Christofascists'" Gays Bad-for-Children" Argument to Face Court Scrutiny

One of the recurring themes of the anti-gay Christofascists is that gay parenting is bad for children and that, therefore, gays should not be allowed to marry.  This specious argument was made in briefs recently in Bostic v. Rainey and other recent same sex marriage rulings all decided at the Summary Judgment point.  But in none of these cases were the faux experts utilized by the anti-gay forces required to testify under oath in open court.  Indeed, the last time that such testimony occurred was in Hollingsworth v. Perry where the Christofascist witnesses either failed to show or were demolished on cross examination.  Now, a case in Michigan will pit the paid faux experts of the far right against virtually every legitimate medical and mental health association in America.  One can only hope that the match up is a catastrophe for the haters which may kill this disingenuous defense of bigotry once and for all.  The New York Times looks at the coming court case and the manner in which extremist groups have funded the faux research.  Here are highlights:

As they reel from a succession of defeats in courtrooms and legislatures, opponents of same-sex marriage have a new chance this week to play one of their most emotional and, they hope, potent cards: the claim that having parents of the same sex is bad for children.

In a federal court in Detroit starting Tuesday, in the first trial of its kind in years, the social science research on family structure and child progress will be openly debated, with expert testimony and cross-examination, offering an unusual public dissection of the methods of sociology and the intersection of science and politics.

Scholars testifying in defense of Michigan’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage aim to sow doubt about the wisdom of change. They brandish a few sharply disputed recent studies — the fruits of a concerted and expensive effort by conservatives to sponsor research by sympathetic scholars — to suggest that children of same-sex couples do not fare as well as those raised by married heterosexuals.

That view will be challenged in court by longtime scholars in the field, backed by major professional organizations, who call those studies fatally flawed. These scholars will describe a near consensus that, other factors like income and stability being equal, children of same-sex couples do just as well as those of heterosexual couples.

“The overwhelming evidence so far is that there’s not much difference between children raised by heterosexual or same-sex parents,” Andrew J. Cherlin, a prominent sociologist of family issues at Johns Hopkins University who is not involved in the case, said in an interview.

The last time these issues were debated in a federal court, in California nearly four years ago, social science opponents of same-sex marriage underwent withering challenges in pretrial depositions and did not even appear in court.   As he struck down Proposition 8, the California amendment limiting marriage to a man and a woman, Judge Vaughn R. Walker of Federal District Court in San Francisco said he had heard “no reliable evidence that allowing same-sex couples to marry will have any negative effects on society.”

This time, four social science researchers, all of whom attended at least one of the Heritage Foundation meetings and went on to publish new reports, are scheduled to testify in favor of Michigan’s ban.  The most prominent is Dr. Regnerus. 

The [Witherspoon Institute] institute gave Dr. Regnerus $695,000; the Bradley Foundation, a grant-making organization that supports conservative causes, gave him $90,000, according to his résumé.

[P]professional rejections of Dr. Regnerus’s conclusions were swift and severe. In a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court last year in two same-sex marriage cases, a report by the 14,000-member American Sociological Association noted that more than half the subjects whom Dr. Regnerus had described as children of “lesbian mothers” and “gay fathers” were the offspring of failed opposite-sex marriages in which a parent later engaged in same-sex behavior, and that many others never lived with same-sex parents.

Wendy D. Manning, a professor of sociology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and the main author of the association report, said of the wider literature: “Every study has shortcomings, but when you pull them all together, the picture is very clear. There is no evidence that children fare worse in same-sex families.” . . . .  “Are we going to hold same-sex parents to a different standard than heterosexuals?” she asked.