abandoned them than having two same-sex parents.

This wasn’t just a hypothetical to some children in the audience, at least three of whom had gay parents, the Los Angeles Times reports:

For the second time in as many days, Rick Santorum waded into the issue of gay marriage, suggesting it was so important for children to have both a father and mother that an imprisoned father was preferable to a same-sex parent.

Citing the work of one anti-poverty expert, Santorum said, “He found that even fathers in jail who had abandoned their kids were still better than no father at all to have in their children’s lives.”

Allowing gays to marry and raise children, Santorum said, amounts to “robbing children of something they need, they deserve, they have a right to.

It’s unclear to which “anti-poverty” expert Santorum was referring, or what the expert’s study said, but it is clear that Santorum is likely distorting it. He isn’t wrong that numerous studies have highlighted the importance of keeping children connected to parents who may be in prison, but none of them include any actual research on comparisons with same-sex families. They may juxtapose a child having no father (i.e. a single mother) with having a father in jail, but it’s completely invalid to compare an abandoned mother to two committed loving mothers.

Numerous conservative groups regularly attempt this “fatherless” rhetorical trap to make a case against same-sex marriage. . . . . In reality, studies have consistently shown that same-sex couples are just as capable of raising children as opposite-sex couples, and any attempt to suggest otherwise is not only wrong but hurtful to same-sex families and the children they are raising.

As Think Progress also noted, Focus on the Family has sought to support this anti-gay parenting lie by releasing a press release claiming that a new study confirms that gays make inferior parents. Of course, the claim is a lie, but then just about everything coming out of Focus on the Family is untrue and/or totally twisted around to support the organization's long history of anti-gay animus. Here are highlights:

Focus on the Family’s duplicity is not always obvious, but execution of their anti-gay rhetoric is becoming more transparent. In a post yesterday, FOTF’s director of Global Family Formation Studies Glenn T. Stanton boasted that a new study from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business proves that boys benefit behaviorally from having “a home with a mom and a dad.

But though FOTF is clearly trying to use this as evidence against same-sex marriage, the study did not prove anything “against” same-sex parents. The study in question (PDF here) did not, in fact, address same-sex parenting whatsoever, but instead compared children raised by married heterosexual parents to children raised by a single mother. It is one of many “fatherless” studies that conservative groups use to conflate not having a father/having one mother with having two mothers.

If anything, the Booth study supports arguments in favor of marriage equality, because it found that it was neither family structure nor biology that were the direct cause of differences in boys’ behavior, but environmental factors determined by levels of parental input. Stanton’s conclusions reflect nothing found in the actual research data — merely his discriminating ideology.

Stanton and Santorum both prove that the best assumption when it comes to "godly Christians" is that if their lips are moving, it's about 99% likely that they are living. They continue to believe that they have some sort of special exemption from the Commandment that bars lying and bearing false witness.