Daniel: It’s hard to know what to say to this. From within the statist paradigm I guess she makes some valid points; if the state is the overarching legal authority, it will have to have some idea of what a marriage contract is.
As for gay marriage, it doesn’t seem like her article rules it out. Since she takes marriage as the primary institution of parenting, you could just as easily say that gay marriage should be institutionalized for the sake of all children presently being raised by gays.
Tony: How children come into the world, how they are raised, how they grow up to affect everyone else in society and governance, these are all public issues which marriage addresses.
How is a history showing diversity more important than children’s actual positive rights? And what exactly does that history show us?
Children have a right to a relationship with their mother and father. They should not be deliberately manufactured like some consumer product by same-sex couples through IVF and a sperm donor or surrogate mother. Adoption should not be normative; it should be a last resort.
Moreover, children need a mother and father. Mothers and fathers are not interchangeable; men and women are not interchangeable. A married man and woman should be given preference in children up for adoption so that children can have a father and mother.
Michael: My point is that if we look at history, has the state always been involved in marriage? If not, were rights still upheld?
Imagine a society with no state. Must you start one in order to uphold marriage rights? I have a hard time seeing why you would, given the state is unnecessary for protecting property rights or providing security, food, shelter, etc.
Tony: Children cannot defend their own rights. Moreover, the damage done to children psychologically is often permanent or at least hard to reverse and heal. An anarchist “utopia” would not protect children.
Michael: How does it follow that:
1) Children cannot defend their own rights.
2) The State is necessary to do so.
Tony: Have you ever observed a child, Michael? Do I really have to state the obvious about the nature of childhood? Weak, dependent, helpless, no reason, etc.
If the state is going to defend anyone’s rights, it should be those less able to defend their own rights, no?
Children suffer psychological damage from absent mothers and/or fathers. That is necessarily the case with a same-sex couple.
Me: Children of same-sex couples do not exhibit any distinguishable differences from heterosexual couples, except a more equitable understanding of gender roles. This is robust research; anything else is opinion.
They also are less likely to be abused, by the way.
Another study specifically on lesbian parents,
“‘We simply expected to find no difference in psychological adjustment between adolescents reared in lesbian families and the normative sample of age-matched controls,’ says Gartrell. ‘I was surprised to find that on some measures we found higher levels of [psychological] competency and lower levels of behavioral problems. It wasn’t something I anticipated.’
In addition, children in same-sex-parent families whose mothers ended up separating did as well as children in lesbian families in which the moms stayed together.”
[http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1994480,00.html#ixzz1r62lfZBW]
And as a child of parents who did not love each other and had me as a complete accident, but loved me very much, I can attest that I am eternally grateful that they were never married and did not put on a ruse. When I was diagnosed with ADHD, the psychologist told me I scored exceedingly well on all metrics measuring emotional health and sense of self, even given being Type-A with ADHD, which tends to result in the failure to develop a self-concept *in most people (not just from ‘broken homes’, whatever that means)*.
Daniel: Tony, the stuff you are posting here is pure bigotry. Obviously, children need stable, loving relationships with the people who raise them. There is no logical reason that these people need to be related to them or have genitals of a particular shape.
And clearly, there are systematic reasons that the biological parents of a child tend to be more suited than other people to raise it. However, there will be exceptions in which alternative arrangements will be preferable. It is up to the actual people involved to decide upon those arrangements, not the state. Also, given that the state does such a terrible job protecting the rights of people who actually HAVE some means of defending themselves, I don’t think there is any expectation that it will do a passable job of protecting the rights of helpless infants.
Tony: Robust research? They’re filled with methodological flaws.
http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=is01j3
“The deficiencies of studies on homosexual parenting include reliance upon an inadequate sample size, lack of random sampling, lack of anonymity of research participants, and self-presentation bias.”
Asking a bunch of same-sex couples with custody of children how good of parents they are is not “robust research.”
Did your parents lack of love for each other affect you in any way, Caitlyn?
Me: That is an incredibly biased source which fails to cite reputable sources or present any studies (not anecdotes or otherwise contrived claims) which disprove my claims. The Pope is not a reputable source.
It’s called a pseudo-experiment for a reason. Sample size isn’t as large as would be ideal (though still large enough for the mean value theorem to apply; the article you cite is a strawman claim against studies of less than 10 participants, whereas mine is much larger) because the government makes is extremely difficult for same-sex couples to have children. Random sampling is literally impossible, if you’ve ever conducted a psychological experiment, where the experimental conditions are inherently pseudo-independent variables). Self-presentation bias isn’t unique to the lesbian ‘condition’, nor is this an interview of the parents themselves; it’s of the children. Anonymity is irrelevant. ‘Robustness’ has to do with statistical analysis, which is not really up for debate.
I got to fly as an unaccompanied minor a lot, which was fun. I assure you that my personal experience isn’t any more relevant than any other anecdote, but even if it were, I don’t see how else it could have affected me. I knew a lot of kids in extremely unhappy ‘traditional’ families, many of which were young girls whom I mentored; I had a much happier childhood than they did and I really felt terrible that they had to endure that. Their parents wouldn’t even show up to family nights. The one girl we had who had two dads? BOTH fathers showed up. Early.
I’m an Economics major (formerly a Psych double major); if nothing else, I know my statistics and research methods.
Tony: Do the same-sex “parenting” studies have those methodological flaws or not?
Flying as an unaccompanied minor is the only way it affected you?
Because I make claims about children and their rights, that makes me a bigot?
“Obviously, children need stable, loving relationships with the people who raise them. There is no logical reason that these people need to be related to them or have genitals of a particular shape.”
Children don’t need “people”; they need a mother and a father. They need a relationship with their origins. This is a basic psychological need.
Children are not mere animals that merely need their material needs met.
Yall should read the follow up article by Dr. Morse:
Me: Those aren’t methodological flaws; you literally can’t assign people’s sex or sexual orientation.
I never had to deal with my parents fighting. They really don’t like each other, so I’m positive that would have happened, had they been forced to interact more than the bare minimum. I have been able to appreciate my mother’s self-sufficiency and my father’s long-term relationship with a woman who makes him happy. It’s definitely taught me that I should never settle for someone who doesn’t make me happy and that love makes relationships work–regardless of the sex either member is.
Is that what we tell kids who are sexually abused by their biological fathers and mothers? That they need ‘their roots’? My parents’ genitalia is absolutely irrelevant to me as a human being; if it were, I would be gravely concerned.
If you can give me empirical data about how having a penis and vagina for parents satisfies some ‘basic psychological need’, I would at least consider it. But insofar as this remains weirdly Freudian, I can’t take it seriously. Look, I’ve taken coursework in developmental psychology from the leading psychologists in the field; you’re going to have to give me some solid science.
Daniel: If we’re talking about ‘gay’ meaning ‘lame’ rather than ‘homosexual’ I can see how having gay parents might pose a problem.
Me: I love you, Daniel.
Tony: You know, I could easily say Time Magazine is “incredibly biased source” but would that get us anywhere? No.
The FRC link cites David Cramer and his review of twenty studies on homosexual parenting that appeared in the Journal of Counseling and Development.
Are you saying that Cramer and that journal are not “reputable sources”? If so, why?
Here is a link from Mercator that addresses the specific study you cited: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/same_sex_adoption_is_not_a_game
“Not surprisingly, there are scholars who oppose this weighty evidence. Two major studies published in 2010 are often cited by homosexual activists and the media. Nanette Gartrell and Henry Bos (10) and Timothy Biblarz and Judith Stacey (11) claim that children who were deliberately deprived of the benefits of gender complementarity in a home with a father and a mother suffer no psychological damage.
However, all data in the Gartell and Bos article are self-reports by the mother and the child. The mothers were aware of the political agenda of the research and this must have skewed the results. This defect in methodology severely weakens the report.
In the meta-study by Biblarz and Stacey, in 31 of the 33 studies of two parent families, it was the parents who provided the data, which consisted of subjective judgments. Once again, this created a social desirability bias because the homosexual parents knew the political agenda behind the study. Furthermore, of the 33 studies in two-person families, only two studies included men, although the title, “How does the gender of parents matter?” suggests that both men and women were fully represented.
Much of the research on same-sex couples tends to have serious methodological flaws.”
“Those aren’t methodological flaws”
Yes, they are. Inadequate sample size, lack of random sampling, lack of anonymity of research participants, and self-presentation bias are all obvious, serious, and commonly acknowledged methodological flaws.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization
http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/random.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression_management
“you literally can’t assign people’s sex or sexual orientation.”
So what? That doesn’t make the study sound and robust research.
Michael: Blah blah blah
The state is still the last group I’d ask to take care of children. Unless I hated children.
Tony: “love makes relationships work”
What is love? Using someone to make you happy?
“If you can give me empirical data about how having a penis and vagina for parents satisfies some ‘basic psychological need’, I would at least consider it.”
Yall keep misrepresenting what I’m saying.
There is a well-established and growing body of evidence showing that both mothers and fathers provide unique and irreplaceable contributions to the raising of children.
And one’s biology determines whether one can be a mother or a father. So it is NOT genitalia that directly determines the well being of the child, but the entire sexual nature of the person, their parents being male and female.
Motherhood and fatherhood cannot be reduced to genitalia. That is a terrible and disgraceful way to view people who are mothers and fathers. But motherhood and fatherhood are dependent on sexual biology, and sexual biology cannot be reduced to genitalia either.
Me: I’m saying the *sources* it cites aren’t reputable. I never claimed Time was reputable; I’m claiming the study is legitimate.
You claim that the children being surveyed is biased. How else do you propose we study this?
Under your paradigm, literally NO psychological studies are valid. I’m sorry, but you’ve ignored basic statistical methodology, like the MVT, which I cited in response to the sample size argument. You are reiterating your talking points in a totally unresponsive way, which indicates very little understanding or respect for widely accepted research methods, because they inconvenience your position. I don’t have the time or patience to read through the Cramer studies, but you haven’t given me specific examples of areas of development which suffer in children raised in same-sex households and I’m not going to root around looking for any positive claims–rather than attempts to discredit other researchers’ findings–which you don’t even claim are there.
Are you questioning whether I have a mature concept of ‘love’? Whether this is a petty attempt to imply that I have an inferior understanding of what ‘love’ means (which is absolutely offensive) or is a valid philosophical question, it’s totally irrelevant to this discussion.
Totally missed the post above mine, somehow.
No, I’m stripping down the flowery language to the core argument. You fail to build/elaborate/explain how I’ve misrepresented this argumentation (again).
[sources for well-established and growing body of evidence?]
Anyway, there was a sexual revolution in the 70’s which seems to call into question your total assumption of the presence/role of gender roles in parenting. You also assume the absence of gender duality in same-sex couples. If the differences are determined by biology and those biological differences are expressed only in genitalia, I am obviously going to infer that that’s how to interpret what you’re saying. You failed to provide a concrete example of inherent differences in sex which are not sexual organs. The concepts of ‘fatherhood’ and ‘motherhood’ are cultural. Just look at some Native American and South American tribes, in which men take on traditional Western notions of femininity (including taking on the role of the primary caregiver) and women behave more ‘masculine’.
If objectifying people based on their genitalia is a ‘terrible and disgraceful way to view people who are mothers and fathers [what about those who aren’t?]’, then labeling same-sex couples as inherently bad parents based on THE EXACT SAME CRITERIA is wrong. You’re in a double-bind: either objectification is bad and we should treat all people, even homosexual people, as equals or objectification is okay and there are substantial reasons why people’s genitalia dictate their parenting skills.
thecheekylibertarian 