Over the weekend I blogged about the right wing funded study on gay parenting and the flawed group same sex parents with other groups so that the results deliberately came out skewed against gay parenting. Not surprisingly, NOM and Family Research Council and similar anti-gay groups have joyously jumped on to the report as supportive of the anti-gay jihad. But as a piece in Slate column suggests - and echo's what I said about the negative impact that DOMA and bans on same sex marriage have on the children of LGBT citizens - the anti-gay study unwittingly makes the case as to why same sex marriage is a necessity if one truly is concerned about children as the Christianists pretend to be concerned The bottom line is that by banning same sex marriage children are deliberately deprived of financial and family stability that the children of heterosexual couples take for granted. It's yet another of the rank dishonesty and hypocrisy of the far right that claim to care about children but then do all they can to harm countless children. As I've noted many times, tawdry whores are more virtuous than most of the "godly Christian" crowd. Here are highlights from the Slate article:
Is same-sex marriage a good idea? Or is an intact biological family the best environment for raising a child? The answer may turn out to be yes and yes.
That’s the curious implication of a study reported yesterday in Social Science Research and outlined in Slate today by its principal investigator, sociologist Mark Regnerus. The study, which found inferior economic, educational, social, and psychological outcomes among children of gay parents, comes across as evidence that homosexuals are unfit to raise kids. But the study doesn’t document the failure of same-sex marriage. It documents the failure of the closeted, broken, and unstable households that preceded same-sex marriage.
In his journal article, Regnerus says it “clearly reveals that children appear most apt to succeed well as adults—on multiple counts and across a variety of domains—when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father.”
These findings shouldn’t surprise us, because this isn’t a study of gay couples who decided to have kids. It’s a study of people who engaged in same-sex relationships—and often broke up their households—decades ago.
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.
[B]roken families were excluded from the IBF [intact biological family] category but included in the GF and LM categories. This loaded classification system produced predictable results. In his journal article, Regnerus says respondents who were labeled GF or LM originated most commonly from a “failed heterosexual union.”
In short, these people aren’t the products of same-sex households. They’re the products of broken homes. And the closer you look, the weirder the sample gets.
What the study shows, then, is that kids from broken homes headed by gay people develop the same problems as kids from broken homes headed by straight people. But that finding isn’t meaningless. It tells us something important: We need fewer broken homes among gays, just as we do among straights. We need to study Regnerus’ sample and fix the mistakes we made 20 or 40 years ago. No more sham heterosexual marriages. No more post-parenthood self-discoveries. No more deceptions. No more affairs. And no more polarization between homosexuality and marriage. Gay parents owe their kids the same stability as straight parents. That means less talk about marriage as a right, and more about marriage as an expectation.
[T]he 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.
Not surprisingly, the wingnuts do not want same sex couples to have the same legal rights, legal protections, and stability of their heterosexual counterparts be cause, God forbid from the Kool-Aid drinking crowd perspective - the same sex couples might just do a better job parenting children and expose the anti-gay Christianist lies.
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