Tag Archives: Child

News

More social scientists stepping forward to defend Regnerus study

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Good news! See the part in bold below, too.

Excerpt:

An influential group of social scientists … have issued a public statement defending Mark Regnerus’s controversial study on same-sex parenting.

Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, published a paper in the July issue of Social Science Research that examined “how different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships?” His findings, based on his New Family Structures Study, indicated that young-adult children of parents who have had same-sex relationships are more likely to experience emotional and social problems.

His Slate article published in June drew more than 450 comments and set off a chorus of criticism.

In response, a group of 18 professors — including Michael Emerson, Christian Smith, Rodney Stark, W. Bradford Wilcox, and Bradley Wright — posted a defense on the website of Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. They argue that rather then Regnerus’ study being “anti-gay,” “breathtakingly sloppy,” and “gets everything wrong” (as many media outlets have alleged), such public criticism is unwarranted for three reasons:

  1. Media outlets have not properly critiqued the “small, nonrepresentative samples” used by previous studies that showed equal or more positive outcomes for children of same-sex parents vs. heterosexual parents. “By contrast, Regnerus relies on a large, random, and representative sample of more than 200 children raised by parents who have had same-sex relationships, comparing them to a random sample of more than 2,000 children raised in heterosexual families, to reach his conclusions,” they wrote.
  2. Those critical of Regnerus surveying children from same-sex relationships with high levels of instability “fail to appreciate … that Regnerus chose his categories on the basis of young adults’ characterizations of their own families growing up, and the young adults whose parents had same-sex romantic relationships also happened to have high levels of instability in their families of origin.”
  3. Another new study (published this month in the Journal of Marriage and Family) — also based on a large, nationally representative, and random survey — comes to conclusions that parallel those of Regnerus’s study.

So that new study something to look forward to! I blogged about the criticisms of the Regnerus study and the other study that came out of the same time, in case anyone wants to double-check the details.

News

Is the news media biased when reporting on gay scandals?

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Dr. Michael Brown explains his view by comparing the reporting of the Ted Haggard scandal with the Larry Brinkin scandal.

Excerpt:

According to published reports, when Larry Brinkin was arrested two weeks ago, the police found… [CENSORED BY WK]. Yet the media has barely reported this terribly disturbing incident.

But, you ask, who was Larry Brinkin? He was “a central figure in the gay rights movement,” a man who was so influential that, “The San Francisco board of supervisors actually gave a ‘Larry Brinkin Week’ in February 2010 upon his retirement.” It was Brinkin who first used the term “domestic partnerships” in a legal dispute, marking a watershed moment in gay activist history, yet news of his alleged crimes against infants and children, not to mention his alleged White Supremacist leanings, has received very little media attention.

Is there a double standard here? Imagine what the media would be doing if Brinkin had been a conservative Christian leader.

When evangelical leader Ted Haggard fell, the media was quick to pounce, suggesting that this exposed the corrupt nature of evangelical Christianity as a whole. And media leaders have done this repeatedly whenever there has been a scandal connected to an evangelical (or Catholic) leader, and the news is blared from the headlines. But where, I ask you, is the outrage or the front page news when a gay leader commits atrocities such as those allegedly committed by Larry Brinkin? And why isn’t the media claiming that Brinkin’s transgressions expose the corrupt nature of gay activism as a whole?

The failure of a Christian leader is considered endemic and representative; the failure of a gay leader is considered an aberrant exception. Why the unequal treatment?

[…]The answer is that Brinkin’s arrest has received relatively little media attention because he was a gay activist leader, not a conservative Christian leader, and there is no hiding the mainstream media’s pro-gay, anti-conservative Christian bias. And because Brinkin’s arrest has not been widely reported, the general public has not been confronted afresh with the horrors of child pornography.

[…]Brinkin, for his part, was no smalltime player, with the San Francisco Examiner describing him as an “iconic San Francisco gay activist who brought the nation’s first domestic partnership lawsuit in 1982.” And he was, after all, a respected, long-term leader within the Human Rights Campaign, the world’s largest gay activist organization. Why hasn’t the HRC been tarred and feathered the way evangelicals (or Catholics) are after one of their leaders falls? Why the inconsistency?

I reported on the Larry Brinkin scandal in a previous post.

Mentoring

How to prevent your children from losing their faith in college

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Here’s an interview with Blake Anderson of Ratio Christi.

Excerpt:

(KW): What are some of the specific challenges to Christianity? 
(BA): When someone with a Ph.D. behind their name suddenly confronts a student with supposed evidence that the New Testament books were forgeries and dismisses the historicity of the Christian narrative, if that student has not been well grounded in the evidence for the historical accuracy of the accounts of Jesus’ life the odds are heavily in favor of that student dismissing their parents’ and pastor’s faith as outdated. In philosophy class when the professor appears to eloquently demonstrate how Immanuel Kant showed two hundred years ago how we can’t really know anything unless it is of the physical world, what chance does a young adult have if all they have for equipping is some Sunday School Bible stories? And when the most articulate current defenders of neo-Darwinian evolution essentially mock anybody that doesn’t agree with them it will take much more than a good feeling in your heart to keep you from being demoralized and eventually giving up on a supernatural Creator.

The frustrating thing in all of this is that there are good answers to these assertions. The problem isn’t that there aren’t answers on the same academic level as those that are challenging Christianity; there are. The problem is that so few Christians are aware of where to go to get answers.

And another:

(KW): What can we do to better prepare Christian students for these types of confrontations?
(BA): This may sound harsh, but first, get our heads out of the sand and realize that our methods for the last thirty years have resulted in five to eight out of every ten solid Christian teens abandoning their faith in some way. It’s not pretty. It’s truly a massacre, and until we face into that hard reality our teens will be the unfortunate fodder. This is not a game and no one will be benefited by pretending it isn’t happening.

Second, encourage your children to express their doubts, hard questions, and objections. Don’t suppress these and run from them. You won’t know all the answers, so be prepared to dig in yourself and spend serious time in learning. Your faith will be shaken, but if you truly trust in Christ you won’t use avoidance you will engage. There is nothing to fear. God isn’t afraid of your children’s questions so you should not be either.

Third, remember that teens are influenced by their parents’ beliefs far more than is thought. You and other adults have massive influence in their lives. They need older mature mentors who can show them how to integrate their faith and their interests in life.

Fourth, teach critical thinking skills and logic to your junior high and high schoolers. In this extremely emotive culture, students need to know how to think rather than just what to think. If young people are taught how to think and process information and critically evaluate ideas that they are presented with, they will be able to stand head and shoulders above their peers (and professors for that matter). Then ground them in why Christianity is true and matches objective reality. It’s not enough to know the basic tenants of Christianity. They must know how to defend those beliefs as objectively true in the face of attack. They need to be exposed to anti-Christian ideas in a controlled environment prior to being sent out on their own. Inoculate your children by allowing them to explain and defend their faith against opposing ideas, instead of hiding them from false philosophies until they go off to college.

Read the rest! There are two things that parents need to do. They need to connect Christian teachings and beliefs with objective evidence from hard data, such as from science and history. And they need to provide their children with experiences to acquaint them with the reality of the moral law – specifically, the importance of having moral boundaries in order to avoid hurting yourself and others.