I suppose the Chick-Fil-A controversy has displaced sociologist Mark Regnerus’s controversial study as the battlefront of the gay marriage wars over the last few weeks, but the Regnerus study is worth revisiting here. His study, “How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study,” was released in June and provoked a heated reaction among bloggers and academics alike.
It was hard to find coverage that was neither hostile (Regnerus is a fraud! The study is worthless!) nor celebratory (Gay marriage is doomed! This proves what we’ve been saying all along!), and most groups refused to admit both the study’s strengths and its limitations. Avoiding these extremes and providing the best analysis we’ve seen of the study is The Weekly Standard‘s Andrew Ferguson, whose recent article explores the background, the findings, and the reaction in some depth. An excerpt:
The criticisms of Regnerus’s paper would be more impressive if they weren’t anticipated and in many cases acknowledged by the author in the same paper being criticized. Regnerus notes explicitly that the study did not identify the sexual orientation of the parents being reported on, and that some of the “gay parents” had little or no contact with their children. He admits that the categories into which he divided respondents were hardly exhaustive: “There are far more ways to delineate family structure and experiences—and changes therein—than I have undertaken here.”
He also addresses the charge of an apples-to-oranges comparison. Measuring children from divorced GFs and LMs against children from intact families, he concedes, is “arguably unfair.” . . . And he never speculated on causation—nowhere does he suggest that homosexual parenting or orientation was responsible for the lower outcomes of the children of GFs and LMs.
Whatever its faults, Regnerus’s study has unique strengths, even beyond the size and randomness of its sample, that his critics ignore altogether. His commendable attempt to include a diversity of views among his advisers is rare within the guild, where the leftism is unrelieved. So too were his willingness to immediately publish his research materials online and his pledge to make all his data digitally available this fall. Rather than a study of monochromatic and well-to-do lesbians or gay men, he managed to capture the full ethnic, socioeconomic, and geographic range of gay America. And his study is one of the first to systematically measure outcomes from the children themselves, rather than simply through the reports of their parents.
And in case you’re not one of our subscribers (yet), Dr. Stanton Jones of Wheaton College wrote about the field of same-sex science in First Things earlier this year. His conclusions, in brief:
Contrary to the assumptions of many social conservatives, biology does appear to play a modest part in determining sexual orientation. Contrary to the assumptions of many social progressives, psychological and environmental variables also appear to play at least a modest part in determining sexual orientation. In contrast to the hubris of those prone to making emphatic pronouncements, what we do not yet know about the causation of sexual orientation dwarfs the bit that we are beginning to know. And the fact that causation is indubitably a complex and mysterious by-product of the interaction of biological and psychological variables confounds the assertion that sexual orientation is just like skin color, determined at birth or even conception. And contrary to the suggestions of some, the involvement of some biological influence does not prove that change in sexual orientation is impossible.
August 9th, 2012 | 4:13 pm
The article seems reasonably fair to me, although reading it we certainly know whose side Andrew Ferguson is on. The problem, it seems to me, is not that there are too few children alive today who were raised from birth to adulthood by same-sex couples. I think we can all see how difficult it would be to come up with a reliably large sample. The problem is that Regnerus, in doing a study of “gay parenting,” chose to compare a group from broken homes (those adult children who answered yes to the question of whether their mother of father had a same-sex romantic relationship) to a group from intact homes. Why could he not have compared them to adult children who answered yes to the question of whether one of their parents had a heterosexual romantic relationship outside of their marriage? It seems to me Regnerus is being defended for comparing apples to oranges because there were too few oranges to compare to other oranges (intact gay homes and intact straight homes), when he could have compared apples to apples (broken gay homes and broken straight homes).
In any case, even if you criticize his choice of comparisons, no doubt the study shows what it shows, and Regnerus seems quite honest about its limited usefulness in predicting the outcome for children raised from childhood by intact same-sex couples. The only “danger” of the study, it seems to me, is not that its results are damaging, but rather that people will interpret the study to say something it doesn’t say (as some already have, according to Andrew Ferguson himself).
As someone has wisely observed here—I can’t remember who it was—there’s something a little strange about trying to decide same-sex parenting based on social science studies. Suppose the small study that claims children of lesbian parents actually do beter than children of heterosexual couples is borne out in the future by large, reliable studies. Are we going to decree that only lesbian couples can raise children? Would people opposed to same-sex marriage even accept the results of such studies? I don’t think so. They would almost certainly argue that there are things that social scientists can’t measure.
August 9th, 2012 | 4:38 pm
Regnerus’ study is provisional and incomplete, something that he freely admits in his study. But isn’t that what all science (whether social or natural) claims to be? I have much less problem with Regnerus, the design of the study and the tentative observations that he makes than with the hysterical reaction to the study. I don’t think he can be blamed at all for the spurious “interpreting” being done in various corners.
It’s clear where Ferguson falls on this debate, but he makes no attempt to hide it and is quite fair in the article. He is a writer, not a scientist and makes no attempt to be one, just a careful reader of the study and it’s conclusions. I think the study is valuable on its own terms, but isn’t proscriptive for anything.
August 9th, 2012 | 7:43 pm
Contrary to the assumptions of many social conservatives, biology does appear to play a modest part in determining sexual orientation.
I wonder: what about other behavioral choices that appear to have a biological component?
Is it not true that having an extra Y chromosome is known to be linked to aggressiveness, and that a disproportionate number of prison inmates have that extra Y?
What about other sexual deviations?
And why only privilege biologically influenced desires? Is a desire any less pressing just because it comes from some non-biological source? Can the person who desires incest, or corpses, or any other atypical preference choose his or her desire any more than a gay man can?
If the involuntary nature of desire justifies behaviors – and grants a blank check to write your own definition of what constitutes “civil rights” for yourself – why isn’t everyone justified, and why doesn’t everyone get one?
August 10th, 2012 | 6:32 am
“As someone has wisely observed here—I can’t remember who it was—there’s something a little strange about trying to decide same-sex parenting based on social science studies. ”
Children have been given to homosexuals based on profoundly unreliable studies. That has never bothered the homosexuality agenda camp who has always claimed it was doing so based on “research” and “science.” Neither has any harm that these children have suffered bothered anyone with a homosexuality agenda.
The question isn’t about the social sciences, since, contrary to what Nickol insinuates, they aren’t useless and they aren’t a useless instrument to provide reliable data about life experiences. The issue is that depending on how the instrument is fashioned and how it is used, it then becomes useless, unreliable and even destructive. What matters is the aggregate quality of the data and conclusions furnished by a particular set of studies.
“Suppose the small study that claims children of lesbian parents actually do better than children of heterosexual couples is borne out in the future by large, reliable studies. Are we going to decree that only lesbian couples can raise children? Would people opposed to same-sex marriage even accept the results of such studies? I don’t think so. They would almost certainly argue that there are things that social scientists can’t measure.”
The issue is not that social scientists can’t measure many things related to parenting. They can. The issue is how data is measured in a way to produce a conclusion that is false but which sounds true enough and scientific enough to promote an agenda to normalize homosexuality.
It’s not science itself, or the multiple methods available to social scientists, but how studies are built in a way that will mask or distort reality more than reveal it, and how scientific results are used that make for propaganda.
August 10th, 2012 | 12:21 pm
“Suppose the small study that claims children of lesbian parents actually do better than children of heterosexual couples is borne out in the future by large, reliable studies. Are we going to decree that only lesbian couples can raise children?
Is “BETTER THAN” a scientific concept?
I thought science couldn’t do value judgments.
If the children of lesbians are doing “BETTER THAN” children who get to have both a mom and a dad, I think it’s time to look at how we are defining “good parenting” and what constitutes a “well-turned-out product”.
Fortunately for us, we don’t need to do that; the studies showing that the children of lesbians do “better” actually show that the children of lesbians are more mature – which is not a sign that they are better off; it’s a sign that they are parentified.
Kids who have to take care of emotionally needy parents (instead of being allowed to be emotionally needy themselves, and having a parent take care of them) grow up to be more responsible and mature. But, like forcing a flower prematurely into bloom, there’s a cost – they have to tap into reserves that were meant for healthy growth. I suspect parentification is the real reason why vampire fiction is so compelling: parentification is when a weak parent strengthens her/himself by feeding on a child’s emotional reserves.
August 10th, 2012 | 2:08 pm
Blake –
As I’ve asked you before:
“…there’s similar evidence of (a tendency for) greater maturity among children that are homeschooled. (E.g. http://learninfreedom.org/socialization.html or https://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000000/00000068.asp ) …Are homeschoolers emotionally abusing their children, too?”
In other words… if ‘kids being more mature’ is evidence of ‘parentification’ in the case of lesbians, why would it not be evidence of parentification in the case of homeschoolers, too?
August 10th, 2012 | 2:30 pm
Is “BETTER THAN” a scientific concept?
I thought science couldn’t do value judgments.
Blake,
You proved my point. I said that supposing there were highly respectable studies that showed children of lesbian parents turned out “better than” children of married heterosexual couples. Let’s say they went on to do better in school, use recreational drugs less, get higher-paying jobs, form more stable marriages, and have lower-than-average rates of depression. You would come along and say, “Is ‘BETTER THAN’ a scientific concept? I thought science couldn’t do value judgments.” Who, after all, is to say that it is better to be raised by lesbian parents and have all of those outcomes than to be raised by heterosexual married parents and to score less well on those objective measures?
I think you would have to say that the Regnerus study didn’t show that the adult children of parents who had same-sex romantic relationships didn’t fare any better than the children of intact heterosexual marriage. After all, it is not up to science to make value judgments. Academic success and financial success aren’t really “better” than dropping out of school and making less money. Is that what matters in life? A lower-than-average rate of depression may mean the person is self-deluded. Or it may mean they are better medicated.
So who is to say that children who score better on all the objective measures a social scientist chooses to include in the study is actually better off? Science can’t tell us that. It may be that the very most important thing can’t be measured by social science, and if children of opposite-sex married parents do less well in school, take more drugs, do less well in the job market, have less stable marriages, and are more depressed than children of lesbian parents, one is still better off to have had same-sex married parents.
August 10th, 2012 | 5:27 pm
You proved my point. I said that supposing there were highly respectable studies that showed children of lesbian parents turned out “better than” children of married heterosexual couples.
Yes, if your point is that you can “improve” on nature.
The history of left wing politics is the history of “improving” on nature – and hurting people.
Science is about erring on whichever side will bring knowledge, but when you’re working with real peoples’ lives, you have to err on the side of caution – you have to use ethical values (“first, do no harm”), because people are more important than scientific findings, and nobody on this Earth is here because scientists need someone to experiment on.
So if you want to “prove” that gay marriage is safe, you need to do a lot better than a single study or a single set of studies. You need to anticipate every single problem and objection that could be raised, and prove that it’s not relevant. And you have to do it over lifetimes, over generations, before you have the right to consider anything “proved”.
But even then – you know what? These kids are still people, and people have rights – and the same arguments that gays use to prove that they have rights also prove that the same things gays value, kids have reason to value too.
And that means you can’t take their biological kinship away, or their chance to have a same-sex parent relationship, or their chance to have an opposite-sex parent relationship, because these are things of value, and they’re not yours to take – not even if you could “prove” that the resulting child would be “better”.
Children are not manufactured goods. There is no spec sheet for the perfect child. They are people, and they have rights. They have the right to their own real family, and your need to pretend you’re something your not is not an adequate justification for taking that away from them.
August 10th, 2012 | 5:28 pm
So who is to say that children who score better on all the objective measures a social scientist chooses to include in the study is actually better off?
You need to prove that gay marriage does no harm.
Which still doesn’t change the fact that it still violates the child’s rights, so even if you proved your point – you’re still gonna lose in the end, because you don’t have truth on your side. What gays are doing is abusive, they know it, and they don’t care.
August 10th, 2012 | 6:52 pm
I would like to leave some information for the readers on two other studies. Rosenfelt out of Stanford August 2010, he used the 2000 US Census and studied 3,502 children who were being raised by same sex couples. And 700,000 children in other family structures.
The census is not ideal, because the census doesn’t ask you how much you drink, or have you ever been depressed, or have you ever been arrested. So it has limitations. Rosenfelt looked to see if children were in the grade appropriate for their age. In other words he was looking for kids who flunked a grade. He found no difference.
http://www.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_Nontraditional_Families_Demography.pdf
Another study which was published right after Regnerus was completed by Daniel Potter. A large sample “Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. It is a seven-wave panel study that collected data from more than 20,000 children during kindergarten in the fall of 1998 and followed them through their eighth grade year.
Using a very rigorous method 158 children were identified living in a same sex parent family.
AND the research showed No Difference. You have to read all the way through to the end, because at first it seems like there might be a difference but this is made clear near the end, no difference.
http://www.baylorisr.org/wp-content/uploads/Potter.pdf
It is purely Regnerus decision to not go with the Calendaring data like Potter did. Regnerus played fast and loose with the sexual orientation terms of gay and lesbian and he is rightly getting pounded for it. Other researchers are very very careful to get that part right.
Rather than accept the measly 26 respondents who said they lived with their mother and her partner for 5 years or more, which is the cut off Rosenfelt used, Regnerus went off the reservation and claimed that parents were lesbian or gay if their now adult child said that they remembered their parent(s) had a same sex romance at least once.
This is the equivalent of doing a study on Catholic Parenting and counting as Catholic, any parent whose child remembered that they had at least one time visited a Catholic Church.
Even Potter’s study didn’t find a lot of them. But there were far fewer gay parents with kindergarten aged children in 1998 than nowadays. Remember Same Gender Civil Marriage became legal in Massachusetts May 17, 2004.
August 10th, 2012 | 11:17 pm
Blake,
You continue to prove my point. Opponents of same-sex marriage are perfectly happy to cite studies like the Regnerus study that they think can be used against same-sex marriage, but they (and you) will never accept studies that show children of same-sex couples doing as well as or better than children of heterosexual married couples as arguments for same sex marriage. For opponents of same-sex marriage, these kinds of studies are “heads I win, tails you lose.” If they show the results you want, you will cite them against same-sex marriage. If they show the results you don’t want, you will simply reject them as irrelevant.
August 11th, 2012 | 10:26 am
The Regnerus study is so flawed as to be useless. I realize that anti-gay groups and individuals were really hoping to have something substantive and serious to move the issue beyond their personal disapproval of gay people. This “study” isn’t it. You can’t say stuff like “the children of gay fathers are more likely to contemplate suicide” when you haven’t even studied gay fathers! Unless it was Mr. Regnerus’ intention to become the “go to” guy for religionist anti-gay propaganda disguised as academic studies, he’s probably trashed his career as a sociologist. Only he knows why he made this choice.
August 12th, 2012 | 11:08 am
Roberts comments are simply part of a smear campaign by pro-gay individuals to tear down this study.
Nothing about this study is scientifically flawed or rigged or any worse than all sociological studies. It is a fair and above board study that anyone familiar with sociological research will readily understand as valuable on multiple levels.
Were was this “outrage” directed at the host of non-radom studies of gay parenting and their selection bias and multiple other “flaws” that can be levied at any study…
This sociologist has not ruined his career.. He has simply taken the expected heat that unfairly has been turned on him for politcal reasons. His work was predicated on the social scientific consensus that intact married families are the gold standard as measured by child outcomes.
Given this consensus: it is easy to see why Mr. Regnerus would be interested in studing “family” forms outside this excepted norm. His work will be built upon and stands solidly as the first large random sample study of gay parenting.
August 12th, 2012 | 6:32 pm
You continue to prove my point. Opponents of same-sex marriage are perfectly happy to cite studies like the Regnerus study that they think can be used against same-sex marriage,
I think you’re missing my point.
You assume that children are like pets – you can do whatever you want to them, until and unless someone can prove you’ve harmed them.
But children are not pets, nor are they deliverables (produce and develop them any way you like, so long as the end results “match specifications”). They are human beings with rights of their own.
In their covetous zeal to claim more than what is rightfully theirs, gays are eager to prove that, while of course marriage is not procreative, it is discriminatory to view gays as any less procreative than heteros (since of course you can’t be equal in marriage unless you are procreative, since we all know that we aren’t supposed to really believe marriage isn’t procreative – that’s just a talking point to manipulate and control discussions). As such, they argue that they have the right to force children to pretend that having two mommies is just as good as having a mother relationship and a father relationship – and that they have this right until and unless someone proves it does harm.
But that relies on a double standard. What you are failing to grasp is that there’s no reason why children’s rights shouldn’t be viewed as equal to the parent’s right.
If a parent’s argument is based on the argument that it is a basic human right to not be excluded from relationships that society values, then you can’t just make that true for the spouse-relationship, without it also being true for the mother-relationship or the father-relationship. If it is true that there is no right to these relationships, then gay marriage is not a right either.
You can’t say it’s a crime to force someone to “live a lie” – then turn around and say it does no harm to raise a child under pressure to pretend that being motherless is no big deal.
You can’t say that intangible things like “experiences” and “identity” and “relationships” and “things people have reason to value” and “being like other people” and “things society values” are terribly important for you, but irrelevant for your child.
Your precious studies are capable of proving that gays harm their children, but a study that does not come to this conclusion does not have the power to prove that gays don’t harm their children, because no one study can prove such a thing – it would take dozens of studies, over at least one and preferably three generations, before we could even begin to draw such a conclusion from scientific studies.
And even if you did prove that the child is not harmed, there’s still the matter of the double standard – the assumption that it’s okay to deprive a child of rights as long as the child is not harmed, while you yourself of course would never want your ability to have a spouse to be reduced to a question of whether it can be proven that not having a spouse will impact you in some way that is of particular interest to society.
Children have a right to a mother and a father. Both are essential, neither is expendable, they’re not interchangeable, and the more you try to “prove” that children can and should be deprived of one or both relationships – misusing science, creating taboos, punishing dissent, and forcing lies – the more it just proves that gay marriage is necessarily correlated with deceit and child abuse.
August 12th, 2012 | 6:33 pm
Nothing about this study is scientifically flawed or rigged or any worse than all sociological studies.
It is a question of framing.
Gay parents can’t handle honest inquiry, and so must act as if any studies that aren’t rigged in their favor are “unfair”.
Suppression of facts that don’t suit the narrative is a sure sign of a group that knows it doesn’t have truth on its side.
August 13th, 2012 | 1:27 am
Gay parents can’t handle honest inquiry, and so must act as if any studies that aren’t rigged in their favor are “unfair”.
Blake,
Can you give me a few quotes from gay parents who have attacked this study? I have read a fair amount about Regnerus’s colleagues who have, whether fairly or unfairly, attacked the study. I have read a lot of criticisms of the study, and yet I don’t recall reading any by gay parents. Do you?
August 13th, 2012 | 11:02 am
Can you give me a few quotes from gay parents who have attacked this study?
Interestingly enough, an awful lot of the gay activists who advocate for gay marriage and criticize anything that interferes with their narrative are themselves lesbians!
I know – who woulda thought?
August 13th, 2012 | 2:26 pm
Interestingly enough, an awful lot of the gay activists who advocate for gay marriage and criticize anything that interferes with their narrative are themselves lesbians!
Blake,
What you originally said was, “Gay parents can’t handle honest inquiry, and so must act as if any studies that aren’t rigged in their favor are ‘unfair’.” Now you are trying to justify what was a sweeping (and ugly) accusation against gay parents by saying that some gay parents must certainly be among those who do what you claim.
Following the same rules of rhetoric, I can say “Republicans are racist,” or “conservatives hate gay people,” because certainly some do. You rarely if ever qualify your statements about gay people. You say, “Gays do this,” “Gays believe that.” If I were to say that religious people hated gays, you would strenuously object. But some religious people do hate gays. You allow yourself the right to make broad, sweeping generalizations about gays in much the same fashion as anti-Semites talk about “the Jews.” I don’t think you would find it acceptable if anyone else in these forums did the same thing in regard to any other group.
August 14th, 2012 | 4:07 pm
Following the same rules of rhetoric, I can say “Republicans are racist,” or “conservatives hate gay people,” because certainly some do.
And when openly racist conservatives tried to pass off studies demonstrating black inferiority as “objective”, I sided against them, first because I don’t believe in black inferiority myself, but also because I think it’s wrong for partisans to use science to “prove” a partisan point.
But gay advocates don’t mind blurring the lines between advocacy and objective “proof”, and so the whole movement loses credibility in my eyes.
When gay advocates embrace studies that are flawed, they lose the right to be taken very seriously when they claim that a far-less-flawed study is something to get all outraged about.
Gay advocates have embraced studies that are not only flawed, but conducted by openly partisan activists.
Then, the entire discussion makes its way through the media courtesy of media figures who just happen to turn out to be – guess what! – gay parents, who are deliberately passing themselves off as objective neutrals – and somehow they forgot to mention that they are heavily-invested stakeholders!
As far as the question about lesbian parents, let me ask you: ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, when these lesbian mothers first started deliberately conducting experiments using their own children as guinea pigs, what grounds did they have for thinking this wouldn’t affect their kids?
It is possible today to argue that a lesbian couple might genuinely believe – from everything in the press – that kids will be just fine if they are raised with “two mommies”, but that evidence is drawn entirely from a generation of children who were raised by lesbians who had no reason at all to think their kids would be “all right”. Those lesbians didn’t care about their kids, they cared about generating evidence to fit their thesis. Without those kids – used in unethical ways – what evidence would we have at all that gay parenting is harmless?
August 14th, 2012 | 4:12 pm
You rarely if ever qualify your statements about gay people
Actually I try very hard to use the language ‘gay rights activists’.
It’s hard, because gay rights activists have gone out of their way to deliberately – and deceitfully – conflate themselves and their agenda with “gay people” (as in, “all gay people”). It’s deceitful because the intention is to suggest that “all” gay people want what they want.
Something to think about when you are frustrated with me for seeming to be speaking about “all” gay people – when I am responding to the things said and done by those people who are deliberately and dishonestly representing themselves as speaking for “all” gay people.
It’s a language trap, but one I sometimes fall into despite my best intentions, not one I chose.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact