Children Reared by 'Mom and Dad' Are Better Off Than Those in Same-Sex Couple Households

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What science has to say about this is irrelevant, folks, unless you’re a consequentialist. And if you’re a Catholic, you had better not be a consequentialist.

If illicit sexual activity caused rainbows to spontaneously burst from everyone’s eyeballs and all our wound-up sexual tension to turn into money, illicit sexual activity would still be illicit. The argument was never “Sodomitical acts cause bad things to happen.” It was “Sodomitical behavior is a bad thing unto itself.”

And if normative sexual activity made everyone grumpy and constipated and poor, well, it’d still be normative and therefore morally laudable. Because the argument was never “marital, noncontraceptive, man-on-woman, intravaginal ejaculatory sex causes good things to happen” (though it does). It was “normative sex is a good thing unto itself.”

Now, bad things often cause other bad things to happen, this is true. But the badness of the bad thing isn’t determined by what comes after it. All of this is true of good things as well. And moreover the fallen (i.e., no longer supernaturally aided) character of human nature means we have a difficult time discerning the consequences of our action, especially how they affect the interior disposition of ourselves and others. So we often struggle and have great difficulties in doing what is right (e.g., dying to ourselves in order to help others, going to Mass in the morning), and often rejoice in doing what is evil (e.g., contraceptive premarital sex, killing people we dislike).

So when we see studies that say things like “Children reared by homosexual couples are better off than those raised by heterosexual couples,” the first thing we need to ask is not “Is this true?” but “According to what standard of ‘better’?” Since science is necessarily naturalist, it’s always going to evaluate “good” and “better” naturalistically, but that’s not meaningful. Natural goods are good but they are not the good. Even if homosexual couples showered their kids with affection and money, there is still one thing they cannot provide their children with, which is good moral example. They are in principle incapable of providing this. Heterosexual couples by contrast are only accidentally incapable of providing it, or any natural good.

Now, these sorts of studies can (CAN) provide us with useful context. They CAN limitedly ratify our intuitions in some respects. That’s about the extent of it. That CAN must be heavily qualified because most social science research is badly done, and I know, because my job is basically to identify bad social science research and I am very, very good at my job. Most people don’t realize that even if a study is conducted with exactly the right analysis and with simple random sampling (i.e., never), the false-positive error rate is about 5%. Since these conditions are never satisfied, it’s probably substantially greater than that.
 
^^^^ sw85, this isn’t the first post of yours I’ve seen that shows a deeper reflection on a subject matter.

Overall - excellent, objective observation of the topic. 👍
 
^ This is why many of us value sw85 on the forum so much and hopes he stays with us: what he adds in substance to the discussions. 🙂
 
Same sex couples with children is nothing new. It’s been around for … forever.

I’m waiting for the first famous or distinguished person I’ve ever heard of who was raised by a same sex couple:
  • a U.S. President.
  • a Senator or Congressman
  • a Supreme Court Justice
  • a noteworthy scientist who made a significant contribution to the world
  • a great military leader, llike Colin Powell of Norman Schwartkoff
  • anybody highly successful in any serious line of work, not including the entertainment business which is full of narcisstic misfits, or novelists who are often just trying to expunge their demons.
  • in other words, somebody who “has it all together” 😃
🍿 🍿 🍿 :whistle: :coffeeread: :sleep:
 
sw85 said:
What science has to say about this is irrelevant, folks, unless you’re a consequentialist… …The argument was never “Sodomitical acts cause bad things to happen.” It was “Sodomitical behavior is a bad thing unto itself.”

…the argument was never “marital, noncontraceptive, man-on-woman, intravaginal ejaculatory sex causes good things to happen” (though it does). It was “normative sex is a good thing unto itself.”
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I have a hard time understanding this argument. How do you determine whether something is “bad” without taking into account it’s consequences. My understanding of what is a “good” action is that which is beneficial or least harmfull.
sw85 said:
…Even if homosexual couples showered their kids with affection and money, there is still one thing they cannot provide their children with, which is good moral example. They are in principle incapable of providing this. Heterosexual couples by contrast are only accidentally incapable of providing it, or any natural good.
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You state that if homosexual couples raise kids that are far better off than those raised by heterosexual couples, then this would still be wrong because they couldn’t provide them with a “good moral example”. I’m guessing, by “good moral example” you mean the idea that homosexual relationships are bad. But without bad consequences, I don’t see where you get your morals from.
 
fix said:
I agree science is a new god to many today. Materialists want to act as they want while claiming science as a type of “proof” that they are acting morally.
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As though our evolving understanding of the natural world (as halting and stumbling as our steps may be) somehow obviates responsibility to God. It’s interesting to see all of these modern freethinkers invoking the holy name of Science much more dogmatically than Catholics invoke the Holy Spirit. It says a lot about both groups.
 
Non_sum_dignus said:
As though our evolving understanding of the natural world (as halting and stumbling as our steps may be) somehow obviates responsibility to God. It’s interesting to see all of these modern freethinkers invoking the holy name of Science much more dogmatically than Catholics invoke the Holy Spirit. It says a lot about both groups.
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I don’t understand this mentality either. What do you mean by the “holy name of Science”. Are you referring to methods of observation, experimentation and analysis? That’s all science is. How else can you obtain information about the world without some method of observation and testing?
 
Twoangels, I couldn’t agree more with the first part of your post…and then you wrote this:
twoangels said:
The reality, though, lies in that adoption should be for needy children. It should not be turned into viewing children as commodities. When a heterosexual has a child, that child is their child. It is not simply a random human belonging to the human community. Giving up a child for adoption is hard because its your child. Certainly adoptive parents’ grow to love their child and thus adopt the child as their own into their hearts, but biological parents are not merely sperm donors and egg donors and uteruses. At this we get to the heart of how offensive surrogate motherhood, invetro fertilization and sperm donation are and how this with contraceptives have led to the view that having a child is liken to the same decision as “adopting” a pet. Its optional and ultimately for your benefit.
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Most parents, including Catholic parents, make a conscious decision to have a child. Whether they decide to use or stop using contraceptives, abstain from sex or use NFP, they are saying that they want or do not want a child. No one (or, I should hope no one anyways) thinks that they are getting a “pet” regardless of whether they get pregnant the old fashion way, use invetro fertilization, use a surrogate, adopt etc…

These people are also saying that they want a child, but they’re unable to have one the traditional way for some reason. You seem to think this is wrong because in these cases the child is not biologically linked to the parent. And my question is, why does that matter?

If I were to find out today that the parents were not my actual biological parents it would change nothing for me. I’d still be the same person I am today. And I would still have the same feelings of love towards those who raised me. Why does it matter who you share you’re genes with? Isn’t it more important that a child grows up in a loving home?

From reading your posts it seems you are a thoughtful person who takes the time to consider other points of view. So I hope you would consider what I’ve said here. No one, in your examples, is commodifying children. They are helping those who cannot conceive naturally to be able to raise children in the same way that you can - and hopefully to raise them in a loving and nurturing environment. That is all that matters.
 
sw85 said:
fffffuuuuuuuhhh. Lengthy post lost. I’ll try again later.
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Oh man! I hate it when that happens. :mad:

I always try to copy everything I write before I hit submit - just in case.
 
buffalo said:
Children Reared by ‘Mom and Dad’ Are Better Off Than Those in Same-Sex Couple Households
Code: 
 For the past decade, a cadre of social scientists has claimed that kids  raised by homosexuals show “no differences” from kids raised by  opposite-sex couples.

  Now, a large national study of the well-being of young adults reared in  different types of families challenges this widely circulated “no  differences” thesis.

  In this month’s *Social Science Research*, University of Texas  sociologist Mark Regnerus reports that Americans ages 18 to 39 who grew  up in families where either parent had a same-sex romance fared  significantly worse on 25 of 40 measures. They were three and a half  times likelier to be unemployed and almost four times likelier to be on  public assistance than children raised in biological, intact mom-and-dad  marriages. Children reared by same-sex-wooing adults were also more  likely to have been arrested, to have pled guilty to a minor criminal  offense, to smoke marijuana, and to have thought about suicide during  the previous year.

  Regnerus’s “New Family Structures Study,” which screened more than  15,000 Americans and interviewed nearly 3,000, radically challenges the  previous scientific consensus.
Read more: ncregister.com/daily-news/children-reared-by-mom-and-dad-are-better-off-than-those-in-same-sex-couple/#ixzz1ywdzJxFm

%between%
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I just read the methodology. You might want to consider how the study was done, before you say it compares kids raised with a mom and dad to kids with two same gender parents. The study made no attempt to do that.
 
empther said:
Same sex couples with children is nothing new. It’s been around for … forever.

I’m waiting for the first famous or distinguished person I’ve ever heard of who was raised by a same sex couple:
  • a U.S. President.
  • a Senator or Congressman
  • a Supreme Court Justice
  • a noteworthy scientist who made a significant contribution to the world
  • a great military leader, llike Colin Powell of Norman Schwartkoff
  • anybody highly successful in any serious line of work, not including the entertainment business which is full of narcisstic misfits, or novelists who are often just trying to expunge their demons.
  • in other words, somebody who “has it all together” 😃
🍿 🍿 🍿 :whistle: :coffeeread: :sleep:
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Shall we judge your worth by that same metric?
 
The trouble is, this is not what Regnerus’ study shows. Not by a long shot. And the claims he makes play into a long-standing pattern of conservative scholars and activists misinterpreting the data on LGBT families.

While Regnerus critiques “same-sex couples” raising kids, his study does not actually compare children raised by same-sex couples with those raised by different-sex couples. The criterion it uses is whether a parent “ever ha[d] a romantic relationship with someone of the same sex.” In fact, only a small proportion of its sample spent more than a few years living in a household headed by a same-sex couple. Indeed, the study acknowledges that what it’s really comparing with heterosexual families is not families headed by a same-sex couple but households in which parents broke up. “A failed heterosexual union,” Regnerus writes in the study, “is clearly the modal method” — the most common characteristic for the group that he lumps in with same-sex-headed households. For example, most of the respondents who said their mothers had a lesbian relationship also endured the searing experience of having their mothers leave the household as the family collapsed.

In other words, Regnerus is concluding that when families endure a shattering separation, it is likely to shatter the lives of those in them. And this is news?

articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/13/opinion/la-oe-frank-same-sex-regnerus-family-20120613
 
Shall we judge your worth by that same metric?
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I’m a 63 year old male. The main character in my story is an 18 year old girl.
She and I have nothing in common, not in personality, not in situations, nothing,
beyond what is common to all human beings, breathing, heartbeat, etc.
That’s writing. 😃
 
cathoichelp said:
The trouble is, this is not what Regnerus’ study shows. Not by a long shot. And the claims he makes play into a long-standing pattern of conservative scholars and activists misinterpreting the data on LGBT families.

While Regnerus critiques “same-sex couples” raising kids, his study does not actually compare children raised by same-sex couples with those raised by different-sex couples. The criterion it uses is whether a parent “ever ha[d] a romantic relationship with someone of the same sex.” In fact, only a small proportion of its sample spent more than a few years living in a household headed by a same-sex couple. Indeed, the study acknowledges that what it’s really comparing with heterosexual families is not families headed by a same-sex couple but households in which parents broke up. “A failed heterosexual union,” Regnerus writes in the study, “is clearly the modal method” — the most common characteristic for the group that he lumps in with same-sex-headed households. For example, most of the respondents who said their mothers had a lesbian relationship also endured the searing experience of having their mothers leave the household as the family collapsed.

In other words, Regnerus is concluding that when families endure a shattering separation, it is likely to shatter the lives of those in them. And this is news?

articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/13/opinion/la-oe-frank-same-sex-regnerus-family-20120613
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Moreover, Regnerus himself admits that only two of the children in the study spent their whole lives raised by a lesbian couple. He also states there is a lack of sufficient statistical evidence to conclude whether there are any differences between that small group of stable lesbian-couple families compared to the much larger group of unstable lesbian-couple families. Apparently, he does not choose to isolate the factor of stability in his study or show an interaction between the stability factor and the lesbian family, and this is a major methodological flaw. His response is it is difficult to isolate this factor since families are always in flux and never static.
 
Non_sum_dignus said:
As though our evolving understanding of the natural world (as halting and stumbling as our steps may be) somehow obviates responsibility to God. It’s interesting to see all of these modern freethinkers invoking the holy name of Science much more dogmatically than Catholics invoke the Holy Spirit. It says a lot about both groups.
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What I mean primarily is that people attempt to use the word “science” to end debate, often in the absence of conclusive evidence of anything.
 
twoangels said:
My husband read the actual study. It is inaccurate to say that it prooves that gays harm children or are worse parents. What the study points out is that there are very few individuals who were raised in a household from infancy to adulthood by homosexuals that are now adults in order to offer a fair study of it. In order to find such individuals, you have to be very selective which causes the other studies to be flawed. When broadening the horizon to anyone whose been raised by same sex couples, we do find such flaws in rearing because these are typically situations where one parent was in a heterosexual relationship, came out as gay and later entered into a homosexual relationship. As such, the harmful effects can be found in the effects of infidelty.

If society were more accepting of homosexual unions and children adopting gays from infancy, we simply do not have enough data to conclude one way or another the harm that may or may not be done to a child. Personally, I find the claim that homosexuals harm children very offensive. If a group of religious sisters can run an orphanage and not damage children, I don’t see the difference.

The reality, though, lies in that adoption should be for needy children. It should not be turned into viewing children as commodities. When a heterosexual has a child, that child is their child. It is not simply a random human belonging to the human community. Giving up a child for adoption is hard because its your child. Certainly adoptive parents’ grow to love their child and thus adopt the child as their own into their hearts, but biological parents are not merely sperm donors and egg donors and uteruses. At this we get to the heart of how offensive surrogate motherhood, invetro fertilization and sperm donation are and how this with contraceptives have led to the view that having a child is liken to the same decision as “adopting” a pet. Its optional and ultimately for your benefit.
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This is an excellent post.

And whomever said if they found out today they were adopted it wouldn’t change anything for them is very much mistaken.

Adoption carries with it a whole world of identity and loss issues.
Every single adoption begins as a loss. You simply can not be unaffected by that. There are wonderful adoptive parents… and openness in adoption is much more common now… kids have an easier time …
But it is very rare for any adopted persons to not search … even those who were in open adoptions with contact with their birth family … still search because you are missing a part of you.
Try to imagine what it would be like to not know a single other person related to you. To not know your own life story …

Gay adoptive parents tend to do a really good job in a most cases because they have dealt with identity issues themselves.

At any rate … It is very very difficult to compare the birth child of a hertrosexual couple and an a child of adoption by ANY couple … because the adopted child has a much different path …
That doesn’t make adoption a bad thing … but children are not property to be traded … and people need to realize that.

Also, gay men tend to adopted more from the foster care system where as gay woman tend to have children through sperm donation… 98 percent of kids in foster care have a history of physical or sexual abuse or neglect —

And as for show me successful adults raised by gay parents – here’s a few …
Iowa state representative Bruce Hunter (D-Des Moines) said it best: “Here’s the funny thing about rights – they’re not supposed to be voted on.

or
youtube.com/watch?v=FSQQK2Vuf9Q
 
If nothing else, kids raised by homosexuals are far more likely to be very tolerant of homosexuals for obvious reasons, and even more likely to support gay marriage. From a Christian perspective, this is very damaging for the children.
 
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