Santorum, who is not unfamiliar with having to field questions from unhinged audience members, responded to the question about child molestation by talking about same-sex marriage. "That's one of the reasons why I talk about the importance of focusing on the nuclear family," he said, adding that the next president must take a stand for the rights of children to be raised by a mother and a father.Just as with the Pope, Santorum is uttering bullshit.
If the Supreme Court strikes down state bans on gay marriage, he continued, "that doesn't mean we won't fight and try to push back both as the Congress should and as the president should as a co-equal branch of the government."
"Depending on what they rule," Santorum said, "we would certainly make sure that we are protecting children and that we are creating an optimal atmosphere for every child, as I said, that have their birthright, which is to be raised by their mother and father."
In response to a question concerning the prevalence of abuse - gay/lesbian couples or marriages versus straight - I stated the following:
Although I am not aware of any incidents of abuse, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I believe the statistics are about equal in regards to prevalence.
The Reich has a really bad habit of citing the 2012 Mark Regnearus study in which he claimed to “prove” same-sex parenting is inherently harmful to children. This study has been seriously panned as flawed methodologically and ethically. (For more critique of said study see here.)
As an example, a review carried out by the American Medical Association:The Regnerus study was funded in part ($695,000) by the conservative think tank Witherspoon Institute, who actively oppose LGBT issues among many other social issues of import. As numerous writers critiquing said study have pointed out, Burroway highlights very well, "All sorts of studies are funded by all sorts of institutions which support a variety of causes. Those sources can come from conservative, anti-gay organizations, or (as is the case with many studies which are favorable to LGBT issues) they can come from pro-gay sources such as the Williams Institute or other organizations. The source of funding can indicate a potential conflict of interest, but the true value of a study rests on the methodology of the study itself."
,,, The data does not show whether the perceived romantic relationship ever in fact occurred; nor whether the parent self-identified as gay or lesbian; nor whether the same sex relationship was continuous, episodic, or one-time only; nor whether the individual in these categories was actually raised by a homosexual parent (children of gay fathers are often raised by their heterosexual mothers following divorce), much less a parent in a long-term relationship with a same-sex partner. Indeed, most of the participants in these groups spent very little, if any, time being raised by a “same-sex couple." (p 33)This from a review of, or concerning, the audit that was done by the publishing journal Social Science Research:
Among the problems Sherkat identified is the paper’s definition of “lesbian mothers” and “gay fathers”—an aspect that has been the focus of much of the public criticism. A woman could be identified as a “lesbian mother” in the study if she had had a relationship with another woman at any point after having a child, regardless of the brevity of that relationship and whether or not the two women raised the child as a couple.
Sherkat said that fact alone in the paper should have “disqualified it immediately” from being considered for publication.
In his audit, he writes that the peer-review system failed because of “both ideology and inattention” on the part of the reviewers (three of the six reviewers, according to Sherkat, are on record as opposing same-sex marriage). What’s more, he writes that the reviewers were “not without some connection to Regnerus,” and suggests that those ties influenced their reviews.
This point is also echoed by Bartlett in his review:
“There should be reflection about a conservative scholar garnering a very large grant from exceptionally conservative foundations,” he writes in the audit, “to make incendiary arguments about the worthiness of LGBT parents—and putting this out in time to politicize it before the 2012 United States presidential election.”I find it a bit ironic, that Burroway in his analysis of the Regnerus study concludes with mention of the Witherspoon Institute and one Robert P. George. An individual that I have written about in regards to a Frank Schaeffer's article that features numerous power brokers behind the Reich and its creation. (I have since highlighted the section where I speak of George.)
Sherkat considers Regnerus to be “a bright young scholar,” and, years ago, he wrote a letter of recommendation for him. Sherkat believes that Regnerus, whom he has known for two decades, made a decision to push a conservative political agenda in his academic work a number of years ago, and that this paper is evidence of it.
Members of the Institute include Robert P. George, who drafted the Manhattan Declaration and whose recent paper in The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy on same-sex marriage was critiqued at length by BTB’s Rob Tisinai. The Withersoon Institute reportedly has close associations with such organizations as the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council, and the secretive Catholic order Opus Dei. George also sits on the board of directors for the Bradley Foundation, which also provided funds for this study.I have said on numerous occasions, nothing the Reich does is without an end game in site. And as I noted yesterday in regards to ,,,Christian Right leaders of the culture war intend to fight LGBTQ Rights and marriage equality in the states, in the towns and cities, and in many kinds of institutions, no matter what the federal government and the courts may say."
Just how dishonest is the Reich in obtaining their end game:
The strategy is for sociological experts to sow just enough doubt about the wisdom of change such that preserving the status quo seems the only reasonable path. As the New York Times recently reported, in 2010 the conservative Heritage Foundation gathered social conservatives consisting of Catholic intellectuals, researchers, activists and funders at a Washington meeting to plot their approach. The idea was for conservative scholars to generate research claiming that gay marriage harms children by placing them in unstable gay homes and by upending marital norms for straights. A solid consensus of actual scholarship—not the fixed kind being ginned up at Heritage—has consistently found that gay parenting does not disadvantage kids, and no research has shown gay marriage having any impact on straight marriage rates. But trafficking in truth was not the plan. The plan was to tap into a sordid history of linking gay people with threatening kids, and to produce skewed research that could be used as talking points to demagogue the public.But it is not just Regnerus spouting bad information in support of the Reich, another study oft cited (especially in regards to the recent SCOTUS hearing concerning Marriage equality), was done by Donald Paul Sullins (2015). His study is just as bad as the Regnarus study as one of the first major flaws is the fact that Sullins has no information about whether the same-sex couples were actually married. A point noted by Zack Ford over at Think Progress:
But the Heritage plan was not to get invited to the cocktail parties of tenured radicals. It was to get Regnerus and other conservative thinkers on the witness stand to combat the airing of real research with enough fake research to create the illusion of a genuine debate. They hoped to avoid an embarrassing repeat of the 2010 Prop 8 trial in defense of California’s gay marriage ban, wherein the state’s witnesses withered under cross-examination. At one point, an expert witness was nearly disqualified after acknowledging he had never done any research on same-sex marriage and had only published two scholarly articles ever, one on Victorian cabinetmakers.
,,,
Judge Friedman didn’t fall for any of it. “The Court finds Regnerus’s testimony entirely unbelievable and not worthy of serious consideration,” he wrote in what must be one of the most stinging and decisive repudiations of an expert witness in memory. He cited evidence that the conservative research was “hastily concocted at the behest of a third-party funder” which clearly expressed its wish for skewed results. Dismissing the defense’s other witnesses just as strongly, the judge wrote that “The Court was unable to accord the testimony of Marks, Price, and Allen any significant weight.” He concluded that “The most that can be said of these witnesses’ testimony is that the ‘no differences’ consensus has not been proven with scientific certainty, not that there is any credible evidence showing that children raised by same-sex couples fare worse than those raised by heterosexual couples.”
Sullins conducted an analysis of data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) that had been collected from 1997-2013. He concluded that information about the 512 same-sex parents identified in the study demonstrates that their children have more emotional problems compared to couples raised by their biological different-sex couples. That these children fare worse, he concludes, “justifies social and policy concerns about differences between family structures, including between opposite-sex and same-sex families.” In other words, same-sex couples should not be allowed to marry because they make inferior parents.Both Sullins and Regnarus have provided reviews and defended each others work:
One of the first major flaws, however, is the fact that Sullins has no information about whether the same-sex couples were actually married. As he notes, “Almost all opposite-sex parents who are raising joint biological offspring are in intact marriages, but very few, if any, same-sex parents were married during the period under observation.” The same-sex couples were instead defined as “those persons whose reported spouse or cohabiting partner was of the same sex as themselves.” No conclusions can actually be drawn about the impacts of legalizing same-sex marriage because the study, by its own admission, collected no data about same-sex marriage or its effect on children.
Regnerus himself provides an overview of the research. In his attempt to defend it, however, he in turn reveals that it also has the very same flaws as his own study. In particular, the NHIS similarly contains no information about family formation. Sullins notes that many of the children had a biological connection to one of the same-sex parents, but it’s unknown if these are from prior relationships, which would suggest their negative outcomes are related to a broken home instead of having two parents of the same sex. Regnerus used the same conflation; only two of the children in his study were actually raised from birth by same-sex couples and they did not exhibit the same negative outcomes as those children who had parents that separated before one entered a same-sex relationship. Incidentally, Sullins has likewise defended Regenerus’ conclusions about the supposed inferiority “gay and lesbian families,” ignoring the significance of this flawed conflation.
Finally, just as damning as Regnerus' association with the Witherspoon Institute, so to is Sullins' alliance with the anti-gay Family Research Council‘s Marriage and Religion Research Institute
Just as the Pope should have known better about making his claim "[c]hildren mature seeing their father and mother like this; their identity
matures being confronted with the love their father and mother have,
confronted with this difference, he does is just asinine and diminishes any good he may be doing." So too with Rick Santorum,"the
next president must take a stand for the rights of children to be raised
by a mother and a father."
President Santorum Will Protect Children From Gay Marriage | Right Wing Watch
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