On gay parents, false "studies", and Congress

Recently, Republicans in Congress have been taking on the National Science Foundation, specifically grants by NSF to social scientists.  Because many of the findings of such studies are unpopular on the right, they are trying to insinuate themselves into peer review to block NSF funding of things they (Congress) considers "unimportant". In March, Congress voted to eliminate National Science Foundation funds for political science research, except for grants certified by the NSF director as “promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.”  Here's an excellent article on the problem.

This seems something arcane and uninteresting until you realize that on the flip side of this, conservative organizations basically "buy" research that they like.  And they try to prevent inconvenient facts from getting in the way. 

Such as the discredited "Renerus study" in which a social scientist in TX purported to do a study showing that children of gay parents don't do well. This got published, and then it got audited, and his professional organization and the journal itself agree, it doesn't say that at all.  Regnerus defines children of gay parents as children who grew up in a broken home where one parent MIGHT have had a same sex relationship at one point.

An interview with the auditor of the article was just published by SPLC.


First, he discusses some of the flaws of the study:

Regnerus’ data are from a large number of people recruited through convenience by a marketing firm — they are not a random, representative sample of the American population. Science requires random samples of the population, and that is not how this marketing firm collected their data....

Regnerus admits that just two of his respondents were actually raised by a same-sex couple, though I doubt that he can even know that, given his limited data. Since only two respondents were actually raised in gay or lesbian households, this study has absolutely nothing to say about gay parenting outcomes. Indeed, because it is a non-random sample, this study has nothing to say about anything....

He also explains that it was funded by a far-right, anti-gay group.  As federal funding dries up, these sources of funding are able to buy the scholarship they want.

One thing that’s disturbing to me about the Regnerus study is that Regnerus received a large amount of money from these foundations and this creates a very different scholarly and intellectual atmosphere. It creates a playing field that’s not level. Someone like Regnerus is now able to go out and buy his own data, if we’re to accept data of this quality.

Even if we were to say it’s high-quality data, he is able to get a million dollars’ worth of influence — he was able to generate that kind of funding from these conservative foundations in a way that other intellectuals are not able to do. All of the traditional sources of social scientific funding have dried up over the last 20 years and there’s nowhere to go to get money, but these guys have it. There are talks in Congress about cutting the entire social science budget at the National Science Foundation. That is chilling, because then we’ll be completely reliant on people like Mark Regnerus and Brad Wilcox [of the University of Virginia] and Christian Smith [of Notre Dame University] and people like that for our information about potentially crucial or controversial issues....

The bottom line:

When we talk about Regnerus, I completely dismiss the study. It’s over. He has been disgraced. All of the prominent people in the field know what he did and why he did it. And most of them know that he knew better. Some of them think that he’s also stupid and an ideologue. I know better. I know that he’s a smart guy and that he did this on purpose, and that it was bad, and that it was substandard.

The harm that Regnerus did (his study was cited many times in the Supreme Court arguments) can only be offset by real, impartial scholarship. And that is why you should care deeply about Congressional efforts to reduce social science funding at the National Science Foundation. Because it's not just some random academic who is affected.  This is personal.

Debunking anti-gay myths

I have discussed in several places the antipathy of the right towards science, and how they get away with dismissing scientific consensus if it doesn't conform to their views.

THe site LIveScience dismisses 5 prominent myths about LGBT people, pointing at data to show that these are false. THese myths are the misperception that homosexuality doesn't exist in animals, that gay people aren't capable of long-term relationships, claims that gays are pedophiles and vv, or bad parents, or that sexuality is purely a choice. Each of these is demonstrably false. But the right-wingers persist in believing them.

What's depressing is the comments, some of which dismiss the findings as "pro-gay propaganda" and one which strikingly calls for "incurable" gays to be locked up in camps.

They really hate us, don't they?

American Psychological Association comes out for equality

From USA today:

he world's largest organization of psychologists took its strongest stand to date supporting full marriage equity, a move that observers say will have a far-reaching impact on the national debate.

The policymaking body of the American Psychological Association (APA) unanimously approved the resolution 157-0 on the eve of the group's annual convention...

The group, with more than 154,000 members, has long supported full equal rights for gays, based on social science research on sexual orientation. Now the nation's psychologists — citing an increasing body of research about same-sex marriage, as well as increased discussion at the state and federal levels — took the support to a new level.

"Now as the country has really begun to have experience with gay marriage, our position is much clearer and more straightforward — that marriage equity is the policy that the country should be moving toward," says Clinton Anderson, director of APA's Office on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns....

"I don't think it's very significant for the population at large, but I do think this move is significant for the ongoing public policy and legal battles in Washington and around the states," he says.
Clinical psychologist Mark Hatzenbuehler, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at Columbia University in New York City, whose new research is cited in the resolution, says the courts tend to look at these kinds of policy statements because "they're really looking to see what social science research says about the influence on gay marriage and marriage bans on a whole host of outcomes.

Does this sound familiar?

“Orientation has a genetic basis, but like other complex traits — height, weight — it is complex,” he said. “It’s not a single gene that leads to it. There’s a strong environmental component, too. It’s a very tricky problem.”

As with other traits that we are tempted to classify as either/or, orientation is probably better viewed as a spectrum encompassing the very strongly gay or straight, and a range of those who prefer one or the other, but have different degrees of comfort....

Orientation has sometimes been treated as pathological. Cesare Lombroso, the infamous 19th-century physician who identified various facial (and racial) features with criminal traits, also saw homosexual orientation as evidence of pathology, primitivism, savagery and criminality. And I was brought up with the story that a generation ago, in the bad old days (and in the old country), foolish unenlightened people tried to force homosexual children to convert and become straight. ...

The percentage of homosexuals in the population seems to be relatively constant, at 10 percent. And this goes back to studies of cave paintings… So though there has been prejudice against gay people, and though there may be some developmental risks, said Dr. Geschwind, “there clearly must be advantages as well. The reason why it maintains that way, nobody knows what it is.”

Dr. Francks said he was “quite happy with the sentiment of reassuring people that homosexuality is not some weird disability.” But, he added, “There’s no reason to go beyond that and say that gay people are even more talented.”

Now, just replace the word "homosexual" with "left-handed" and "orientation" with "handedness". The original article, on handedness, is here.We used to view left-handedness as a pathology and unnatural defect. Now, we recognize it is a normal human variant. Being gay, I argue, is no different.

You may also be interested in this article on the biological origins of homosexuality…including links to handedness.

Selective Science

One of the features of the conservative movement is a suspicion of the educated. As David Frum recently pointed out, it's an odd characteristic of American populist movements that it's the educated elites that they attack, rather than the economic elites that actually oppress them. THis leads to suspicion, where as Frum says

many refuse to believe that the so-called experts care for the interests of anyone beyond their narrow coterie and class.

. Little wonder that educated people continue to move away from the Republican culture of ignorance.

In the case of LGBT rights, those opposed to equality refuse to believe myriad findings that homosexuality is a normal human variant and not a pathology, that kids of gay parents do just as well as kids of straights, and they peddle such endless lies and propaganda that the Southern Poverty Law Center labels many of them "hate groups."

The media plays into this, in an aberrant expression of "balance" that gives the most perverse minority view equal standing with actual mainstream thought.

In fact recently Dan Savage called out CNN for giving Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council "equal time" to peddle his lies.

The Southern Poverty Law Center labels these groups as hate groups and yet the leaders of these groups, people like Tony Perkins, are welcomed onto networks like CNN to espouse hate directed at gays and lesbians. And similarly hateful people who are targeting Jews or people of color or anyone else would not be welcome to spew their bile on CNN.

They invent official sounding organizations, like the so-called College of Pediatrics, which is really about a hundred conservative malcontents founded by George "lift my luggage" Rekers, who dislike the fact that the mainstream medical community accepts gay people. The American Academy of Pediatrics, which is the real organization of 60,000 pediatric professionals, is supportive of LGBT people and of same sex marriage.

Last week, Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball, had to clarify that this group cited by Perkins as a justification for his bile is a fringe offshoot.

Notorious anti-gay activist Paul Cameron, who has been thrown out of the mainstream groups and willfully misrepresents the facts, actually says

“We can no longer rely — as almost all pro-family organizations do today — on gleaning scientific ‘bits’ from those in liberal academia… . [W]e must subvert the academy by doing original, honest research ourselves and use this to advance the historic Christian faith"

Remarkably Cameron continues to get away with this. He out and out lies, but still manages to provide a veneer of respectability to the other side, despite the fact he has been soundly repudiated by a vast majority of physicians. And he keeps at it: this from a recent interview

God’s 11th Commandment is “Thou shalt not corrupt boys,” Cameron told me. He celebrated the Ugandan anti-gay bill, in which the penalty for gay activity could be death. “Whatever they decide, I’m OK with,” he said.

Cameron believes homosexuality should be criminalized in America. He proposes heavily taxing single American adults and homosexuals because of their failure to procreate. He would also like to see gays undergo a “public shaming,” though he offered no specifics.

Amazingly, he still gets an outlet for this crap.

They do it with official sounding words, but examination of the data shows that they focus on small reports and on mis-stating the findings of actual papers to the dismay of the authors.

The same sort of selective facts are characteristic of the conservative attacks on climate change, evolution, as well as other issues. Do you remember the cigarette company CEOs standing in front of Congress, each stating "I do not believe smoking causes cancer"? An excellent book documenting this is The Republican War on Science.

In a world where knowledge drives economic growth and development, this legitimization of fringe viewpoints as somehow "equal" to the mainstream is a dangerous step into willful ignorance.

So how do we counter this gullibility of the media and calculating abuse by the opponents of actual facts? One way is to be ever vigilant. The bad guys are good at sounding "official," which is why Chris Matthews fell for the College of Pediatrics But he was called to task and corrected it. Now it would have been more effective if he had been aware enough to challenge it when it started--but expecting our media to be informed and responsible appears a pipe dream. (Except for Anderson Cooper, who is pretty on the ball).

Another way is to work to get the facts out there. Of course, people must be susceptible to the facts, which leaves out the tea party persuasion, but there are still reachable people in the middle.

It's why I keep writing, and sourcing this stuff, in hopes that I can give my readers the resources needed for vigilance.

Genetics Primer, Aside #2: Bilatleral gynandromorph

This is Sam, a chicken who is literally half male and half female. Early in Sam's development, Something Happened, (possibly a chromosomal nondisjunction, or a double fertilization). Sam is a mosaic, containing two types of cells; those with both ZZ chromosomes (male, in birds) or ZW (female) chromsoomes Sam's "male" half has more ZZ, and the "female" half has more ZW cells. And, the cells of each half developed autonomously : that is, it didn't matter what hormones were coursing through the body, all that mattered was the chromosomally determined sex of the individual cells.

In mammals, sex is presumed to be programmed during development, regardless of the chromosomal complement, in responses to signals from the developing gonad. This is called cell-nonautonomous, because the individual cells depend on external signals to "decide" which way to develop. So cells with male chromosomes can develop as females, if they get those signals. In birds, it appears to be somewhat different.

However, there is clearly some genetic determination in birds particularly for the gonad; alternatively, perhaps there is also some cell autonomous development of some traits in mammals.

Debunking the myth that kids do better with straight parents

How often have you heard the words, "Studies show," and then a statement to be taken as fact? Increasingly, we need to apply a caveat emptor to such statements because around the GLBT issue, the opposition has a regrettable tendency to mis-state those studies.

I told you recently about a new study that shows kids of lesbian parents are doing in some measures better than kids with straight parents. Well, it turns out that study isn't alone.

A new paper, How Does the Gender of Parents Matter? from THe Journal of Marriage and Family (72:3-22 (2010)): takes on the frequently heard claim that "children do better with a mother and a father" , performs a meta-analysis of prior studies, and discredits the statement.

One of the authors comments (emphasis mine)

Significant policy decisions have been swayed by the misconception across party lines that children need both a mother and a father. Yet, there is almost no social science research to support this claim. One problem is that proponents of this view routinely ignore research on same-gender parents. The bottom line is that the science shows that children raised by two same-gender parents do as well on average as children raised by two different-gender parents. This is obviously inconsistent with the widespread claim that children must be raised by a mother and a father to do well.

When you go to the paper itself, it says (emphases mine)

Almost all of the studies [...] cited, however, compared single-mother with married-parent families. .....To support its claim that "a child who is not living with his or her own two married parents is at greater risk of child abuse" [they] cited studies of children who live alone with single mothers, in stepfamilies, or with their mother's boyfriends.It ignored research on lesbian and gay parenthood....

The entrenched conviction that children need both a mother and a father inflames culture wars over single motherhood, divorce, gay marriage, and gay parenting. ....Current claims that children need both a mother and father are spurious because they attribute to the gender of parents benefits that correlate primarily with the number and marital status of a child's parents since infancy. At this point no research supports the widely held conviction that the gender of parents matters for child well-being.

What does this mean? It means that if you actually analyze the research, the claim that "a child does best with a mother and a father" is not true. What IS true is that a child does best with two committed parents in a stable relationship.

The sort of people who write comments in response to news articles or tweets have argued that the recent Pediatrics study cannot be true, because there may have been gay advocates supporting it. This is another version of only straight white Christian men are objective fiction, and completely ignores the fact that the study was published in a rigorously peer reviewed journal, which than you can say for most of their stuff. Indeed, those opposed to equality frequently point to studies from the anti-gay group NARTH. This is a long-discredited group that supports "gay cures" and their website (to which I won't link, as I will not send traffic to hate sites) is full of lies and misinformation.

Using NARTH as a source for scientific data on homosexuality is like using the Flat Earth Society for studies of Earth's geology.

But then, when has the right wing cared about science and facts?

SO: if you want to back up your contention that gay and lesbian parents do just as well and sometimes better than straight parents, send your opponents to the following studies for starters. Think of the Church and Galileo- you have truth,and the facts, on your side, and E pur si muove!


Biblarz, T.J., Stacey, J. (2010) How Does the Gender of Parents Matter? Journal of Marriage and Family, 72, 3-22

Gartrell, N. and Bos, H., Pediatrics (2010) US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Psychological Adjustment of 17-Year-Old Adolescents Pediatrics (online prior to publication) DOI10.1542.peds.2009-3153

Tasker, F. (2005). Lesbian mothers, gay fathers, and their children: A review. Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 26, 224–240.

Telingator, C. J., Patterson C. (2008). Children and adolescents of lesbian and gay parents. Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 47, 1364–1368.More important than the gender of parents’ partners for teenagers’ adjustment, it seems, is the quality of relationships within the families they have.

More resources here, at the COLAGE website.

But here's the big one: From the American Psychological Association, Lesbian and Gay Parenting document, intended to provide resources "for the use of clinicians, researchers, students, lawyers, and parents involved in legal and policy issues related to lesbian and gay parenting." Here's what they conclude:

In summary, there is no evidence to suggest that lesbian women or gay men are unfit to be parents or that psychosocial development among children of lesbian women or gay men is compromised relative to that among offspring of heterosexual parents. 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. Indeed, the evidence to date suggests that home environments provided by lesbian and gay parents are as likely as those provided by heterosexual parents to support and enable children's psychosocial growth.

Update reviewing data that the kids are doing fine, from Alternet.

Update New study from U. Virginia shows that the gender/orientation of adoptive parents does not affect how well the kids are doing.

Update Media matters has another helpful summary here.

Scientists challenge anti-gay group for misrepresentation

The prestigious American Academy of Pediatrics considers that marriage equality is good for children. Its policies are supportive of GLBT youth.

A small group of anti-gay activists calling themselves the American COLLEGE of Pediatrics have deliberately misrepresented scientific research on GLBT youth. That is their sole purpose: attacking GLBT youth. They are telling lies about what the research actually says. Several scientists misquoted are challenging them, including Dr Francis Collins, direcor of the National Institutes of Health.

"It is disturbing for me to see special interest groups distort my scientific observations to make a point against homosexuality. The American College of Pediatricians pulled language out of context from a book I wrote in 2006 to support an ideology that can cause unnecessary anguish and encourage prejudice. The information they present is misleading and incorrect, and it is particularly troubling that they are distributing it in a way that will confuse school children and their parents."

Don't be misled. These people of the ACP are lying homophobes, counting on the confusion of their name to lend them undeserved credence.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Counseling Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, and the National Association of Social Workers, together representing more than 477,000 health and mental health professionals, have all taken the position that homosexuality is not a mental disorder and thus there is no need for a "cure." (source)

Genetics Primer, Aside #1: read the NY Times on Sunday

There's an outstanding piece in the New York Times Magazine coming this weekend on homosexuality in the animal world. It's a thoughtful discussion on how much we try to anthropomorphize animals, inapprorpriately. What it is to be homosexual or same-sex paired as an animal may vary by species and population and not be at all comparable to what it means to be a GLBT human. But the fact is that many animals do show same sex pairing.

Excellent article!

In the course of her doctoral work, Young and a colleague discovered, almost incidentally, that a third of the pairs at Kaena Point actually consisted of two female birds, not one male and one female. Laysan albatrosses are one of countless species in which the two sexes look basically identical. It turned out that many of the female-female pairs, at Kaena Point and at a colony that Young’s colleague studied on Kauai, had been together for 4, 8 or even 19 years — as far back as the biologists’ data went, in some cases. The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks and just generally passing under everybody’s nose for what you might call “straight” couples.....

In recent years though, more biologists have been looking objectively at same-sex sexuality in animals — approaching it as real science. For Young, the existence of so many female-female albatross pairs disproved assumptions that she didn’t even realize she’d been making and, in the process, raised a chain of progressively more complicated questions. One of the prickliest, it seemed, was how a scientist is even supposed to talk about any of this, given how eager the rest of us have been to twist the sex lives of animals into allegories of our own.

Update: here's an updated link if the first one doesn't work

Born Gay: why it matters.

From the LA Times, a kick-ass editorial by two geneticists:

There was an elephant in the San Francisco courtroom where lawyers contested the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the California law that prohibits the marriage of same-sex couples. One key issue should influence every aspect of the Perry vs. Schwarzenegger proceedings yet remained unspoken: What makes people gay? Is it a choice or is it innate?

....the empirical evidence for the role of genetics in human sexual orientation has been quietly but steadily mounting over the last 15 years. ....The results unambiguously demonstrate that heritability plays a major role in sexual orientation and far outweighs shared environmental factors such as education or parenting.

...critics of sexual orientation inheritance are fond of pointing out that there is no single identified "gay gene." However, they fail to mention that the same is true for height, skin color, handedness, frequency of heart disease and many other traits that have a large inherited component but no dominant gene. In other words, sexual orientation is complex, i.e., many genes contribute...

So why does this matter?

Biology cannot be avoided in determining whether fundamental rights are protected under the equal protection clause of our Constitution. This is because "immutability" is one of the factors that determine the level of scrutiny applied to possible violations and that determine whether gays are awarded "suspect class" status, which would give them more constitutional protection. Heritability is not necessary for immutability or suspect class status (religion is the usual counter-example), but it should be sufficient; we do not choose our genes, nor can we change them.,,,polling data [shows] that people who believe that gays are "born that way" are generally supportive of full equality, whereas those who believe it is "a choice" are opposed.

In the Advocate, a commentator pushes this further, and challenges the political decision not to bring this up strongly in the advocacy for marriage rights.

Eighty percent of voters who believe people are born homosexual vote yes on gay rights. Our strategists intentionally ignore this. Economists call this opportunity cost: what we could and should be doing strategically instead of what we are. It is shocking to realize it, but the “empathy” and “letting people hear our stories” ads that Garden State Equality and the Empire State Pride Agenda use our money to run are, in their political opportunity cost, just as toxic to us as the ads run by Schubert Flint and the National Organization for Marriage. We're being killed by friendly fire because our own people dislike the fact that Bob Schieffer’s question, "Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?" moves voters. So they don’t ask it. 


Okay, but why ignore it? The commentator provocatively suggests,

Homosexuality is inborn. The problem is that this contradicts liberal ideology. The leaders of the gay rights movement are (logically) almost all liberals, and so viscerally opposed to the idea that behavioral traits are innate. Yet those 25 percentage points we get from making voters understand that homosexuality is innate are exactly what will make us win. Result: We've got a serious problem here.

A deliberate decision, he suggests, for political or ideological reasons. He goes further,


What we are doing wrong is simple. We’re failing the Schieffer test. We’re refusing to answer the only question America is asking us. This is political suicide. 

In an interview with Rex Wockner six weeks before voting day in Maine, Jesse Connolly, No on 1’s campaign manager, dismissed the other side’s strategy: "These are the same old doomsday tactics that opponents of equality have been using ... in every state."

In an e-mail to Connolly, Wockner observed, "And those tactics worked in every state."

Connolly: "Question 1 is only about fairness and equality."

Wockner: "'Fairness' and 'equality' are lovely words and beautiful high-minded concepts. But they were beyond useless ... " 

Wockner.... made the cool, ballot-box-math, matter-of-fact observation: "They like us better if we're born gay." And they just do. 


So how would the mantle of biology help counter the arguments used against us? (Used, we must remember over and over again with considerable success).

Schools can't "teach" homosexuality any more than they can "teach" handedness. (Although they can teach understanding and acceptance.) Teachers can't "promote" innate traits like being black or female, and if your TV spots claim they can, it reveals antigay forces to be the idiots that they are.

SO, time for a big change. I am glad to see this brought up--and it's critical to the argument in the Prop8 case. It is well past time to explain that for most gay people, it's not a choice. We aren't a pathology. It's who we are. So stop making such a big deal of it, give us our dam' rights, and let us work together on things that really matter.

Are you listening, Rick Jacobs? Are you listening, Geoff Kors? Are you listening, Jesse Connelly? Are you listening, HRC, EQCA, Courage Campaign?

What are you going to do about it?

The APA on marriage equality

Once thing we learned from the Prop8 testimony is that our opponents aren't interested in facts or science. Still, it's worth having access to this Fact Sheet from the American Psychological Association which includes references to studies proving each point (PDF here):

There is no scientific basis for the assertion that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons are not fit to marry or to become parents of healthy and well-adjusted children.

Marriage bestows substantial psychosocial and health benefits to individuals, due to the moral, economic, and social support to married couples. The denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples, therefore, adversely affects the health and well-being of the individuals involved, as well as their families and friends. ...

Scientific research provides no evidence that would justify discrimination against same-sex partners and their families. In its 2004 resolution on sexual orientation and marriage, APA strongly supports policy and legal decisions that support the health and well-being of same-sex couples, their children, and their communities.