Minnery and all of FOTF and FRC can go pound sand. Go find something more important to do. Like, I dunno, make the country aware of the urgency of domestic violence and how THAT threatens families and everything else.

That isn’t likely. Political fundamentalists are believers in male supremacy and tend to be strong supporters of using physical violence in the disciplining of children.

But, “Juan” did prompt BTB to have a meaningful discussion which ironically is very helpful.

http://www.truthwinsout.org/pressreleases/2011/07/17710/#comment-46469

When I pointed out on TWO that he had posted here under Juan/Tom said “Priya, how many times do I need to tell you that changing name, email and/or IP address is necessary for me to successfully post? Do you understand that? Does that make sense to you?”

1. There are three groups: Nuclear Families, Single/Divorced/Separated etc., and Gay Couples.

2. The study shows that children in the Nuclear group do better than children in the S/D/S group. The entire focus was on nuclear v. S/D/S.

3. Gay couples don’t make up enough of a subpopulation that they would impact the results of whichever group they were included in, be it Nuclear or S/D/S. Further, any conclusion made about Nuclear or S/D/S cannot be automatically attributed to any specific subgroup.

(Illustration: a study of ‘all recent immigrants to the US’ would likely find that ‘all recent immigrants’ are more likely to speak Spanish than non-immigrants. However we cannot then say that because immigrants from Greece are included in the ‘all recent immigrants’ group that therefore they obviously speak Spanish.)

Thus, regardless of what category the researches put gay couples in, this study would still tell us nothing about gay couples. They data for gay couples was not isolated.

4. Minnery wanted to claim that children in gay families do less well than children in straight families. But the research does not support that assertion.

5. So Minnery lied. He included three words not present in the research or supported by the data: “mothers and fathers”.

This effectively changed the working definitions of the groups from “Nuclear Family” to “Heterosexual Nuclear Family” and from “Single/Divorced/Separated etc.” to “gay couples and Single/Divorced/Separated etc.”

With Minnery’s seemingly ‘innocent mistake’, he changed not just the groups, but the entire meaning of the study. Instead of being nuclear v. S/D/S, Minnery presented it as straight v. gay.

6. Minnery got caught in his lie. But he still might have won the war over the impression had it not been for one fact, one important fact: to the extent that gay couples were counted at all, they were counted as part of the Nuclear Group.

So Minnery can’t even claim that his intentional distortion technically was accurate in describing the groups.

It’s not a matter of “this study isn’t really relevant to the issue”, but a matter of “if we apply your logic, this study actually says the opposite of what you claim it says”. Not only were gay couples not counted among the people less successful in child rearing, but he’s left trying to argue that gay couples should be denied marriage rights because, ummm, they are part of the group that had better results. (All of which explains nothing about why the children of gay couples should be denied the protections of marriage rights while the divorced and single people can marry any time they like.)

7. Those who start with the conclusion that gay people are inherently inferior don’t really care about studies or facts. They know what they know and no evidence – no matter how compelling – will effect their opinion.

I suspect Juan falls into this category.

Exactly. In court both sides have the “evidence”. However, sometimes that can still be a squishy result with judges trying to rule on what is the right interpretation of a study.

Which is why I think that Judge Walker is brilliant. All the anti-gays have for support is twisted interpretations of studies and spin. And his requirement of a trial of the facts – with experts rendering specific conclusions on the research based on the data and their profession’s treatment of data – left them with nothing at all.