Those opposed to gay marriage often claim they are concerned about children born into such relationships. It’s an odd claim because anyone can use donor sperm/ova and/or surrogacy to produce children and none of that is dependent on any particular State definition of marriage. I wonder why those supporting a legal bar on gay marriage, devote none of their time pushing for a legal bar on the use of donor sperm/ova and surrogacy?

If we accept that children have a right to know and have a loving relationship with both their biological parents how is it possible that as a society we allow people to use donor sperm/ova to produce children?

It seems to me those actively opposed to gay marriage have put the cart before the horse. Yes gay marriage is a silly idea, although not as offensive or damaging as heterosexual remarriage. But a more important issue than gay marriage is the use of donor sperm/ova to produce children who will be deliberately prevented from knowing and having a loving relationship with one or both of his/her natural parents.

I get the impression that many of those who oppose gay marriage don’t really do so because of concern for children, I think they just don’t like gays.

I hope you were not suggesting that the only measure of selfless love is the creation of new life. That would be insulting to the NYC fire fighters who went into the burning towers, to countless soldiers who have died for their buddies, and to every mother who has ever loved her child.

Instead of telling me that I CAN’T feel a powerful love for my partner, why don’t you ask me if I DO?

Instead of assuming that partners in same-sex marriages are nothing more than “toys” for each other, why don’t you get to know some same-sex couples? You may discover that they are not just assemblages of body parts and that they don’t look upon each other as “toys.”

Your last claim is simply untrue. Marriage does reduce promiscuity.

And finally, I don’t know where all these obsessions with sex are coming from. I hear them again and again on these sites. Bodies are reduced to sex organs, and people are reduced to objects (toys).

But wait, I do know. Do you? It starts with a p and ends with a y.

From when you were born until age 18 (or until you left home to be on your own), did either of your parents ever have a romantic relationship with someone of the same sex?

If the answer was “yes,” the respondent was considered to have been the child of a gay or lesbian parent, whether or not the child had been raised by a same-sex couple. The “romantic relationship” of the question could have been nothing more than an infatuation or a one-night stand. A child of Larry Craig could have qualified as a respondent, though Craig was never part of a same-sex couple.

In other words, the actual parenting of that child might have been done by an opposite-sex couple. Nevertheless, Regnerus places the child into the category of “children raised by gay or lesbian parents.”

Tom Bartlett, writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, says, “In reality, only two respondents lived with a lesbian couple for their entire childhoods, and most did not live with lesbian or gay parents for long periods, if at all.”

Of the 253 respondents in the test group, 42% reported living with a gay father and his partner for at least four months, but only two percent of those reported doing so for at least three years.

Regnerus did not control the variables in his test group (children of gay and lesbian parents) and his comparison group (children of heterosexual parents).
The alleged purpose of the study was to answer the question, “Do the children of gay and lesbian parents look comparable to those of their heterosexual counterparts?” Regnerus claims that his study proves a correlation between gay parenting and sub-standard child outcomes.
Regnerus should have eliminated any factors that might cloud the issue. If his comparison group contained only children of continuously married heterosexual parents, his test group should have contained only children of continuously “partnered” same-sex couples.
Instead, Regnerus selected children of continuously married parents for his comparison group, and children mainly from failed mixed-orientation marriages for his test group. This introduction of a third factor into the test group (but not into the comparison group) should have disqualified the study.
Because of this asymmetry, the study can only be said to show that children raised in broken homes do less well that those raised in intact homes. But, of course, this is not Regnerus’s own stated conclusion.(more to follow)

“I think the study is so thoroughly flawed, in particular with respect to its categorization of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian,’ that no conclusions can be drawn with sufficient confidence to report, publicize, or use them.”

About Regnerus and Wilcox, he wrote,

“They should state publicly that the study does not support the ‘gays are pedophiles’ conclusion.”

When asked about the study’s finding that 23% of the young adult children of “lesbian mothers” had suffered childhood sexual victimization, he responded,

“The fundamental flaws in data collection and interpretation are sufficiently grave as to make this finding very suspect.”

About the conflicts of interest, he writes,

“Regnerus’s claim that the funders were not involved in the study design is clearly not true given Wilcox’s status.”

“The other important angle on this is that Wilcox’s “academic” work is not particularly well respected and is highly politicized, so it is not plausible that Regnerus engaged his services for primarily scholarly reasons. Regnerus certainly knew any advice he received from Wilcox would be heavily slanted toward the point of view Witherspoon routinely pursues.”

More to follow.