Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Why studies are unbalanced

A reader comments:
As for the study fuss. I think it's a pretty fair bet that social engineers can and do set up their 'expert' studies to produce whatever results they want. With their exclusive control over the study parameters, data collection and interpretation of the data, they can easily reach any conclusions they barn well please. Maybe some sort of peer review might help but when the political atmosphere is so strongly influenced by PC think, peers who disagree with the conclusion that homosexuals make grand parents are going to be hard to find. For the simple reason that they would be quickly unemployed and labeled as homophobic. It is a homo world, after all. Hum the small world Disney song here. We see the same PC think influencing the global climate hysteria. Therefore, playing with politically influenced social engineering studies, as if they are serious studies, is a waste of time.
That is correct. The academic social science experts are some of the most narrow-minded leftist bigots on Earth. They only permit studies that match their leftist political objectives.

A recent example is how they hounded Robert Spitzer into apologizing for an innocuous study he did about gays in 2001. He was "arguably the most influential psychiatrist of the 20th century", according to Wikipedia. The only thing wrong with his study is that it did not match the bogus arguments being made by the gay lobby in the same-sex marriage court cases. So they harassed the 80yo into writing an apology for doing the study.

No honest science would work this way. If there were some defect in his study, the better response would be to do another study to get the truth. But they refuse to do that. A the journal has refused to retract the 2001 study paper because no one has found anything wrong with it.

Nevertheless, I have readers who are fascinated by these studies on gay adoptive parents and step-parents. A new one was just published. The NY Times reports:
Young adults from broken homes in which a parent had had a same-sex relationship reported modestly more psychological and social problems in their current lives than peers from other families that had experienced divorce and other disruptions, a new study has found, stirring bitter debate among partisans on gay marriage.

The study counted parents as gay or lesbian by asking participants whether their parents had ever had a same-sex relationship; the parents may not have identified themselves as gay or lesbian. ...

But outside experts, by and large, said the research was rigorous, providing some of the best data yet comparing outcomes for adult children with a gay parent with those with heterosexual parents. ...

Participants who grew up in intact, traditional families reported the lowest average level of problems in their current life, like drug use, unemployment or depressive moods, the study found. Participants who grew up in nontraditional arrangements — with a single, heterosexual parent, in a stepfamily or in a family with a late divorce, for instance — reported higher levels of such problems as adults.

Those who said they had a parent who had had a same-sex relationship fared somewhat worse than those in other nontraditional families.
None of this should be surprising to anyone. Traditional family structure is based on what we have learned from thousands lf years of civilization.

The pro-gay NY Times does of course quote some gripers about the study:
Others said the study was limited in its usefulness. “What we really need in this field is for strong skeptics to study gay, stable parents and compare them directly to a similar group of heterosexual, stable parents,” said Judith Stacey, a sociologist at New York University.
So why does Stacey and her fellow "queer studies" activists need such a study? Presumably it would be some bogus evidence for same-sex marriage. By "gay stable parents", she probably means parents, step-parents, and adoptive parents. I don't know what she means by stable or why that would be relevant, as same-sex marriage would not be limited to stable gays.

I would dismiss Judith Stacey as a harmless academic fruitcake, but I am afraid that she is doing real damage. She writes books and articles arguing that kids do not need fathers. Here is her Amazon bio:
Judith Stacey is an author, and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and Sociology at NYU. Her primary focus areas include family studies, gender studies, queer studies, and sexuality. Her latest book, Unhitched, explores social "family" configurations that deviate from the standard Western "marriage" idea, including polygamous families in South Africa, gay men's diverse forms of intimacy and parenthood in, and the Mosuo people in southwestern China. She has published many works. Her paper, co-authored with Timothy Biblarz, "How Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter?" argues that children of lesbian and gay parents develop at least as well as those with straight parents, but are more likely themselves to be open to different kinds of relationships.
I am guessing that she does not go into detail on "gay men's diverse forms of intimacy", or most of her readers would be too grossed out.

Stacey's idea of paradise is the Mosuo women of China. Anthropologists have studied thousands of primitive tribes all over the world, and this obscure tiny tribe is the only one that is not a patriarchy. Apparently women there are free to be as promiscuous as please at night. This supposedly shows that women can separate they family life from their sexual freedoms.

The US Supreme Court will probably soon be hearing cases on same-sex marriage, and the queer professors will be swamping the court with amicus briefs arguing that research proves that traditional marriage is obsolete. The justices ought to be smart enough to realize that maybe there is a reason that the Mosua women are still living in the Stone Age.

Again, I would not care what these LGBT folks and queer professors do, except that they are actively working to undermine fathers rights rights and to censor free speech.

Of all the groups mentioned on this blog -- whites, blacks, liberals, Mexicans, Chinese, Mormons, Jews, gays, Moslems, Republicans, Christians, etc. -- there is one group that consistently bombards me with hate-filled, bigoted, name-calling comments. They cannot tolerate someone else with a different opinion. They post ad hominem attacks with no substance. Can you guess who?

If you want to see some real anti-gay nonsense, watch what the Shiites say about Sunni Moslems.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

More here:

A separate analysis in the same journal edition by Loren Marks, associate professor at Louisiana State University, more directly challenges previous same-sex parenting studies as inadequate, biased and unreliable. He lists seven concerns with the science, including the fact that "well-educated, relatively wealthy lesbian couples have been repeatedly compared to single-parent heterosexual families instead of two-parent marriage-based families." .....
The Regnerus study is unusual, as well, because it questioned the children, now adults, themselves, instead of asking the parents to report on how they thought their kids were doing


"She writes books and articles arguing that kids do not need fathers."

"I would dismiss Judith Stacey as a harmless academic fruitcake"

omg why are you such an 'anti-father'phobe?

Anonymous said...

why the ad hominem attacks on you? Simple: you're reaping what you sow. Hate. That's what you're doing, sowing more hate. Just like the man-haters at UC Santa Cruz Women's Studies. You're no different than they are and you aren't moving the ball forward. Your blog is irrelevant to helping fathers win their rights back. In fact it's become a black eye. Thanks, asshole.