All posts by Wintery Knight

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News

New study: children raised by same-sex parents have twice the risk of depression

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Young people seem to like gay marriage more than they like individual liberties
Young people seem to like gay marriage more than they like to care for the needs of children

A new peer-reviewed study published in the journal Depression Research and Treatment confirms that children do better when raised by their mother and father.

Here’s the abstract:

The relationship of elevated depression risk recently discovered among adult persons raised by same-sex parents with possible precipitating conditions in childhood has not previously been acknowledged. This study tests whether such inattention is supportable. Logistic regression based risk ratios were estimated from longitudinal measures of mental health outcomes observed in three waves (at ages 15, 22, and 28) of the US National Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health (,701). At age 28, the adults raised by same-sex parents were at over twice the risk of depression (CES-D: risk ratio 2.6, 95% CI 1.4–4.6) as persons raised by man-woman parents. These findings should be interpreted with caution. Elevated risk was associated with imbalanced parental closeness and parental child abuse in family of origin; depression, suicidality, and anxiety at age 15; and stigma and obesity. More research and policy attention to potentially problematic conditions for children with same-sex parents appears warranted.

The Federalist commented on the new study:

Children of same-sex parents also reported more violence, having a parent slap, hit, or kick them, or saying “things that hurt your feelings or made you feel you were not wanted or loved,” or “touched you in a sexual way, forced you to touch him or her in a sexual way, or forced you to have sex relations.”

In conclusion:

 The emergence of higher depression risk in early adulthood, coupled with a more frequent history of abuse victimization, parental distance, and obesity, suggests that the inattention of research and policy to the problems of children with same-sex parents is unwarranted.

As initial results, the present findings should be interpreted with caution and balance, based on the limited evidence presented, and (it is hoped) neither exaggerated nor dismissed out of hand on preconceived ideological grounds. However, well-intentioned concern for revealing negative information about a stigmatized minority does not justify leaving children without support in an environment that may be problematic or dangerous for their dignity and security.

Sullins’ study is not alone in suggesting more research needs to be done in this area. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published an extensive study proving the importance of biological fathers in the “healthy development of children.” In addition, “the most careful, rigorous, and methodologically sound study ever conducted” on the issue of homosexual parenting found “numerous and significant differences” between children raised by biological parents and children of homosexuals, “with the outcomes for children of homosexuals rated ‘suboptimal’ in almost every category.”

Very important to understand that same-sex couples who bring children into their relationship are intentionally depriving the child of a relationship with one or more of her biological parents. Just imagine growing up in the world and not having access to the people who made you. It’s not fair, and adult selfishness should have to give way to the needs of vulnerable children. Motherlessness is bad for children, and fatherlessness is bad for children.

Let’s go back and look at a previous study from Canada.

The Public Discourse reported on it.

Excerpt:

A new academic study based on the Canadian census suggests that a married mom and dad matter for children. Children of same-sex coupled households do not fare as well.

There is a new and significant piece of evidence in the social science debate about gay parenting and the unique contributions that mothers and fathers make to their children’s flourishing. A study published last week in the journal Review of the Economics of the Household—analyzing data from a very large, population-based sample—reveals that the children of gay and lesbian couples are only about 65 percent as likely to have graduated from high school as the children of married, opposite-sex couples. And gender matters, too: girls are more apt to struggle than boys, with daughters of gay parents displaying dramatically low graduation rates.

Unlike US-based studies, this one evaluates a 20 percent sample of the Canadian census, where same-sex couples have had access to all taxation and government benefits since 1997 and to marriage since 2005.

[…]Three key findings stood out to Allen:

children of married opposite-sex families have a high graduation rate compared to the others; children of lesbian families have a very low graduation rate compared to the others; and the other four types [common law, gay, single mother, single father] are similar to each other and lie in between the married/lesbian extremes.

Employing regression models and series of control variables, Allen concludes that the substandard performance cannot be attributed to lower school attendance or the more modest education of gay or lesbian parents. Indeed, same-sex parents were characterized by higher levels of education, and their children were more likely to be enrolled in school than even those of married, opposite-sex couples. And yet their children are notably more likely to lag in finishing their own schooling.

[…]The truly unique aspect of Allen’s study, however, may be its ability to distinguish gender-specific effects of same-sex households on children. He writes:

the particular gender mix of a same-sex household has a dramatic difference in the association with child graduation. Consider the case of girls. . . . Regardless of the controls and whether or not girls are currently living in a gay or lesbian household, the odds of graduating from high school are considerably lower than any other household type. Indeed, girls living in gay households are only 15 percent as likely to graduate compared to girls from opposite sex married homes.

Thus although the children of same-sex couples fare worse overall, the disparity is unequally shared, but is instead based on the combination of the gender of child and gender of parents.

[…]Thus the study undermines not only claims about “no differences” but also assertions that moms and dads are interchangeable. They’re not.

Here’s the study.

The author of the study is a professor of economics at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. His PhD in economics is from the University of Washington. A previous study had shown that gay relationships typically have far more instability (they last for more shorter times). Another study featured in the Atlantic talked about how gay relationships have much higher rates of domestic violence. Neither of these factors is good for children. So we have three reasons to think that normalizing gay relationships as “marriage” would not be good for children.

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News

FBI: if other people do what Hillary did then they will be prosecuted, but she won’t be

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Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help
Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help

A round-up of reactions from around the Internet, on the right and on the left.

First, here’s radical leftist Chris Cilliza, writing in the radically leftist Washington Post, of all places:

FBI Director James B. Comey dismantled large portions of Clinton’s long-told story about her private server and what she sent or received on it during a stirring 15-minute news conference, after which he took no questions. While Comey exonerated Clinton, legally speaking, he provided huge amounts of fodder that could badly hamstring her in the court of public opinion.

Most importantly, Comey said the FBI found 110 emails on Clinton’s server that were classified at the time they were sent or received. That stands in direct contradiction to Clinton’s repeated insistence she never sent or received any classified emails. And it even stands in contrast to her amended statement that she never knowingly sent or received any classified information.

[…]Comey said Clinton had used not one but multiple private email servers during her time at State. He said Clinton used multiple email devices during that time. (She had offered her desire to use a single device for “convenience” as the main reason she set up the private server.)

[…]It’s hard to read Comey’s statement as anything other than a wholesale rebuke of the story Clinton and her campaign team have been telling ever since the existence of her private email server came to light in spring 2015. She did send and receive classified emails. The setup did leave her — and the classified information on the server — subject to a possible foreign hack. She and her team did delete emails as personal that contained professional information.

Those are facts, facts delivered by the Justice Department of a Democratic administration. And those facts run absolutely counter to the narrative put forth by the Clinton operation: that this whole thing was a Republican witch-hunt pushed by a bored and adversarial media.

Andrew McCarthy in National Review:

There is no way of getting around this: According to Director JamesComey (disclosure: a former colleague and longtime friend of mine), Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence services.

Yet, Director Comey recommended against prosecution of the law violations he clearly found on the ground that there was no intent to harm the United States.

In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require.

David French in National Review:

[…]Comey noted that her personal e-mail server was less secure than Google’s Gmail:

None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning because all of these e-mails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff, like those found at Departments and Agencies of the U.S. Government — or even with a commercial service like Gmail.

[…]I defy any member of the military or any civilian not directly affiliated with Hillary Clinton to engage in such conduct and get away with it. The first thing that would happen is you would lose your security clearance. Next, you would lose your job. Finally, good luck escaping prosecution. Comey claims that prior FBI prosecutions included “some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice.”

I blogged previously about how Clinton’s private unsecure e-mail server was was definitely compromised by foreign governments and hackers. She was the top diplomat of the United States of America. Clandestine agents and their sources would undoubtedly have been compromised.

The FBI has been focusing its attention on Christians and conservatives for quite some time, and letting the real criminals on the secular left go Scot free. So their refusal to enforce the law here is no surprise. It’s not the first time, it won’t be the last time.

At the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro notes that the timing of this non-prosecution is suspect:

Just days after the Attorney General of the United States Loretta Lynch held a secret meeting aboard a plane with former President Bill Clinton – whose wife was under FBI investigation; just the day after Hillary leaked that she’d want Lynch for her own administration; just hours after the President of the United States Barack Obama flew Hillary – still under FBI investigation – down to North Carolina on Air Force One; just two hours before Obama was to open his campaign on behalf of Hillary Clinton, FBI Director James Comey announced that while Hillary Clinton had clearly engaged in criminal activity worthy of prosecution, he had recommended that she not be prosecuted.

James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal:

After announcing his no-charge recommendation, Comey added:

To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.

In other words, laws are for little people.

So let’s take stock. Nobody was prosecuted for the Clinton Foundation donations from foreign sources. Nobody was prosecuted for Fast and Furious gunrunning to Mexican drug cartels. Nobody was prosecuted for Benghazi. Nobody was prosecuted for the IRS persecution of Christians and conservatives. And nobody was prosecuted for the Clinton unsecure e-mail server.

News

Eat, Pray, Love author divorces man she married after leaving her first husband

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Eat, Pray, Love: Elizabeth Gilbert and her Brazilian stud Felipe
Eat, Pray, Love: Elizabeth Gilbert and her Brazilian stud

Does abandoning your marriage in order to travel the world indicate that a woman has the character necessary for a life-long married love? Let’s look at a case in which a famous feminist abandoned her husband to travel to have adventures.

The New York Times writes:

Elizabeth Gilbert, whose best-selling 2006 memoir, “Eat Pray Love,” traced a journey of self-discovery around the world that continues to resonate with fans, announced a new chapter on Friday.

[…]Ms. Gilbert, speaking directly to her readers in a Facebook post, said that after 12 years she was separating from José Nunes, the Brazilian importer whom she met during her travels and later married, and who was a central character in the book.

“I am separating from the man whom many of you know as ‘Felipe,’ ” she wrote of her husband, referring to his pseudonym in the book. “Our split is very amicable. Our reasons are very personal.” She also asked for privacy, saying she would be “a bit absent from social media during this sensitive moment.”

“Eat Pray Love,” a sumptuous tale of escape, self-discovery and romance, quickly became a cultural phenomenon, though not one without criticism, with some noting that not every woman who wished to escape would have the privilege to live as sumptuously as Ms. Gilbert did on her sojourn through India, Italy and Bali.

The book, however, drew praise from Oprah Winfrey and was made into a 2010 film starring Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem. The tale also resonated with fans, mostly women, who either identified with being in an unhappy relationship or had managed to artfully escape one.

The phenomenon has endured over the past decade: The travelogue touched so many readers that it eventually spawned a book, “Eat, Pray, Love Made Me Do It,” comprising 47 essays from inspired fans who had written their own tales of escape and discovery. That book was released in April.

[…]In April, Ms. Gilbert said that she missed travel: “I’ve never been to Japan, Iceland, South Africa and other places that it would be a pity to come to this earth and miss.”

Adventures, escape and discovery – that’s what young women want today. Not marriage, and not motherhood. They believe that they can find lasting happiness through travel and adventures. Even if they change their minds later, and want to marry, repeated acts of self-centered behavior do not prepare a woman for life-long self-sacrificial married love. Promiscuity and hedonism do not prepare a woman’s character to be content with the roles of wife and mother.

Here is Gilbert writing in the New York Times about her priorities:

It started with a boy I met at summer camp and ended with the man for whom I left my first husband. In between, I careened from one intimate entanglement to the next — dozens of them — without so much as a day off between romances. You might have called me a serial monogamist, except that I was never exactly monogamous. Relationships overlapped, and those overlaps were always marked by exhausting theatricality: sobbing arguments, shaming confrontations, broken hearts. Still, I kept doing it. I couldn’t not do it.

[…]If the man was already involved in a committed relationship, I knew that I didn’t need to be prettier or better than his existing girlfriend; I just needed to be different.

[…]Soon enough, and sure enough, I might begin to see that man’s gaze toward me change from indifference, to friendship, to open desire. That’s what I was after: the telekinesis-like sensation of steadily dragging somebody’s fullest attention toward me and only me. My guilt about the other woman was no match for the intoxicating knowledge that — somewhere on the other side of town — somebody couldn’t sleep that night because he was thinking about me. If he needed to sneak out of his house after midnight in order to call, better still. That was power, but it was also affirmation. I was someone’s irresistible treasure. I loved that sensation, and I needed it, not sometimes, not even often, but always.

[…]In my mid-20s, I married, but not even matrimony slowed me down. Predictably, I grew restless and lonely. Soon enough I seduced someone new; the marriage collapsed. But it was worse than just that. Before my divorce agreement was even signed, I was already breaking up with the guy I had broken up my marriage for.

[…][I]f you asked me what I was up to, I might have claimed that I was a helpless romantic — and how can you judge that? If really cornered, I might have argued that I was a revolutionary feminist, taking brazen agency over my own sexuality…

She didn’t want to commit and love others self-sacrificially. That’s boring! She wanted to get attention and drama. Men liked her because she was easy to use and easy to throw away. She wasn’t anyone’s “irresistible treasure”, because she didn’t have enough value for any of these men to commit to her for life and take care of her as she aged. The men she chose wanted sex, but they were not going to actually provide for her or protect her when she reached her 70s, 80s and 90s.  The question that we need to ask is whether a woman like this can stay married. Is she capable of doing the work that ordinary wives and mothers do in a married home – the work that wins a man’s loyalty for life? Is she capable of behaving in a way that leads a man to commit to caring for her when she is no longer young and pretty?

Let’s review what happened after Elizabeth Gilbert divorced her first husband for travel and adventures.

Christian men’s rights blogger Dalrock explains:

Having written a book on divorce, Elizabeth decided to write a book on marriage titled Committed.

From the Publishers Weekly review on Amazon:

How did a woman who didn’t want children land the only Latino hottie with a vasectomy in all of Indonesia?

[…][I]t turns out he needed a visa to get into the US, so he asked Elizabeth to marry him.  After a year of bickering and unhappiness together, she finally said yes after he explained it to her.

From the Publishers Weekly book review on Amazon.com:

When are you going to understand? As soon as we secure this bloody visa and get ourselves safely married back in America, we can do whatever the hell we want.

You couldn’t make stuff this romantic up!

That was 6 years ago, Elizabeth is about 47 now and divorced again. I wonder how well her plan of “seducing” men and getting no commitment in return will work over the next 40 years? Tramp stamps and belly-button rings seem fun when you are 17, but are not so fun when you are 71. Hooking up, cohabitating, traveling and having adventures seems to make sense when you are 17, but they don’t result in a man standing by you when you are 71. A woman needs to invest in a marriage-minded man early, and sustain this investment if she expects him to stick around when she loses her youth and beauty. Not every man will respond to this investment, but it is her job to choose one who will – with the help of wise advisers.

UPDATE:

In early September 2016, it emerged that she is now in a relationship with her best female friend.