Can we even suggest that perhaps the kids are not all right*?
Some research has been published indicating that the offspring of same-sex couples may not be doing quite as well as other kids, and it has met with a firestorm of politically-correct disapproval. This should come as no surprise; politics is rife in the social sciences.
Of course it affects the quality of the research done, as well as the hiring of faculty. If a person really cared about truth, truth would be followed wherever it led. But that is too dangerous; witness what happened to Larry Summers when he dared to mention the paucity of women at the very highest levels of science, and to suggest that this phenomenon should be studied.
This is what goes on today:
Such homogeneity of sociopolitical views among social scientists almost invariably leads to “groupthink,” a phenomenon that occurs when group members have relatively homogeneous backgrounds or ideological views. With this groupthink comes self-censorship and pressure on dissenters, the negative stereotyping and discounting of conservative perspectives, and a failure to consider conservative-friendly (as compared with liberal-friendly) question framing and data interpretation. A recent national survey of psychology professors found that one in four reported that they would be less likely to give a positive recommendation on a journal manuscript or grant application having a conservative perspective, and one in six would be less likely to invite conservative colleagues to participate in a symposium…
It is not surprising, nor is it indicative of nefarious scientific misconduct, that researchers of different ideological persuasions would produce findings consistent with their own ideology. It is human nature to frame research questions and interpret findings in ways that confirm one’s political beliefs. Such biases are the norm, even among scientists. This is particularly true when it comes to research on social issues because social scientists, many of whom were attracted to social science because of its progressive ideology, often have values invested in the issues they research. One can find such ideological tilt throughout social science research. For instance, how researchers interpret data on the relative contributions of hereditary factors versus environment to intelligence, or on biological factors in personality styles, seems to be partly a function of their political views.
One could argue that social science research—a field I know something about, having studied it and even worked briefly in it—is fatally flawed anyway as a scientific pursuit. It is certainly deeply flawed, but it is also used increasingly to justify the increasing number of government interventions that are all designed (supposedly, that is) to make us healthier and better people. As such, it’s doubly dangerous that PC thought dominates it so thoroughly.
[*NOTE: the title of this post is from the 2010 movie “The Kids Are All Right,” about a family parented by two women, with two children conceived through artificial insemination.]
A great resource on “the Gay Left:”
http://www.americanthinker.com/robert_oscar_lopez/
which lists all the articles about Robert Oscar Lopez.
See this article:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/understanding_the_viciousness_of_the_gay_left.html
About ROL:
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/08/6065/
Even if we could have an honest discussion about this, good luck with changing minds in the age of the award-winning TV series Modern Family, which is a perfect follow-up to the influential Will & Grace.
For those who haven’t seen the show, it’s centered on three families, one of which is two gay men with an adorable and whip-smart adopted daughter. They are very charming, funny, and nice, and their family often comes across as more well-adjusted than the other families.
It’s funny. Now the latest discussion (somewhere) is about polygamy, and of course it’s defended. Can’t common sense for once enter the various discussions?
It is OBVIOUS that broken homes, homosexual homes, polygamous homes will not in general be good for children.
I could probably find hundreds of examples. Let’s start with the delightful lives of second and third wives in China in the last century. Ditto the lives of catamite boys in modern Afghanistan and ancient Rome. Not to mention the joyous lives of children, male and female, who service their uncles in Saudi Arabia. It’s always fun to read about the loving relations between half-siblings in the Turkish Court. (Once again, I recommend Jay Vinik’s “The Great Upheaval” about the Caliphate in “modern times.” Life for children was also wonderful in the Soviet Gulags.
I’m sorry. I’m on a rant. We simply MUST take back our culture before the descent into savagery is complete.
There are also many known problems with adopting children, fostering children, and raising children in orphanages. A lot of these problems are due to a lack of bonding, inconsiderate non-related adults, etc.
How will the normalization of gay “marriage” fit into the big picture?
We already know what happens to boys raised without the benefit of fathers. We don’t need “sociologists” to tell us anything. We live amongst the wreckage in our various cities.
Social science is an oxymoron. All electrons are identical, as are all protons, and all neutrons. The consequence is that all atoms, which are made of these particles, are identical and the molecules made from atoms are in turn identical. As a result one can study the physics and chemistry of atoms and molecules and get consistent answers to questions.
People, on the other hand, are anything but identical. Two different people will respond to the same situation differently and one person may respond to the identical situation differently at different times. There is such a thing as human nature but it’s only captured in words of wisdom like “a fool returns to his folly as a dog returns to its vomit” and “you can’t cheat an honest man”. This is not science though it can be very useful steering you through life. The problem is that all that wisdom is no longer taught in either secular or religious schools. It’s effectively lost and we get gay marriage, soon to be followed by polygamy, and who knows what other arrangements in time. We get the refusal to accept that male and female are different at the deepest levels as determined by biology even though it’s been evident for thousands of years of history in every known civilization and without doubt before then.
/rant
This topic just came up with my son the other day because we bumped into one of the mommies of a kindergarten friend (two moms, two daughters, nice family). He said he was glad he had a mom and a dad. I agreed, but mentioned that his friend is lucky to have two loving parents, too.
This has become so polarized that no one wants to make a judgement, or say one family configuration is better/optimal, for fear of causing offense (and being vilified as a H8r). What seems to have been lost is the notion of what is best for the child.
My determined opposition to homosexual “marriage” is that this form of lifestyle is actively being promoted to young children in our school system.
Imagine all the math textbooks, the language arts textbooks, the social studies books, etc. including homosexual families as part of the norm, just like ethnic/racial groups are shown.
What are my young grandchildren being taught in school in their “progressive” communities? I shudder to think. If there are no standards for anything, like building a family life or supporting oneself as opposed to living on welfare, how can a country remain strong?
Instead of asking why the state “denies” marriage rights to gay couples, we should be asking why societies have traditionally privileged the relationship between one man and one woman through marriage. And the answer is that it’s the optimal environment for raising children. By supporting gay marriage you’re basically saying that children don’t need a mother AND a father. Children need both. marriage is not just any relationship between persons.
After a particular horror in California resulted in what seemed a grossly inadequate sentence, a commenter asked, “What do you have to do to a kid in California to get a hard sentence?” Implication was it would be hard to imagine.
What would you have to see in a gay-parent situation which would be allowed to call the concept into question?
Nothing.
See “frank lombard” duke.
So many conflicting narratives that nobody would touch it, although what happened to the kid is truly sick-making.
It’s all about the narrative. See George Zimmerman and Roderick Scott. Crystal Mangum andn Katie Rouse. Matthew Shepherd and Jesse Dirkhising. Some crimes are more equal than others and you’d damn’ well better remember it.
Humanity is going to catch ONE break: homosexuals — particularly male homosexuals — don’t care to marry or raise children.
In my old stockbroking days I had more than a few gay clients.
The only thing more personal than ones sex life — is ones FINANCIAL life. It’s ALWAYS kept more secret.
And from that insider’s point of view: gays LAUGH at the fools ruined by family court — particularly gay husbands who married so as to stay in the closet.
The other source of chronic amusement: the financial destruction endured raising ungrateful families — with particular emphasis against women.
Gays are over represented in the financial markets — because of these factors. Even living large is nowhere near as expensive as supporting a wife — let alone offspring.
And it was no rare thing for gays to bitterly remember their own childhoods as something that they’d NEVER inflict upon any other soul.
Which all nets down to: only a minority of the minority gay community has the slightest intention to actualize the Hollywood script fantasy.
Peter Pan was more realistic.
=====
As for Lesbians. They are wildly under represented on Wall Street — as investors. That could be strictly a personal/ generational bias. My take on Lesbians is that they’re far, far, more prone to put their savings into real estate — not Wall Street. Countless Lesbians dominate real estate brokerage houses across the land. They have the aggressive closer-instincts — while being able to turn on the charm — to a prospect base that is overwhelmingly female.
(My late Uncle (the RE broker) tutored me in the ways of home sales: 99% of the deals were decided by the wife… I guess the balance were single homosexuals. No husband is going to deny his woman her chosen nest. And, it’s also true that only women and gays have a clue about interior design. All real men just toss up their arms.)
And it would appear that it’s LESBIANS that are at all interested in raising children. They’re going to make a complete hash of the poor bastards, though.
For during the first decade of life, both sexes need mother much more than father — from a social connections point of view… not that they don’t need to imprint on father’s authorities within and without the home.
But, after that point, daddy ends up being the most important parent — whether he’s bumping around the house, or not. Once puberty kicks in, sex roles and the nature of the whole mommy-daddy connection becomes the pole around which the psyche’s dance.
Girls rapidly learn that the ONLY person in the world who holds a constant psychic course is daddy. Her girl friends are perpetual flakes — drama princesses 100% of the time — and mommy, by now, is over exposed and taken for granted.
Boys rapidly learn that men run the outside world — and that only daddy has the slightest clue — and connections — where it’s going to count — for them. This works up and down the social scale. Most societies, most of the centuries, were low growth — and the son would be vectored into a niche handed down through the ages.
It could be VERY tough for second sons: the fodder of open warfare if they can’t be married off into son-less families . (Societies without (lots of) second sons lapse into peace.)
This ‘double sex dependence’ is not addressed at ALL in modern family courts. On the whole, women can’t face the fact, the brutal reality, that they’re NEVER going to be able to control teenagers. ONLY fathers can do that — and it’s a challenge even then.
Most of the dysfunction in the ghetto is due to this teen maturation dependency.
(The Spartans believed that the cross-over occurred at age seven. Modern Americans seem to have stretched out childhood by years and years. I run into childish twenty-somethings all the time.)
Many good comments here that I agree with.
The idea that men and women are not really different, that it’s only that culture that has made them that way, is IMO, the beginning of where we went wrong. It wasn’t far from there to the idea that LGBTs weren’t being treated as equals either. Gay marriage was making NO headway in Washington State until they framed it as “marriage equality.” Suddenly, it seemed that everyone agreed. The LGBTs were being discriminated against in a way akin to apartheid.
Having known a few gay men back in the 50s and 60s, I found that they reveled in promiscuity. The idea of being tied to one partner was anathema to them. Only the AIDs problem made them look at the legal benefits that accrued to married couples. (Especially the health insurance) I heard one gay agitator here in Washington say that there were over a hundred financial and legal benefits that married couples had and they wanted them. It was only FAIR!
Can gay couples properly parent children? As blert points out, the odds of it turning out well are long because of the way children mature and shift their psychic alliances. That said, a heterosexual couple can screw it up royally as well.
My father left my life when I was 9 and did not play much role in my teen years. Looking back I realize that I zeroed in on other male figures to pattern myself after. My high school coach, my Scoutmaster, and two local men who coached me in skiing. I escaped a single parent household without becoming a juvenile delinquent, but without those male influences it would have been a shaky proposition. Maybe gay couples could get that sort of outside influence to help them with their child rearing. Maybe not.
Looking at the drift toward legitimizing any and all behaviors and lifestyles, the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan keep echoing in my ears, “Defining deviancy down!” We have accepted abortion, shacking up, single motherhood, drug usage, welfare lifestyles, gay marriage (soon to accept polygamy and ??), and much more. All in the name of tolerance and acceptance. With the claim that all life choices are valid. But aren’t we really defining deviancy down? How do we stop it when anyone who speaks up about the issues is immediately attacked as a hater, a racist, a homophobe, a blue nose, etc.? Sociological studies (whatever they are) won’t help much. Actually there has been a long run study of humans with some pretty good suggestions on how we ought to conduct ourselves. It’s called the Bible, but that has been roundly attacked and denigrated too. So, what do we do? I wish I had the ANSWER. All any of us can do is try to conduct ourselves with responsibility and care for our neighbors – hoping our small light will push the darkness back a bit.
Just get rid of the evil. Everything else will resolve themselves. Humanity hasn’t had tens of thousands of years producing societies from one man, one woman, that it cannot reconstruct itself once you get rid of the evil poisons.
I followed the link for the movie and was surprised at the overwhelmingly positive reviews. Underlines the points being made here.
I was shocked by the movie, and still get upset when I think about it. (If you haven’t seen it and don’t want to know the plot, don’t read the rest of this comment.)
Seeing the trailer made me think I would like the movie. I like the work of Julianne Moore, and the trailer makes it seem like the movie is about inclusiveness.
It’s not. It’s about why we don’t need men. I found that extremely offensive.
The movie is insidious because it’s very well made and well acted. So it seems like a heartwarming movie with a feelgood plot. It moves along quickly and it’s not until the end that one realizes that the sperm donor is going to be cast out as a villain. Maybe they changed the ending at the last minute.
The movie works directly against what JJ points out was helpful to him. The setup is that the male kid is looking for a male role model–he hangs out with a creepy disgusting kid and his creepy disgusting father who roughhouse all the time and play football. So we’re given to believe that the young man’s desire for a male role model is akin to a sickness. Good thing he’s raised by lesbians, the movie tells us, or he would be creepy and disgusting.
Then we meet the sperm donor, who isn’t like that. He’s smart and funny and good-looking and he’s nice and tries to be reasonable. Yay, we think, males aren’t all bad. Everyone starts to get along–the inclusiveness from the trailer. Whoever reviewed the movie for the Rotten Tomatoes summary neo links to above must have stopped watching at this point. The summary says “the family tree grows a new branch.”
Well, no, it doesn’t. It starts to. But the ending saws that branch off unceremoniously. Sperm Donor Man is rejected, told if he wants a family he should go make one of his own. Then the lesbians immediately get back together for no discernible reason except that they love their kids. Right. They love their kids so much that one of them has a casual affair and neither of them cares about their son’s desire for a male presence in his life. That desire passes as if it were just a mood.
I am friends with several gay couples. One gay couple I know raised some kids together–kids from one of the women’s marriage to a man. The dad ran off and completely gave up on his kids. The new partner was a better person and a good parent. So I fully realize that people are individuals and that it’s possible for gay couples to be decent or even excellent parents.
None of that changes my horror at the message of this film, which seems to be that women are superior no matter what they do and men are the enemy no matter how nice they may seem.
To claim an effect, us real scientists work at the P<0.05 level, while social "scientists" commonly work at P<0.5. That's crap, honestly.
As the most of human behavior is an exercise of free will, an obviously supernatural entity, the absurdity of making something akin to natural science about human behavior is self-evident.
And note a false and hysterical outrage in Western media about so-called “homophobic” Russian law which forbids propaganda of homosexuality to CHILDREN in schools and other educational institutions!
There is a wonderful story about 18-19 century Irish woman who disguised herself as a man and made a brilliant career of surgeon in British Army:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barry_(surgeon)
Sarah, well at least the lesbians didn’t take the sperk, make a child with it, and then slap the male with child payments. As has happened before.
Also, I really suggest people absolutely shut off Western entertainment, until it’s been purified and tested at least.
Instead, look at some of the Japanese modern material. Like Seirei no Moribito. Guardian of the Sacred Spirit.