Tag Archives: Gay Marriage

News

New study finds that children do best in traditional mother-father families

6 Comments
Straight vs. lesbian parenting (click for larger image)
Straight vs. lesbian parenting (click for larger image)

From the Washington Times. (H/T Jonathan)

Excerpt: (links removed)

Two studies released Sunday may act like brakes on popular social-science assertions that gay parents are the same as — or maybe better than — married, mother-father parents.

“The empirical claim that no notable differences exist must go,” Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said in his study in Social Science Research.

Using a new, “gold standard” data set of nearly 3,000 randomly selected American young adults, Mr. Regnerus looked at their lives on 40 measures of social, emotional and relationship outcomes.

He found that, when compared with adults raised in married, mother-father families, adults raised by lesbian mothers had negative outcomes in 24 of 40 categories, while adults raised by gay fathers had negative outcomes in 19 categories.

Findings such as these do not support claims that there are “no differences” between gay parenting and heterosexual, married parents, said Mr. Regnerus, who helped develop the New Family Structures Study at the university.

Instead, “children appear most apt to succeed well as adults when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father, and especially when the parents remain married to the present day,” he wrote.

Mr. Regnerus‘ study of 2,988 persons ages 18 to 39 — including 175 adults raised by lesbian mothers and 73 adults raised by gay fathers — marks the first research from the new dataset, which initially included some 15,000 persons.

The second study, also in Social Science Research, takes a critical look at the basis of an oft-cited American Psychological Association (APA) report on gay parenting.

The APA brief says, “Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents,” said Loren Marks, associate professor at the School of Human Ecology at Louisiana State University.

However, after looking at the 59 studies that undergird this assertion, “the jury is still out,” Mr. Marks said. “The lack of high-quality data leaves the most significant questions [about gay parenting] unaddressed and unanswered.”

Problems with the APA-cited studies were their tiny size; dependence on wealthy, white, well-educated lesbian mothers; and a failure to examine common outcomes for children, such as their education, employment and risks for poverty, criminality, early childbearing, substance abuse and suicide. Instead, the APA studies often looked at children’s gender-role behaviors, emotional functioning and sexual identity.

This story was also reported on Science Daily, with the predictable liberal spin.

Here is my previous post on the data that shows why same-sex unions are not good for raising children.

News

UK doctors who refuse to perform sex changes can be banned from practicing

2 Comments

Dina sent me this alarming article from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

The General Medical Council has issued guidance warning that it would be “discriminatory” for doctors not to prescribe either the pill or morning-after pill because they disagree with people having sex before marriage.

[…]The draft GMC guidelines, entitled Personal Beliefs and Medical Practice, stipulate that doctors “cannot be willing to provide married women with contraception but unwilling to prescribe it for unmarried women”.

“This would be a breach of our guidance as you would be refusing to treat a particular group of patients,” the document adds.

It also warns it would be illegal for doctors to refuse to carry out “gender reassignment”, because it would also amount to discrimination.

“Serious or persistent failure to follow this guidance will put your registration at risk,” the guidelines warn.

[…]Bishop Tom Williams of the Archdiocese of Liverpool claimed the advice discriminated against “certain groups of doctors” and risked creating an “atmosphere of fear” in which doctors would be “prohibited from ever expressing their own religion”.

Dr Peter Saunders, chief executive of the Christian Medical Fellowship and a former surgeon, said the rules would “marginalise Christian health professionals in Britain”.

He told the Daily Mail: “The problem is that 21st century British medicine now involves practices which many doctors regard as unethical.”

In other secular left regimes like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, conscience rights for medical professionals were similarly frowned upon. For a socialist, whatever the state wants is right, and who cares about the individual’s freedom?

Many Christians today in the United States, and especially in socialist countries, think that it is a good idea for the government to provide medical care to everyone, regardless of their lifestyle choices. It doesn’t matter if some people are freely choosing lifestyles that expose them to higher medical costs, like promiscuity or homosexuality. These socialist Christians think that individuals and their employers should be taxed in order to pay for abortions, sex changes, HIV treatments, and so on. The secular left things that birth control pills, which can cause abortions, are “health care”, and socialist Christians agree with them.

A dollar can only be spent one way. It can be spent on an apologetics book, or it can be spent on a sex change. It can be spent on private Christian school tuition or it can be spent on a partial birth abortion. What would God prefer? Would he rather that people who are sinning face higher costs for their sins, so that they think twice about committing them? Or would he rather that people who are sinning have the costs paid by someone else who isn’t, so that the sin becomes cheaper? Well, when I talk to socialist Christians, especially in Canada, they think that God is happier with a bigger secular government, so that sinful people have lower costs and government approval. That doesn’t make sense to me, though.

News

N.A.A.C.P. follows Barack Obama and endorses gay marriage

Leave a comment

From the liberal New York Times. (H/T Bad Blue)

Excerpt:

The board of the N.A.A.C.P. voted to endorse same-sex marriage on Saturday, putting the weight of the country’s most prominent civil rights group behind a cause that has long divided some quarters of the black community.

The largely symbolic move, made at the group’s quarterly board meeting in Miami, puts the N.A.A.C.P. in line with President Obama, who endorsed gay marriage a little over a week ago. Given the timing, it is likely to be viewed as both a statement of principle as well as support for the president’s position in the middle of a closely contested presidential campaign.

All but two of the organization’s 64 board members, who include many religious leaders, backed a resolution supporting same-sex marriage, according to people told of the decision.

Borrowing a term used by gay right’s advocates, the resolution stated: “We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

[…]The group’s endorsement could potentially bolster support for President Obama with a key constituency: black Democratic voters who remain skeptical of same-sex marriage.

Black and white Americans are divided on same-sex marriage in similar numbers, according to the results of four aggregated polls conducted by The New York Times and CBS News over the past year.

Yet there is greater opposition among black Democrats than white Democrats. Sixty-one percent of white Democrats supported legalizing marriage for gay couples, compared with 36 percent of black Democrats, while 35 percent of black Democrats opposed any legal recognition, compared with 18 percent of white Democrats.

When I interviewed some of my black co-workers before the 2008 election, they all thought that Obama was more pro-life than McCain, more pro-marriage than McCain, tougher on crime than McCain, more of a hawk on national security than McCain and more fiscally conservative than McCain. This is in spite of the fact that Obama’s record up until that time was staunchly in favor of abortion, gay marriage, leniency for criminals, unilateral disarmament and weakening counter-terrorism, higher taxes, more anti-business regulations and more spending. My black co-workers were able to tell me the rosters of our local sports teams and recite entire conversations from popular movies, but their beliefs about the Presidential candidates were entirely counter-factual.

About 95% of black voters support Democrats. I think it will be interesting to see how whether Obama’s policies and voting record play a role in their voting this time.

By the way, if anyone is tempted to accuse me of racism for telling the truth, I’m darker-skinned than Obama.