Friday, November 28, 2008

ANTI-GAY LIE EXPOSED

Rare it is that I get a chance to show in unequivocal terms how dishonest anti-gay people are in their use of academic resources. Today I have that chance.

I first discovered the unequivocal lie I'm about to expose when checking footnote 82 of the pamphlet "21 reasons why gender matters". It is alleged that in an academic article entitled "Lesbian mothers and their children: A comparison with solo parent heterosexual mothers and their children", published on pages 167-184 of Volume 15, issue 2, of the academic journal 'Archives of Sexual Behavior', the researchers Green et al found
developmentally important statistically significant differences between children reared by homosexual parents compared to heterosexual parents. For example, children raised by homosexuals were found to have greater parental encouragement for cross-gender behaviour (and) greater amounts of cross-dressing and cross-gender play/role behaviour”.

The anti-gay pamphlet specifically quotes this text as allegedly appearing in the "Lesbian mothers" article. Well, I found the article in question (thank you, university access to academic databases). The text they say is in there is not there.

Really, the fact that the article's title plainly specified that it was comparing single-parent families, and not comparing "homosexual parents" (plural) with "heterosexual parents" (plural), should have been a slight clue that it couldn't possibly include the quote that these anti-gay fraudsters say it includes. But they went ahead and used it anyway. Ponder what that says about their ability to understand the whole concept of "evidence".

But the best part for me is what the article they're lying about actually does say. The summary at least is available to the general public here. Emphasis is mine. The study's real conclusions were that:
No significant differences were found between the two types of households for boys and few significant differences for girls,. Concerns that being raised by a homosexual mother might produce sexual identity conflict and peer group stigmatization were not supported by the research findings. Data also revealed more similarities than differences in parenting experiences, marital history, and present living situations of the two groups of mothers. The postulated compromised parental fitness of lesbian mothers, commonly asserted in child custody cases, is not supported by these data.


Gee, it seems to me that the study that the anti-gay people are using to "prove" that a difference was found between gay and straight parents is actually saying that they can't find any difference at all - at least as far as comparing single lesbian mothers to single heterosexual mothers goes.

The only question left for me is what the real source of this quote may be. I've searched for it online, unsuccessfully. It's definitely not in any article published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior that I can find (and my access to that journal is total). And all I get on the web is people repeating the lie that it's this 1986 study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior that is the source. I wonder how long it would take to visit each one in turn and correct them?

I'll keep looking for the true source I guess. If there is one.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Please see the link >

http://about-orpahns.blogspot.com

Many thanks.

Z said...

I'm not sure what to make of the link. It seems like an argument in favour of banning adoption across the board, to me, which doesn't seem related to my particular interest in saying same-sex couples treated in the same-way as opposite-sex ones.

I will say, though, that the comparison that should be considered here isn't between children given up for adoption and children who weren't, but between what would have happened to adopted children if they had not been put up for adoption - without any other changes to their situation which would have alleviated the need to put them up for adoption in the first place. Somehow I doubt that they'd be in the same statistical bracket as those children for whom adoption never even needed to be considered.

As a concrete example of what I'm talking about, consider this Florida gay adoption case. Would those particular children really have been better off in the care of their parents because they would have both "a mother and a father"? So much so that their adoption should be forbidden by law?