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.

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?

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.