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.
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."
Just as with the
Pope, Santorum is uttering bullshit.
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 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.
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."
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.”
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.
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.)
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
Frederick Clarkson's piece about the "legal manuals" coming from the Reich, ",,,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 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.”
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:
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.
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.
Both Sullins and Regnarus have provided reviews and defended each others work:
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.
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
