Box Turtle Bulletin

I agree 100% that a kid with parents who love him/her is far better off than a kid with parents who don’t. Any kid whose relationship with one or both biological parent is going to feel abandoned at some point in his/her life, regardless of the truth of the situation. And kids who live with his/her biological parents (who love him/her and each other) are bound to do better than kids with any major issues in their past, so I can see the comparison to be made here. Any kid who has any form of abandonment in their past (by either or both of their biological parents) are liable to have it hit them at some point in their lives, regardless of the fact of their present. Things happen to kids and it sucks. This data could be used as well to point out that kids of same sex parents are “less well-adjusted” than kids whose biological parents are both in their lives and still in love, so by that yardstick I can see a little validity to this argument. However the world is far from ideal and kids do get abandoned, sometimes by one and sometimes by both of their parents, and I have yet to see any data that convinces me that amongst kids who have trauma/abandonment in their history that same sex parentage isn’t just as effective as opposite sex parentage. Yes, sure, the ideal is that the family is made and never broken in any way and that the kid’s mommy and daddy love them very much and that they also love each other for ever and ever, but that is rare these days and most kids don’t even expect that kind of ideal for themselves. I guess my point is that comparing children from the old-fashioned “Leave it to Beaver” family model to kids who have had some kind of parental issue is apples and oranges in the same sex/opposite sex family debate. What’s more appropriate are kids from same sex families and kids from opposite sex families in an adoptive situation. That’s a far more fair and appropriate comparison.

Ben in Oakland

Rob– i don’t have any time to write today. This section riles me up. It’s all crocodile tears and far more dishonesty than you give him credit for.

His OTHER omission is this: in california alone, there are 70,000 children (according to Ca. supreme Court) being raised by gay parents.

Is he proposing that those children should be taken away from their parents? Sent back to the orphanages? Returned to the drug addicts that abandoned them? Sent back to China or Korea or some third world hellhole?

If he is, then he advocates ripping funcioning families apart, taking children form security to isecurity. whatsamatter, Georgie? Are the orphanages just not full up enough for you?

If not, then it doesn’t really matter about who is better for the kids. Because those people have children who deserve the protection that having married parents will give them.

further disingenuousness, to put it mildly. He is going to have a hard time explaining how all those children of heterosexuals intact marriages ended up as drunks, psychopaths, mass murderers, in prison, rapist, child molesters, therive, and congressmen. Obviously, merely being a man and a woman in a marriage guarantees nothing.

But this is the quote that lays bare exactly how deep his animus is. He no longfers gets (not that he ever did) a pass on the “I’m jus defending the family and thinking of the kids” competition.

I’m surprised you missed it.

“This strongly suggests that children reared by same-sex parents will experience greater difficulties with their identity, sexuality, attachments to kin, and marital prospects as adults, among other things.”

George and the anti-ex-gay industry that he shills for are, shall we say, INSTRUMENTAL in creating this world that he condemns gay people to.

If i didn’t have work i must do today or face the Righteous Husband’s Wrath, I’d be off in a new york minute on this,.

Ben in Oakland

sammit, I left something out.

Their own go-to guy, David blankenhorn, admitted in his Prop. 8 testimony that marriage would benefit the children and families of gay people.

you can just cut and paste this paragraph and insert it into any of my paragraphs above.

occono

Is anybody emailing these posts to him or to Olsen and Boies?

Jonathan Justice

While I do understand the stance you take, I do not for a minute suppose that Professor George gives a fig for his ordinary readers’ intellectual integrity. The article is one of those Roman Court speeches to be made in the basilica and intended to give the cover of ostensible legitimacy to the exercise of social and political clout by those who hire Cicero or Robert George.

His problem, of course, is that the case may actually end up getting decided on its merits while he and is oh-so-delicate secret donors at NOM get taken out with the trash. He would like to take as many dear readers along with him as possible to cushion his otherwise uncomfortable resting place. They would be well advised to let him rot on his own.

tavdy79

How can he damn same-sex parenting with studies that donâ€™t look at same-sex parents? How can justâ€¦skip that little fact in his presentation?

This is the same technique used by Dr. Paul Cameron, a man now widely recognised as a fraud, but who was once a highly regarded expert on homosexuality – in no small part due to his background in psychology.

David in Houston

He’s using the same non-applicable research that NOM and the FRC use. That speaks volumes. I think this really points out how desperate George is to prove his argument. He goes on and on about the benefits of opposite-sex parenting. All the while, inferring that same-sex couples are inferior. He does all of this without a shred of proof to back up his claim.

The fact of the matter is, there are over 20 million children being raised in single-parent families. I don’t hear George saying that those children should be taken away and placed in homes that have a mom and a dad. With all things being equal, how can he possibly argue that a two-parent same-sex family is a worse situation than a one-parent straight family? Even a child knows that two parents are better than one.

Amicus

Timely, because I’m actually thinking/writing about this right now in terms of moral philosophy, but trying to drop that discussion smack into the legal framework for marriage, so that, when the discussion shifts to talking about norms the limits of the reach of the law, of the moral coercive force of the law, are prominently juxtaposed.

Not an easy task.

I do have to say that this bit on norms is not trivial, because, even after the PIV stuff is dispensed with, this still warrants argumentation.

Here’s some stuff to share, maybe for discussion here.

Take just these “relationships”, all nongay:
1. Married couple, “faithful”
2. Non-married couple, “faithful”
3. Single, chaste
4. Single, glorious slut
5. Something wild [just to test the limits of reason, see below]

What distinguishes these, in expressly *moral* terms, in ways that interest the state, vis-a-vis public marriage contract?

If you choose one dimension, childrearing outcomes, does that say something about parenting or something about marriage as a social institution or something about the kind of parents who choose marriage?

What do you compare? Do you compare the ideal from each class? Or, do you compare ‘overall and in the long run’?

What does is mean to compare empirical outcomes? Does it mean one is better or that one is morally superior? [I’m especially torn on this one…]

What comparisons are illicit and does that consideration play a role? What if we compared jewish marriages to Italian (non-jewish) marriages.

If the final answer is that it is really tough, then is George right that leads to an “eventuality” that no kind of arrangement be proposed as an ideal (p. 263) or as Maggie forecasts that marriage will cease to be? Is it really true that we wouldn’t be able to teach anything or anything much if there isn’t single ideal, one ring to rule them all (pun intended)?

Last, and this might turn out to be my favorite, is the selection of an uncontested ideal among these better thought of as a faith belief, than something we can prove by reason alone, which might only be able to show which are directly harmful or in contravention of our other ideals, and, thereby, not permitted?

I think I have most of the questions, but not all the answers yet!

Amicus

uh, better:

“so that, when the discussion shifts to talking about norms, the limits of the reach of the law (the moral, justifiably coercive force of the law), are prominently juxtaposed.”

Remember, this is the area of the law in which the proof required is often the thinnest (rational basis), but the stakes, as the authors admit, are presented as the highest. Odd juxtaposition that. What does THAT tell us about the underlying nature of the problem/question, I wonder?

Amicus

blech! I should write this stuff in a processor, rather than type in the box.

Better: “What if we compared jewish, non-Italian marriages to Italian, non-jewish marriages.”

CPT_Doom

Yet the larger empirical literature on child well-being suggests that the two sexes bring different talents to the parenting enterprise, and that children benefit from growing up with both biological parents.

This is yet another line of absolute bunk. I was a psych major in college, and remember nothing in the literature that indicated the gender of the parents has any impact on the talents they bring to a parenting situation. This is the whole “Moms are nuturing, while Dads encourage independence” crap that FRC has been peddling for years.

Does George cite any empirical research indicating that 1) women all parent the same and men all parent the same or that 2) those parenting styles are required for healthy child development? I am going to guess no, because the ideas are false. We all know of parents that meet the strict gender roles favored by George and his fellow travellers, yet have raised horribly damaged kids, and we all know of the opposite circumstance – “nontraditional” families who have raised amazingly well-grounded and productive kids.

That is the real weakness of George’s arguments – we don’t evaluate families based on aggregate data, we evaluate families (whether for adoption or through social services or in our own everyday interactions with various families we know) based on the actions, skills and talents of the individuals raising the children. Thus my aunt and uncle, who fit the ideal George wants to promote, but were nonetheless alcoholics, raised a family of rehab graduates, with two children shortening their lives because of drug/alcohol issues. Meanwhile my divorced uncle and his first wife have three children who lived through a really messy parental break-up, but have managed to build productive homes and families (to be honest, one of the boys recently got divorced, but that was a direct result of a stroke he suffered several years ago that changed his personality).

For George to argue that we should evaluate the benefit of families only on their aggregate success rates means he is arguing that poorer and younger parents, whose children also tend to have tougher times, should be deprived of the right to raise children and build families.

Regan DuCasse

This is why I keep saying that it seems that essentially, those that oppose marriage equality still believe that the ROLE of gender is still in play and can be legislated.
That is to say, they seem to think that men ONLY do certain things and women only do certain things. And that’s when their argument gets reduced to sexual organs and their function.

Physical gender isn’t always constant either. And there is nothing in the law that can make it more rigid.
And because gender is no longer a function of discrimination IN A MARRIAGE, making it a function of marriage is regressive.

Similarly, sexual orientation is no guarantee of the quality you’ll bring to a relationship or parenting.
I always say too, it’s obvious that GOOD parenting isn’t a talent bestowed on a GROUP. Not even on women, actually.
It’s an INDIVIDUAL talent, with one’s orientation being neutral to it.

I hope SCOTUS gets that. Because the way that the laws are written where PROGRESS has been made, there isn’t any purpose in discriminating against gay people that has any basis in nature OR social history and reality.

Amicus

lunchtime!

From Prop8 trial, Day 5:

[the foundations of good parents, of good family outcomes]

1. The quality of the relationship that children have with their parents and those that come after them. Large body of evidence that children do best with loving parents and do worse without.

2. The quality of the relationship between the parents or other significant adults. Kids do better when parents are happy with each other than not.

3. The availability of adequate economic and social resources.

A footnote on 3: hard to express this, but the ‘minimal optimal household size’ in our economy is dual-income. If you don’t have that, on average, you are at a competitive disadvantage. So, if you study single parents, I’d suspect a huge part of the variance has to do with economics, but I think it might be hard to isolate _specific_ factors like drug abuse risk or truency or whatever to “economic factors”, rather than the other two.

@Regan

Assume that “they” aren’t so dopey that they don’t understand that their line isn’t _somewhat_ arbitrary.

What they are then implying, without saying it, is:

“We don’t believe that you can (a) either show us distinctions among all these other things (that we don’t want) or (b) if you can, you still can’t get a “rational consensus” with enough force to do what it needs to do in society. Your failure on either score will put us on the path to lowest common denominator, which is ‘anything goes’. If you think you can disagree, show us how.”

Of course, this is all mixed up in irrational fears and strange religiosities, but that’s it in a nutshell, so far as I can tell/share my understanding.

I happen to think they are wrong, but it is still a challenge to show it.

Timothy Kincaid

Ben,

You are correct. The issue is not “what family structure is most ideal for children” (though George doesn’t win on that point either).

The real question is “what available family structure is most ideal for these children?”

Surely it would be better to be raised as the heir to the throne of England than most other family structures. But that is not a valid argument for denying all non-royal families the right to marry.

And you also caught his heterosexist presumptions:

â€œThis strongly suggests that children reared by same-sex parents will experience greater difficulties with their identity, sexuality, attachments to kin, and marital prospects as adults, among other things.â€

What he is saying here – and if you read the basis for this claim it is clear – is that children reared by same-sex parents are more likely consider whether they have a non-heterosexual orientation (identity), to readily accept their sexual orientation if it turns out not to be heterosexual (sexuality), experience rejection by hetero relatives (attachment to kin), and be the victim of his campaign to harm their lives (marital prospects as adults).

Look, jerk, it’s only a “problem” with identity because you are working as hard as you can to make it one.

Timothy Kincaid

George’s argument in a nutshell, Children of same-sex couples have fewer advantages in life, so the appropriate response is to punish them for by taking away more advantages.

And that is some kinda crazy.

Ben in Oakland

It’s not some kind o’ crazy.

I think it is the hombigotry kind o’ crazy.

Darina

*half-growling through her teeth* My stepfather did just fine raising me although he never formally adopted me, thankyouverymuch Mr. George.

Darina

Sorry, this touched a painful spot. And I know that my stepfather is in effect my adoptive father and not just somebody who married my mother.

But still… should my mother have been forbidden to remarry after my her first husband’s death because nobody could be her already existing children’s BIOLOGICAL father anymore?

Amicus

Ben wrote:

those people have children who deserve the protection that having married parents will give them

I’m curious whether people believe, as this implies, that, if you are going to have kids, you should get married.

Dan Savage’s book, which I have not read, is entitled “The Commitment”. Is that telling or are the contents dispelling?

Amicus

Here’s a succinct formulation of George’s argument (I had to do this to think clearly about a reply):

He claims that because nongay sex is moral and ‘naturally oriented to kids’ that implies that it *should* be favored over other relationship types.

He could have stopped there (logically/philosophically), but he doesn’t.

He goes primarily for confirming evidence ‘from the social sciences’ (“corroborative”). (What he might need is disconfirming evidence, but leave that aside, for now…).

He claims at least two things.

1. Support from the social sciences is dispositive, just in the sense of ‘overall’. He says “it is not individuals as such who are singled out…”. [Perhaps he is aware he is going to get accused of making moral judgments on individuals, a lesson hard won from experience? Who knows?]

2. There is no disconfirming evidence, because gays just haven’t been studied.

Then we come along.

We observe that the ‘social sciences’ do not support ‘relationship forms’, per se, but three factors:

1. Quality (overall functioning) of parent-child relationship
2. Quality (non-conflict) of parent-parent relationship
3. Economic resources (which may condition a relationship form, since most, but not all, single parents are at a disadvantage to the dual-income now required in our market economy)

And his reply is going to be:

1. “Parents” is radical, both ‘in principle’ (return to his basic argument about what is ‘natural’) and in practice (opens the door of horrors for gays and nongays, not just a line to gay parents)
2. Something from bioethics
3. Is unworkable or undesireable from a normative perspective, e.g. “teaches that mothers and fathers aren’t important”.
4. Just looking at social sciences ( even though he did it, himself), is not going to give the kind of (morally) conclusive answers that we (presumably) need, because (a) we can’t agree what to conclude from them and (b) it might commit us to stuff we might think is weird and outlandish. So, although it might be an interesting (empirical) critique, it is not an acceptable, stand-alone reply.

Then there is the counter-counter-reply:

Assume GGA are correctly argued (which concedes a lot). We’d better just go ahead and declare “Gay is Good” and get along with it, already, with the moral responsibilities and freedoms pertaining thereto… This is the “New Traditionalist” view.

Amicus

ooops, I skipped a bit in the “then we come along’ section. Should have included Rob’s clip from Blankenhorn that some evidence is actually in support of gay forms, indirectly.

Regan DuCasse

Certainly the consensus to maintain Jim Crow and not allow mixed marriages was the quality of life “mongrel children” were conjectured to have.

The assertions by racists, isn’t any different than those of George or any other anti gay person. The racists were ‘protecting’ children from being mongrels, therefore, won’t be subjected to prejudice, pariah status or physical and mental defect.

Also of course, denying all the while that they were the very captains of the social stigma a mixed child would confront.
Despite all that, our nation has had many mixed children of distinction.

Try as they might to say it’s the protection of children that’s the impetus for systemic bigotry, it’s an age old tactic to divert from the main issue.
Only the target minority has changed.
And those who employ this tactic like to deny there is anything well worn to it, or that it applies as well to blacks and other people of color as it does to gays and lesbians.

I really, REALLY hate being treated like I’m stupid. Which is essentially happens in discussions on gay lives. I get treated as if I’m an idiot. Even if I mention that I’m a black woman, old enough to remember what Jim Crow or it’s legacy was like and what the Civil Rights Movement meant to my family.
I mean YOUNGER WHITE PEOPLE (who couldn’t POSSIBLY know) will deny what I know to my face.

Part of the denying what gay people know of themselves and their lives, type arrogance.
Supremacist values, are what they are. They don’t change. And they aren’t GOOD.
And have never been good for individuals, a society or nation.
We can’t bring THAT home enough.

Amicus

At the risk of overposting (again), I have to point out just how *thoroughly* at odds George is with Maggie Gallagher.

Mags seems to suggest that the social concept of marriage is the solution to a problem. Specifically, it is the solution to out of wedlock births, historically and currently. She seems to glide between “fatherless” and “cohabitating couples” with analytical abandon, in a cutsie utilitarian position she calls “sex makes babies” (article with the same name).

In a reader-startling moment of
Ã©lan, she uses this tacitly to rule out all gay couples. Basically, gays aren’t part of the problem, so they aren’t part of the solution. Or, if they were in the solution, somehow she wouldn’t be able to, (a), discourage fragmented families and, (b), encourage women not to get knocked up without a marriage vow (whether they are cohabitating or not).

Yes, you read that right. *boggle*

Then there is this, which, taken with George, gives the gays the razzle-dazzle, the one-two, from consequentialist and nonconsequentialist alike:

In the U.S., people have always been able to marry without a religious ceremony. But the legal structure of marriage is deeply influenced by our specific religious traditions about marriage. Which of these conceptions are we allowed to keep and which must be discarded as unduly religious? Monogamy? Mutual fidelity? Primacy of husband and wife over other relationships? None of these are human universals. They are the products of a specific marriage tradition deeply rooted in religious ideas.

Aaaand, scene.

Timothy Kincaid