tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8238382886103256219.post7682497870458594924..comments2023-11-10T09:15:40.084-08:00Comments on The Friends of Jake: Misleading study on gay families tells lies, again!Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10124314924693077453noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8238382886103256219.post-75933363562260107572012-06-13T17:28:10.335-07:002012-06-13T17:28:10.335-07:00"Regnerus acknowledges he was unable to find ..."Regnerus acknowledges he was unable to find an adequate sample size, but he went ahead and made the comparison anyway"<br /><br />That tells you all you need to know. (Well, that---and who paid for the study! >:-/)JCFnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8238382886103256219.post-30961000590413568352012-06-13T09:34:51.714-07:002012-06-13T09:34:51.714-07:00An op-ed in today's L.A. Times is very critica...An op-ed in today's L.A. <i>Times</i> is very critical of this study --<a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-frank-same-sex-regnerus-family-20120613,0,392991.story" rel="nofollow">Dad and dad vs. mom and dad</a>. An excerpt:<br /><br />"The trouble is that no scholarly research, including the Regnerus paper, has ever compared children of stable same-sex couples to children of stable different-sex couples, in part because an adequate sample size is hard to come by. (Regnerus acknowledges he was unable to find an adequate sample size, but he went ahead and made the comparison anyway.) Like the Regnerus paper, all these studies show is that divorce and single-parenthood raise risks for kids. Indeed, the basis of the 20-year "consensus" is that two parents are better than one, not that parents have to be different genders.<br /><br />"Regnerus seeks to enhance the credibility and relevance of this body of research by including in his sample respondents who actually had a gay parent instead of just people from broken or single-parent homes. But because his sample is mostly made up of fractured families, he fails the most basic requirement of social science research — assessing causation by holding all other variables constant. What he has produced is no better than its predecessors at yielding insight into the effect of same-sex parenting.<br /><br />"There is a larger point, however, that can be lost in the debate over how to read the data. There is no basis in the recent history of American social policy for testing the parenting skills of a class of citizens before we grant them permission to parent — or to marry. Given all the research on the hardships of children raised by single parents, there is still no movement to preemptively remove kids from broken homes after every divorce or to ban single people from having kids; such policies would be patently inhumane and unenforceable. Growing up in poverty increases the risk of a wide range of social and psychological ills, yet since the craze for eugenics died down, no one is proposing banning poor people from marriage or child rearing. And some ethnic and racial groups are statistically less likely to get or stay married, yet there is no ethnic litmus test for marriage or parenting — only a gay one."dr.primrosenoreply@blogger.com