It’s impossible to figure out what’s being said here. To say, “That’s not what the evidence says” implies that you have some better source of evidence, but to say, “the tests are overwhelmingly run by partisans,” etc., suggests that all you have to rebut the evidence is doubt. You have no evidence at all.

“that gays are bullied and therefore we have to give them whatever they want”

I never made that argument. You might try responding to what I actually said.

“yes, I am claiming victimhood (though not for myself):”

Untrue. You routinely claim that you are being “forced” to do one thing or another. You claim all the time that you are a victim of gay rights, liberalism, Unitarians, science. And you want our sympathy.

“one would expect gay marriages to be far more prone to promiscuity, drama, fickleness, and all the instability that putting your faith in unstable constructs like “choice” brings.”

And yet none of the long-term gay relationships in my church congregation have demonstrated any of the things you mention. Couples have been together without promiscuity or drama for ten, fifteen, twenty, and even thirty-five years. Children have been raised, and the parents are still together. Before I joined the congregation, I know that one couple got together and then parted soon afterward, but that’s the only story I know. Being part of a small, intentional Christian community makes a difference, and that difference is part of the good news the faith teaches.

Actually, no.

To the extent that we have evidence, the evidence suggests that gays and lesbians are WAY more likely to divorce and have unstable families than heteros.

And even among heteros, marriages are not all equal. (Interesting to note that Unitarian Universalist ministers appear to be especially prone to divorce.)

Your vision of “marriage” – the “liberated” one (do people ever stop to really consider what exactly the sexual revolution “liberated” people from?) – is all about letting go of exactly those aspects of marriage that confer the benefits.

Based on the values expressed in justification for the union, one would expect gay marriages to be far more prone to promiscuity, drama, fickleness, and all the instability that putting your faith in unstable constructs like “choice” brings. And this is exactly what we have seen so far.

Compare the statistics yourself: look at gay marriage in northern European states as opposed to gays who marry lesbians in Israel, and tell me which families are more solid and sound.

Marriage leads to stability, health, and happiness precisely because it is not founded on the fickle, hedonistic values, materialistic selfishness, and unrealistic beliefs “gay marriage” is founded on.

I’m not. You are.

Was a response to the attempted red herring, above (that gays are bullied and therefore we have to give them whatever they want).

Gays shouldn’t be bullied. Nobody should be bullied. Whether or not people who deliberately flout social norms and laws have a right to expect not to face consequences is another story – but whether or not Oscar Wilde was in fact an innocent victim who did nothing at all (!) to bring his own downfall onto himself, the fact that they are bullied does not grant them the right to make all manner of unrelated claims. Gays are trying to write themselves a blank check.

As far as me playing the victim card, yes, I am claiming victimhood (though not for myself): these kids ARE victims. They are victims of exploitation.

If you stopped trying to use your kids as meat shields, they wouldn’t get hurt.

That’s not what the evidence says – even though the tests are overwhelmingly run by partisans, focuses entirely on irrelevant questions, and uses highly suspect methods.

Interviews with the kids and the opinions of psychologists are not in any way adjusted for motive, for instance, and what exactly does it tell us about gay parents when tests avoid looking for things like grief and “taboo” problems, issues with same- and opposite-sex identity, relationships, bonding, and trust issues, etc. and focus entirely on questions that aren’t even known to be correlated with good parenting?

What does it really tell us about the overall health of the family if it proves that kids raised by lesbians score well on traits that just happened to be valued by lesbians, but not by conservatives? It tells us who wrote the test, not what it means. And even things that seem neutral really aren’t, upon closer inspection: studies have found liberal kids have an advantage in GPA contests over conservative kids, because their values and priorities are in harmony with their liberal teachers (of course, the people who do these studies don’t describe it this way – they say that the evidence proves that left wing family structures “are better at cultivating academic achievement”, which just further proves what’s wrong with these studies masquerading as objective while pushing a blatantly partisan agenda).

Not to mention, of course, that these kids are all raised by parents who are self-selected, who know not only that they’re being watched but also what they’re being watched for. Another thing these studies conspicuously fail to account for: “teaching to the test”.

And yet, even so, the evidence does not suggest these kids are the same. There are in fact differences.

One difference that gays love to crow about is that these kids are “more mature”. This is one of the reasons I claim that we’ve already demonstrated that the children of gays suffer from a known form of child abuse called “parentification”.

Parentification where the child is forced to “grow up” too fast, to “take care of” their parents either physically or emotionally – an inversion of roles. I presented the fictional example from the film “Birdcage”, if you recall – Val having to grow up fast because he has to learn how to dodge his infantile stepfather’s emotional neediness, and has to learn how to do things like lying to his teachers so as to protect his parents from situations they find uncomfortable. In fact, the whole plot of this film revolved around this dilemma – the crisis that triggers the film’s plot is not that Val lied about his family (he’s been doing that all his life, apparently) but that for the first time, he lied for his own sake rather than theirs – he prioritized his OWN comfort level (and expected his parents to do for him what he’d been doing for them since first grade).

Of course that’s just a film and I would hope that real-life gay parents aren’t so blatantly abusive toward their child. But I have seen the same problem in real-world gay families. The children are taught from birth to prioritize their parents’ political agenda – enforced with insinuations that if their parents’ political agenda fails, the evil religious people will come persecute the whole family, Nazi-style (which is itself not exactly a healthy parenting style, deliberately instilling anxieties in your child to make said child easier to manipulate).

But, yes, any test that shows that the children of gays are “more mature” or “more well-adjusted” also flag those children as probably being “parentified” – that maturity comes at a cost: by being forced to accept inappropriate responsibilities at too young an age, the child’s growth is stunted in other ways (just as you’d expect from feeding steroids to make a chicken grow fast, fast growth does not equal healthy growth). Parentified children are prone to all sorts of problems in later life, so I look forward to the day when researchers tackle this particular question – hopefully using the same kids from the earlier studies.

Another way in which kids differ: they are more likely to experiment with homosexuality themselves.

But even if the claim that the kids are not shown to be harmed is true it does not change the fact that rights are not contingent upon proof of harm, but on the recognition of things people have reason to value. Even if you could prove that these kids are not harmed – and you still have a few million variables left, and even then you’d need at least three generations to really get data of the sort required to meet a “child’s best interest” standard – even if you could prove all of this, it doesn’t change the fact that you are deliberately and unnecessarily depriving them of something they have reason to value.

So even if your case were proven (and it’s not), you still need to explain how it is that the right to have a recognized spouse is not only important, but so important that we need to make major accommodations so that you can have exactly the sort of spouse you want – but having a mother isn’t important at all?

Following out your train of logic seems to tax even you.

You said that “gays who are arranging for “coparenting” contracts with members of the opposite sex are obviously willing to accept the limits and restrictions.”

But now you’re repeating an earlier claim that “gays are not willing to accept the limits and restrictions of marriage.” So which is it? Are you going to persist in an obvious falsehood about how ALL gays behave, or are you going to return to your previous brief moment of honesty and admit that some gays do respect those limits?

I’m not. You are.

You responded to Glen’s comment that “gay people suffer from societal stigmatization, prejudice, bigotry, discrimination” by saying that “They bring it [meaning societal stigmatization, prejudice, bigotry, discrimination] on by their own actions.”

I’m merely asking whether you are seriously claiming that gays are stigmatized and discriminated against today because they are asking for their rights. You seem to be suggesting that if they were not asking for these rights, they would be living in peace and harmony. Such a claim is ridiculous.

They’re not.

If they were, they would understand that by choosing to marry someone inappropriate for having children with, their “marriage” is doomed to be barren.

“Gay Rights” in this context is not about the right to not get beaten up, but about the “right” to pick and choose which obligations gays feel like honoring.

Now it may be true that gays genuinely derive less pleasure from the usual obligations that are part of founding a family. They aren’t going to enjoy making the baby – or honoring their child’s other parent – nearly as much as a hetero would.

But it does not necessarily follow that because they don’t feel what other people feel in similar circumstances, that they are automatically entitled to rearrange anything and everything until their feelings are accommodated.

The only way this can be made to seem logical is by zooming in on how gays “feel”, with intense focus on the “feeling” of wanting something and not being able to have it – while, at the same time, using a camera blur to disconnect everyone else’s feelings, so as to create the impression that only the feelings of these gay people are involved, and nobody else is affected.

Really, once you see past the trick, it’s hard to understand how you ever fell for something so cheap and blatant and openly dishonest.

If you are trying to whip out the victim card to construct an argumentum ad misericordium (since whether gays are bullied has nothing to do with the argument at hand), you need to stick with today, not some mythical timeless pool of victimhood.

I read in USA Today a year or so ago that we’d reached a landmark: more Mormons than gays were experiencing harassment. Congratulations; “Bash Back!” and other gay “rights” organizations have done their job.

Are you saying that before the gay rights movement, gays were not stigmatized, discriminated against, or bullied? That claim is preposterous.

“It is the “gay rights” community that causes this effect – by pretending to speak for the whole community”

But you wrote the sentence that claimed that “Gays are not willing to accept the limits and restrictions of marriage.” The gay rights community didn’t write that sentence. You did. You need to take responsibility for that.