I'm beginning to believe that in addition to being devoid of compassion towards others, consumed by greed and filled with hatred towards those deemed "other," in order to be a Republican nowadays, one must also be a pathological liar. A case in point is the seemingly deliberate misuse of gay parenting studies by the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the U.S. House of Representatives, also known as BLAG for short. BLAG's legal team apparently takes a view that if research doesn't support one's anti-gay agenda, then just lie about it and twist its findings. It's a trait apparently learned from the Christianist hate groups who can safely be assumed to be lying if their mouth pieces' lips are moving (think Tony Perkins, Maggie Gallagher and Bryan Fischer for starters). A component in childerns' success is stability - something same sex marriage would bring to families. As would ending the "change myth" and "ex-gay" ministries that only lead to opposite sex marriages that are doomed to fail and cause upheaval for the children of such marriages. The hypocrisy is that the opponents of gay marriage do all in their power to destabilize same sex unions, and then use the fruits of their handiwork to condemn gay couples and their families. A piece in The Advocate looks at BLAG's attempts to defraud the Courts with false citations of Daniel Potter's study. Here are some article highlights:
BLAG’s brief marks the second time the study — which was conducted by University of Texas professor Mark Regnerus with the financial backing of socially conservative groups — has been used to defend DOMA in the case. The day after Regnerus’ study was released to the public last month, a conservative medical group highlighted it in a “friend of the court” brief. The American College of Pediatricians filed that brief at the request of the Alliance Defending Freedom, an influential religious right legal organization.
In fact, Regnerus’ study has been widely criticized for comparing children raised by intact biological families to children raised by parents who had a same-sex relationship at some point, regardless of whether the child was actually raised by a stable, same-sex couple.
The other recent study BLAG cites in support of the premise that children are better off when raised by two heterosexual parents was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in May. That study, authored by Daniel Potter of the American Institutes for Research, found that children raised in same-sex-parent families scored lower on academic tests than children raised in two-parent households by a straight couple.
Potter, who conducted his research using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, says in a discussion of the results that the “transitions and changes that accompany the formation of such households” factored heavily into the lower test scores. He stresses that instability within the family, rather than the family structure itself, seemed to have had more of an effect on the children’s test scores.
In an email exchange, Potter said he had not previously been aware that BLAG had used his study in its defense of DOMA. . . . . “But … the negative association is accounted for by including information on the number of transitions that children experience. … I interpret these findings to suggest that it is not the family structure per se that is associated with children’s lower performance, but that it is the instability and transitions leading up to the formation of these families that matters.”
Potter added: “I do not view my study as rejecting prior research on same-sex parent families, nor do I believe it offers the quintessential investigation from which future research should advance. . . . . “I think the results do push forward the idea that stability is a central element for understanding the role of family structure in children’s lives,” he said, “but the research cannot speak to the issue of same-sex marriage.”
Potter explains that “same-sex parent families are often created through a series of changes to and transitions in children’s family structure” but notes that “not all same-sex parent families are created from dissolved opposite-sex relationships.”
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