Box Turtle Bulletin

I’ve met a few therapists whose lap I wouldn’t mind sitting in for a spell to test this theory. The “motorcycle position” we read about sounded like fun.

Dan Farrell

Nicolosi has a book, based on extensive therapy, that has kept many boys from becoming effeminate. The influence of a loving father is crucial.

… then probably you wouldn’t mind kids having TWO loving fathers, wouldn’t you, Dan?

Rob Tisinai

So Dan I guess you’re saying that instead of effeminate gay sons they had masculine gay sons?

Dan Farrell

Franck, a kid with two fathers would miss out on the experience of a mother, which is important for bonding among infants and toddlers and for experiencing the particularly feminine kind of love that women offer children.

Rob, I actually haven’t read the book, but to the extent that homosexuality can be a matter of nurture rather than nature, there’s evidence of ways to prevent it.

Rob Tisinai

Dan I can at least imagine experiments where it would be possible to determine whether a course of action has changed someone from gay to straight. I cannot however imagine what kind of experiment could determine whether homosexuality had been “prevented.”

Can you elaborate on this research?

Rob Tisinai

Dan, can you define what you mean by “he particularly feminine kind of love that women offer”?

Please be specific. And also explain why it’s impossible for a father’s love to have those same qualities.

what about a married ex-gay man and ex-gay woman? If the Exodus spokespeople are any evidence, they’ll both be just as effeminate and butch as they were when they were gay.

Could they prevent their child’s gaymosexuqueerness?

William

Dan, even if one succeeds in eliminating so-called effeminate traits in a boy, that wonâ€™t stop him from growing up gay. The most extensively documented case of an attempt to â€œhead offâ€ homosexuality in a boy â€“ which was undertaken because he was gender-nonconformist as an infant â€“ is that of the boy known in the literature variously as Craig or Kyle. The good news is that, although the â€œeffeminateâ€ traits were successfully bullied out of him, the attempt to prevent him from growing up gay was a failure; the bad news is that the â€œtreatmentâ€ that he was given did him serious psychological harm as well as destroying his relationship with his father. The â€œtreatmentâ€ was prescribed by a psychologist whose name you may have heard: Dr George Rekers.

I wonder what became of poor Craig. When he was interviewed by Richard Green at the age of 18 he had already made one suicide attempt. Iâ€™d like to think that he eventually recovered from the appalling damage that had been done to him and that heâ€™s perhaps now in a loving gay relationship, but of course I have no means of knowing.

Dan Farrell

As I say, I haven’t read that book.

Kids need the softness of a mother; mothers are more inclined than fathers to stress relationships and sympathy. There’s a huge and harmful falsehood out there that gender is just physical.

Greg

Dan, how do you explain the gay men and women who come from families with straight parents?

How about when only one child is homosexual?

And then, why is it no more likely for children raised by gay male and female couples to be gay than the general population?

Dan Farrell

Greg,

I’ll leave it to wiser heads to explain about what kinds of parents might make a kid gay. What I’m talking about is the whole human race, all of us, being better off when we have had the advantage of being raised with the feminine influence of a mother and the complementary masculine influence of a father. We have all had decades of observation that should make this obvious without studies. Studies exist but I think they are like those studies that prove that in two-story houses the second story is higher than the first story.

David in Houston

Dan,

The “wiser heads” have already proved that your sexual orientation is hard-wired at birth. Gay/straight brain scans, birth-order studies (in utero hormone changes), identical twin studies all point to the same conclusion. There is nothing that links homosexuality to the lack of a particular parent, or having a parent that doesn’t fulfill specific gender roll correctly.

My brother and two sisters are straight. I’m the 4th child, that was born 10 years later. I’m gay. That situation is exactly the same as the birth order study. My husband’s situation is exactly the same: Two brothers, one sister, he was born 7 years later. He’s gay. They aren’t.

Dan Farrell

David,

I’ve heard others state with equal definiteness that no good evidence exists for what you’re saying. As for myself, I’d say we all have certain natural inclinations, but some of them aren’t good for ourselves or for our impact on others and should therefore be resisted. Homosexuality is one of these, and the honors, privileges, and economic benefits of marriage should not be extended to such relationships.

don

wait, dan cites a book then says he hasn’t read it? kind of says he really doesn’t know jack-shit, eh?

Tara TASW

Nicolosi told Newsweek he’s worked his “therapy” on children as young as 3. He’s got a great racket: convince parents that their toddler is going to be gay, and collect a large pile of money for “preventing” it. Since the chance is at least 90% that any given child will be straight, they can think it worked. If not, well, Nicolosi’s already long gone with the money.

Sarah

Having been raised by a single parent, I think I have a bit to add to this discussion as well. Yes, Dan, in the “Ideal” world, every child will be raised by a loving mother and father, blah blah blah. . .And when that happens I’ll be sure to let you know. In the real world, what a child needs is love. And while there might be certain benefits to having one male and one female parent, there are others to having a single parent. And still more to having two male parents. And others to having two female parents. Personally, if I’d been raised by both of my birth parents, I’d be a much less functional human than I am now. My father never wanted me. My parents were married, he consented to have kids, then realized it was a mistake for him and left. It was good too, as he was pretty clearly becoming abusive. So. . .yeah, I made my way pretty well without the whole “dad” figure in my life. And you can say on and on that the “ideal” way is the best. But that’s useless conjecture. Hundreds of thousands of children wait for a family in this country in far less ideal situations than to be adopted by gay families.

TampaZeke

Dan, you say, “Nicolosi has a book, based on extensive therapy, that has kept many boys from becoming effeminate.”

But you failed to cite references, peer reviewed references to back up your claim that his book “has kept many boys from becoming effeminate”.

Please provide these references.

I would also like to hear your feelings on straight parents where BOTH are feminine or BOTH are masculine. We ALL know such couples.

Is it important that the feminine partner have a vagina and the masculine partner have a penis? I mean, is a passive, gentle, artistic, straight man with absolutely no interest in sports a better masculine influence for a child than a strong, dominant, physical, athletic, tom boy woman?

I just want to make sure I get all the rules on gender roles straight.

Dan Farrell

The word “ideal” tends to suggest an unattainable perfection, which is why I prefer the word standard. There should be marriage courses and other forms of support to minimize the cases of irresponsible or abusive people like your father, and there should be a maximum of honor and benefit for those able to commit to the kind of marriage that offers gender complementarity in child-raising. There are, of course, exceptions, including my grandmother, who was an orphan and still turned out well, but the social dysfunctions that have been on the increase for the past several decades are based on the general rule, not the exceptions.

Sarah

So you’re saying that those waiting children I mentioned should be left in foster care situations rather than placed with “non-standard” parents? I’m sorry, but regardless of the dysfunction you cite, the world can only be as it is and conjecture about what might happen if all things were perfect is foolish. We have to deal with what’s right in front of us in the best way we can. And, I believe that the most recent studies find that children of same sex couples are doing fairly well, thanks.
Also obvious troll is obvious. /bait

Greg

I’m with Sarah.

That, and I have a fervent wish that people start getting logic classes before graduation.

Dan Farrell

I don’t trust those studies. The biggest problem in society today is the lack of the kind of authority and discipline that a father can provide, especially to an older child. Children without fathers are more than twice as likely to get pregnant or have run-ins with the law as teenagers. This is a much bigger problem than all the other causative factors combined, including economic deprivation or public policy flaws. I haven’t formed an opinion about how best to deal with foster children, but the stability of marriage has to be restored through a resurgence of support for it, not by making other arrangements its equivalent.

Lael

Dan,

Social dysfunctions are on the increase because the population has increased, creating more people to be dysfunctional. Also consider that the vast majority of ‘parents’ in this world are, in fact, heterosexual. They turn out dysfunction quite well without help from ill-informed quasi studies that cherry pick information and put false spins on pieces of legitimate research material.

Lucky me, I had two sets of hetero parents. Mine divorced and each remarried. Shouldn’t that have been twice the re-enforcement of those virtues you keep going on about? Not really. I ended up with abuse, serious abuse, from both sets.

Gender traits is a bogus argument. I have more maternal instinct that my mother. The proof, I raised 3 sets of children as a live-in nanny. All 6 boys ended up straight. Imagine that. 5 of them are thriving while the 6th is deceased, due to his biological father’s neglect after I left. So, had I stayed… don’t think I won’t wonder to my dying day. Are you telling me that boy is better off dead than having a gay male to nurture his growing up?

Your use of ‘standard’ is as unrealistic as ‘ideal’. There is no standard anything in the world. There is infinite variation and how we adapt to that variation. Why are preacher’s kids more likely to cut up and act out? Isn’t their homelife exemplary? Aren’t they taught right? Aren’t the example’s supposed to be even better? You can’t take a singular ‘ideal’ or ‘standard’ and claim it will always work, in every case, under every circumstance, worldwide without getting laughed at and exceptions thrown at you over and over.

Remember this: Gay parents produce gay kids at exactly the same rate as heterosexual parents produce gay kids. 9 out of 10 are straight, regardless of parents. Your argument is baseless, useless, unscientific and pretty plainly unrealistic without the props of ego and religious credo. Child rearing is about loving and teaching the child how to best adapt to the world and how to be as successful as possible while understanding responsibility and consequences. Any parent able to do these things is an ideal parent, whether singular or in pairs.

Titus

Dan Farrell said:

“…Iâ€™d say we all have certain natural inclinations, but some of them arenâ€™t good for ourselves or for our impact on others and should therefore be resisted. Homosexuality is one of these…”

[citation needed]

Dan Farrell

You may have more maternal instinct than your mother, but that isn’t the usual situation or the instinct wouldn’t be called “maternal.” Yes, child-rearing is about loving, and on the whole, there is a father kind of love and a mother kind of love, each of which has its own distinctive strengths and lack of which very often produces dysfunction. You don’t need studies at all, just eyes and ears and minds that are open to the ambient reality. There’s a framework that maximizes love, and the dismissive attitude toward that so common in our culture today has produced the astounding rise in antisocial behavior which now must be reversed before it’s too late.

Jason D

“You donâ€™t need studies at all, just eyes and ears and minds that are open to the ambient reality”

Then the studies would just further prove this to be true.

But they don’t.

It was said we didn’t need science to prove the earth was flat or that the sun revolved around the earth, just eyes and ears!

Rob Tisinai

“You donâ€™t need studies at all, just eyes and ears and minds that are open to the ambient reality.”

Dan, step back for a moment from the topic at hand, and imagine someone said that about a belief you disagreed with. How would you react? Is there a chance you might think, “These are the words of someone who has no proof or evidence at all”?

Because, seriously, when someone denies peer-reviewed research in favor of “ambient reality,” it’s quite hard to take them seriously, no matter what the topic.

TampaZeke

Dan keeps comparing mother/father headed families to single mother families. He has yet to compare mother/father families to mother/mother or father/father families. He hasn’t pointed us to one peer reviewed study that compares mixed gender two-parent families to same gender two-parent families.

He talks about the lack of discipline in a fatherless family but doesn’t address two father families. He just pulls a claim out of his ass that a father can’t be nurturing or teach a child “feminine” qualities. Again, NO peer reviewed study is offered to back up his dubious claim.

Like Ted Olsen and David Boise so rightly said; you say make up all kinds of sh*t in comment sections, you can make TV ads that are full of misinformation but you CAN’T get away with that in a courtroom, on the stand, under oath and under cross examination. The Prop 8 trial proved that without a shadow of a doubt.

People like Dan, and his willingness to spew claim after claim with no peer reviewed studies to back him up, is a perfect example of Olsen and Boise point.

Eric in Oakland

Dan said: “… to the extent that homosexuality can be a matter of nurture rather than nature, thereâ€™s evidence of ways to prevent it.”

What evidence? Please cite one reputable study. To my knowledge there aren’t any.

Dan said: “We have all had decades of observation that should make this obvious without studies… I donâ€™t trust those studies.”

In other words, “don’t confuse me with facts. I have made up my mind and no amount of scientific evidence can convince me otherwise.”

Dan said: “As for myself, Iâ€™d say we all have certain natural inclinations, but some of them arenâ€™t good for ourselves or for our impact on others and should therefore be resisted. Homosexuality is one of these…”

I am glad that he at least understands that homosexuality is a “natural inclination”. Howevever, it is profoundly irresponsible to then suggest that it is not “… good for ourselves or… others…” and that one’s natural orientation should be “resisted.” Each year, thousands of teens commit suicide or turn to drug abuse because homophobic prejudices like this makes them unable to accept their natural orientation. If Dan really cared about the wellbeing of children, he would not be pushing a psychologically destructive ideology or supporting a hatemongering con artist like Nicolosi.

Dan said: “…the stability of marriage has to be restored through a resurgence of support for it, not by making other arrangements its equivalent.”

I completely agree. That is one reason why it is so important for gay people to be allowed to marry, rather than being forced into other inferior arrangements such as civil unions, domestic partnerships, reciprocal beneficiaries, or cohabitation. These inferior arrangements are not in the best interest of the couples, the children, or society in general.

Dan said: “Children without fathers are more than twice as likely to get pregnant or have run-ins with the law as teenagers.”

Actually, while there may be evidence that children in single parent homes are more likely to have issues than children in two parent homes, the available evidence does not show that one of the two parents must have a penis.

TampaZeke

You know you’re wasting your time when trying to have an intelligent debate with a person who says, “don’t confuse the issue with proven facts!”

Kith

The problem with “studies” that prove you can “teach” away the gay is that we still rely on self reporting for homosexuality and if a child grew up in an environment that was so worried about you having teh ghey that they altered the language, activities and parenting styles to get rid of it, one thing you can bet the child will learn better then anything else is how to hide teh ghey. So in fact what these studies are “proving” that we’ve taught kids how to better live in the closet.

Now I know this is the preferred status for all the little gay chillen in the world as far as most Ex-gay groups are concerned, there are extensive studies that prove people who are taught to suppress or hide traits* usually suffer long term emotional and in some cases physical harm.

*This includes any physical or perceived trait, including but not limited to, country of origin, religion, handedness, sexuality, parental identity. . .

David

Dan Farrell said:

â€œâ€¦Iâ€™d say we all have certain natural inclinations, but some of them arenâ€™t good for ourselves or for our impact on others and should therefore be resisted. Homosexuality is one of theseâ€¦â€

This is an odd assertion, given that the evidence of “decades of observation that should make this obvious without studies” actually, centuries of observation, indicate that it is anti-homosexual prejudice, and anti-homosexual theology, that is not good for ourselves, gay or straight, or our impact on others.

Anti-homosexual prejudice and theology are concretely shown by experience across centuries to destroy families, incite hate crimes and genocide, degrade the value of all humans, exacerbate gender inequities, and cultivate pride, a deadly sin according to Christianity, in heterosexuals.

Candace

I guess everybody here is going to be waiting a long time for Dan to cite any studies that support the claims he’s making….

Snickers Bars all around.

Scott P.

Sarah, loved the lolspeak!

dave

This is the same phenomenon as god and religion. You make these thoughts up in your mind, block out reality and force your self to believe them as true.

Priya Lynn

Dan said “What Iâ€™m talking about is the whole human race, all of us, being better off when we have had the advantage of being raised with the feminine influence of a mother and the complementary masculine influence of a father. We have all had decades of observation that should make this obvious without studies.”.

Utter nonsense. There’s been dozens and dozens of studies, perhaps hundreds and all have shown that the children of same sex parents do just as well, if not better than the children of heterosexuals. There are no studies that say otherwise, and no studies that compare single parent families to mother/father families don’t count.

Dan said “Iâ€™d say we all have certain natural inclinations, but some of them arenâ€™t good for ourselves or for our impact on others and should therefore be resisted. Homosexuality is one of these…”.

That’s a lie. Every major mental and physical health organization agrees that gayness is a natural positive variation of human sexuality and that those who positively accept their orientation are better adjusted and happier than those who do not.

Aeval

Dan Farrell quotes:

“..should make this obvious without studies.”
“I donâ€™t trust those studies.”
“You donâ€™t need studies at all, just eyes and ears..”

A chinese quote:
â€œThose who do not study are only cattle dressed up in men’s clothesâ€

Tara TASW

Sarah, I’m a CPS worker, (“TASW” is short for my usual nickname, “the antisocial social worker”), and you are very right.

The WORST thing we can do for a child is let them sit in foster care with no permanent home, no one they can trust to be around forever. Waiting around for some “idealized” heterosexual couple means the children may be moved one or more times, and at a minimum they’re living with the insecurity and stigma of being foster children. Children need parents – single, married, gay or straight.

justsearching

Earlier on David said “The ‘wiser heads’ have already proved that your sexual orientation is hard-wired at birth. Gay/straight brain scans, birth-order studies (in utero hormone changes), identical twin studies all point to the same conclusion.”

I think we’re speaking a bit too soon here. Birth-order studies suggest that in-utero hormones can influence whether or not one becomes gay. Brain scans haven’t really shown much at all, because these scans are done of adults and our brains could end up indicating a preference for one sex or the other, but that is no indication what the brain was like at birth. Identical twin studies, from what I’ve read, show that if one of the identical twins is gay, there is somewhere between a 30-50% chance that the other will be gay as well. That seems to show that genes and in-utero hormones aren’t enough to explain homosexuality.

In my opinion, we don’t need to be assured that we were born this way. Regardless of how we got to be the way we are, our orientation seems fairly immutable. Our relationships and our legal right to marry ought to be respected regardless of what scientists conclude about the origins of homosexuality.

Identical twin studies, from what Iâ€™ve read, show that if one of the identical twins is gay, there is somewhere between a 30-50% chance that the other will be gay as well. That seems to show that genes and in-utero hormones arenâ€™t enough to explain homosexuality.

Identical twins do not have identical genomes. This throws a wrench into the “if twins don’t have it it’s not genetic” side, not just in sexuality studies, but any study involving identical twins.

Kate

Speaking of reading that which has been “cited”…I just read the excerpt from the book that started this whole thread, and it says that allowing children to participate in same-sex groups without close supervision is “unwise and dangerous”, and mentions that scouting and YW/YMCA organizations are specifically suspect.

OMG…the GIRL SCOUTS could have made me ghey! Well, that and the fact that “Our whole social fabric is woven so as to make all women slightly homosexual”…IT SAYS SO RIGHT ON PAGE 179. (see? I cited.)

Even old, venerable looking crap is still crap.

Dan Farrell, I have to ask, do you have an over all goal here? Is there a specific question you need answered, or is there something you’re trying to tell us? Is there somewhere you’re trying to direct us?

Jason D

justsearching said: “In my opinion, we donâ€™t need to be assured that we were born this way. Regardless of how we got to be the way we are, our orientation seems fairly immutable. Our relationships and our legal right to marry ought to be respected regardless of what scientists conclude about the origins of homosexuality.”

Absolutely.

I have often said this. It doesn’t matter whether being gay is a choice or not a choice, what matters are outcomes.

Homosexuality is not an illness, LGBT people are perfectly capable of going to school, interacting positively with other classmates, studying, graduating, getting advanced degrees, finding and maintaining employment, handling their bills, obeying laws, socializing positively with peers, falling in love and forming commitments, and raising happy, untraumatized, productive children.
In short, homosexuality, in and of itself, is neutral. It does not harm anyone and does not boost anyone’s abilities any moreso than heterosexuality.

Ben in Atlanta

“The biggest problem in society today is the lack of the kind of authority and discipline that a father can provide, especially to an older child.”

That is both patriarchal and sexist. Men and women can do anything equally well. Gender roles are artificial and arbitrary. They have never been innate, just traditional.

FWIW the children of same gender parents or single parents in my neighborhood are not growing up without the influence of either males or females. We do not live or raise our children in isolation.

Dan Farrell

Has anyone here had a mother? (Remember, I didn’t ask if anyone here has seen a peer-reviewed study. I asked if anyone has had a mother.) Okay, now, when you were little, couldn’t you go to her and relate to her in a particular way? Do you seriously believe that could have been replaced by Tom, Dick, or Harry? I’ve had decades of experience observing this in all its forms, including as a child and as a parent myself, and so has anyone else here with his eyes open. We’re not talking about the eating habits of the Hottentots here, or some other subject where you have to compare studies. Are you going to tell me that a women is nothing compared to a man except in the realm of anatomy? There’s a lot of harmful nonsense being propagated lately.

Rob Tisinai

“Okay, now, when you were little, couldn’t you go to her and relate to her in a particular way?”

We keep you asking to be specific.

You keep…declining.

Dan Farrell

Rob, I said it before: “Kids need the softness of a mother; mothers are more inclined than fathers to stress relationships and sympathy.” I was more the roughhousing type with my kids when they were little; they needed that too.

Ben in Oakland

“mothers are more inclined than fathers to stress relationships and sympathy.â€

Citation for that, please.

And since they are “more inclined”, how much more to they need to be inclined before they are considered superior to fathers, or whatever it is that you are claiming.

Citation, please.

Actually, my mother pretty much didn’t like anyone. My father was the one who taught me about compassion and caring for others.

Tara TASW

I have two absolutely wonderful heterosexual parents who are still married after 50+ years.

And I’m still queer as the proverbial 3-dollar bill.

Rob Tisinai

All right, Dan, thanks for being specific, then. Completely stereotypical and unfounded, but specific.

I think a fair question would be to ask a child of two fathers or two mothers, “could you replace either of your dads or moms with any Jane, Diane, or Mary/Tom Dick or Harry?”

I’m sure they would say they wouldn’t replace their parents with anyone in the world, even if it were of the “correct” gender.

Jason D

Has anyone here had a mother? (Remember, I didnâ€™t ask if anyone here has seen a peer-reviewed study. I asked if anyone has had a mother.)

In other words you want us to think anecdotally, not scientifically. You have no proof, no observed, tested, reviewed and refined data. You have anecdotes, you have stereotypes, you have appeals to tradition, and appeals to emotion, but nothing real, true, or concrete.

Nothing that’s actually been proven to be true, just things you think, feel, should be true, therefore you assert them as if they were. This is what comedian Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness”

You dismiss serious study into the subject because it doesn’t support your deeply held beliefs. Well, people deeply believed that the sun was revolving around the earth—because that’s what they saw with their eyes! They believed the earth was flat because it appeared to be so to their “open eyes”.

Other Fred in the UK

@ Emily K

Identical twins do not have identical genomes.

Please could you explain?

Lael

Dan said, “Okay, now, when you were little, couldnâ€™t you go to her and relate to her in a particular way? Do you seriously believe that could have been replaced by Tom, Dick, or Harry?”

Actually, you are still off. Remember, I was a nanny. The kids were more likely to come to me than their mothers OR fathers with problems, needs and desire for comfort. You are talking about positive nurturing, hugs and kisses and affection. Guess what, male and female, that makes no difference at all. None. Zero. This is based on MY experience, which is counter to yours.

I am still in contact with my families that I took care of. The youngest of the first family is 21 now. Guess what? He still considers me his other dad and he comes to me to talk out his problems and for the unconditional love I have always given him. He is 21 now and doing wonderfully. He was 3 when I started taking care of him. He has made me honorary grandfather to his first child. I nurtured his empathy and caring from little and he still has it today.

His bio father still treats him like crap. His mother died 5 months after hiring me, of cancer. I took care of her , the kids and the house. I stayed after she died for 3 more years because the youngest was already attached to me. Your assumptions, without fact, fall to pieces in the face of reality. Any parent can teach what you claim only comes from one or the other.

My mother was physically, emotionally and mentally abusive. No, I did not go to her to the things you claim. Ever. I went to my father. I was a daddy’s boy, always was. So much for stereotypes.

You keep forgetting that the world simply is not that ideal 1950’s fraud of family that you keep pushing for. Child abuse and spouse abuse was rampant, just not talked about. Wives took pills to cope and children rebelled to keep their sanity and individuality. No one can live that way. This world has so much variation that what you keep pushing has no basis in reality, scientifically or through personal experience. For every example you give, I can give thousands of exactly the opposite.

Your experiences are comparable to no one else’s. They are yours. They can’t be duplicated. You stubbornly argue here and in the face of direct evidence and example, purposefully and willfully ignore it. You convert no one to your views, and likely won’t. Give it up. To continue is a sign of mental instability and you really should take time to consider just what you are doing. Seek counseling.

werdna

@Other Fred in the UK

Here’s an article from Scientific American on genetic variation between identical twins.

Dan Farrell

You can always find exceptions, especially when one parent is absent or abusive. In the inner city, I’ve read that about nine out of ten kids without the authority or discipline of a father have run-ins with the law, compared with just one out of ten among kids that have that advantage. Girls without fathers are twice as likely to be promiscuous and become pregnant. As a culture, we’re playing around with gender at our peril.

penguinsaur

As a culture, weâ€™re playing around with gender at our peril.

Except that you’ve been arguing about this for 50 posts and you still haven’t cited a single scientific study to back you up.

Post a single peer reviewed scientific study from an organization that doesn’t get the majority of it’s funding from churches. *AKA no ‘9 out of 10 NARTH members agree gayness is bad’*

Post a single peer-reviewed study that in any way supports your claims that children do worse with gay parents or admit you’re lying.

Candace

(First, let me state that I am an undergrad student in the Psychology program at Florida International University, specializing in Behavior Analysis.)

OK, Dan, since you won’t cite references, I’ll give you some:

The work referenced above is by John B. Watson, known as the founder of Behavior Analysis. His work was preceeded by Pavlov and followed by Thorndike and Skinner and has grown into a science in its own right, with thousands of practicing Behavior Analysts today around the world.

Watson is known for his observations and experiments in the field of Child-rearing (such as his famous work with Little Albert, a baby that was presented with a cute, cuddly bunny while Watson snuck up in back of him and made a loud clang. Little Albert became terried of the bunny, then Santa Clause and even a fuzzy sweater. He was allowed to leave the experiment without being de-conditioned, so god only knows what became of hm.)

Watson’s father was a drunkard with several mistresses who deserted the family when the boy was 13. He wrote that his father “betrayed him” (Cohen, 1979). and all his life he was “fearful of too much intimate contact.” (Ibid., p.9).

He was greatly influenced by The Care and Feeding of Children by L. Emmett, who wrote: “Babies under 6 months old should never be played with, and of kissing, the less the better.” (Cable, 1975, p. 166-167).

Watson himself went of to say this about caring for children: “Treat them as though they were young adults. Dress them, bathe them with care and circumspection. Let your behavior always be objective. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when you say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job of a difficult task.” (Watson, 1928, p. 12).

Cable, M. (1975). The Little Darlings: A History of Child rearing in America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

(Cohen, D. (1979). J. B. Watson: The Founder of Behaviorism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Dan, you don’t have a clue that the “expert” on child-rearing that you are trying to agree with was an individual who was traumatized by his own parents and thus rejected parent-child intimacy not only for himself, but on behalf of chilren everywhere. His model of child-rearing would not be accepted by any therapist or professional on this planet today. He isn’t exactly an expert witness for your side of the Equality struggle.

& I’m still waiting for you to provide a single citation for the statements you have offered thus far as proof that your opinions are correct.

Dan Farrell

I can’t believe it’s so necessary to state the obvious: Children need the cuddling and so on that a mother can provide! Three men and a baby was a comedy, not a model for human behavior. This should be like stating that we need air and water. We should be, as a society, earnestly going about the business of putting an extremely high value on training responsible mothers and fathers. Speaking of mistresses, I have a friend who had one and left his wife and four children for her but anyone who complains about this kind of deviant behavior nowadays is “judgmental” or “holier-than-thou” or “intolerant.” Child neglect is becoming the standard. Finding a path back toward a degree of intolerance wouldn’t be a bad idea if it can somehow be done with humility. I don’t claim to know how to do this. I tried to say something to that friend and now he won’t speak to me.

Rob Tisinai

So Dan, your argument comes down to this: Fathers cannot adequately cuddle with their children.

That may say more your (and your father’s) ability to cuddle than it does about anything else. The fact that you find yourself and your father deficient in the capacity to cuddle does not form the basis of sound public policy.

Dan Farrell

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
======================

BLOGGERS ANNOUNCE THAT WOMEN
ARE JUST BODY PARTS

Washington, DC (AP)Sept. 5 … Master bloggers from Box Turtle Bulletin announced today their conclusion that women offer nothing distinctive and may be considered just different because they have different body parts.

“We’ve exploded the myth that women offer anything special to little children, for instance,” said Rob Tisinai. “All a man has to do is get one of his friends to partner up with him and it’s all exactly the same.”

Bloggers on BTB were particularly incensed by the notion that a woman does anything by way of bonding with her child. Their peer-reviewed studies have shown that a womb is needed but that immediately upon exiting that womb a child can be handled easily by a man.

Adding to this theory, they exploded the myth that boys without fathers had anything to do with crime. “Just stating that 85% of criminals didn’t have fathers is totally irrelevant,” the bloggers agreed.

Rob Tisinai

Sorry, Dan, didn’t realize you were 12.

When you grow up, you’ll learn a study about children from broken homes has nothing to do with children who grow up with two committed parents.

It’s nice to know that for you, suggesting that a father can be loving and affectionate means a mother can’t. Yeah, it’s completely logic: somehow, somewhere, a mechanism drains women of their cuddliness and love for their children whenever a man starts showing these traits.

Scott P.

LOL A certain troll’s arguments are really devolving, aren’t they?

Dan Farrell

The heart of the heart of the whole thing is that human beings need to have the influence of a mother’s parenting style AND a father’s parenting style or else they are handicapped to the extent that one is lacking. Dr. Kyle Pruett of Yale in his book called Fatherneed spells it out from that viewpoint and Brenda Hunter in The Power of Mother Love spells it out from the other side. Kids need the softness of a mother and the roughhousing of a father, or as Carol Gilligan of Harvard says, fathers stress rules, mothers relationships, fathers fairness, mothers sympathy. Boys who grow up with fathers are less likely to be violent because they learn from fathers how to affirm and channel masculinity properly. Kids need the constant experience of the complementary parenting styles, and all the meddling of church and state to nullify that is damaging.

Rob Tisinai

“Boys who grow up with fathers are less likely to be violent…”

Is that based on studies of children from broken homes or studies of children with two committed lesbian parents. ‘Cause one does not tell us anything about the other.

“…because they learn from fathers how to affirm and channel masculinity properly.”

And how on earth would you actually test such a hypothesis? Or is it just someone’s unsubstantiated theorizing?

Rob Tisinai

“Carol Gilligan of Harvard says, fathers stress rules, mothers relationships, fathers fairness, mothers sympathy.”

Did Carol determine this by studying same-sex parenting couples?

Eric in Oakland

Dan has just proven that he has no interest in honest discourse. Rather than answer the actual comments or questions of other bloggers, he feels the need to misrepresent statements and outright lie about what they have shown.

With all this insistence on traditionally feminine and masculine roles, I suspect Dan would like to take us back to the days when a woman was only allowed to perform jobs like cooking,cleaning, and child care. This isn’t about finding out what is best for chilren, it is about forcing people to conform to bronze age gender roles.

Oh yeah, reaffirm one’s masculinity, like Pedro Jones when he beat his girlfriend’s 17-month-old son to death for acting like a girl. That much good it did him, right?

Dan Farrell

A little dose of reality would do you folks some good on the subject of fathers, too — not just mothers. If a boy only has women to raise him, he might turn out fine, but an extremely large percentage of them don’t. A mother canâ€™t show a son how to control his impulses because sheâ€™s not a man and doesnâ€™t have the same urges as one. Boys in father-absent families are twice as likely as those in two-parent ones to go to jail. Boys without married fathers populate our street gangs, and these gangs are responsible for an inordinately high level of violence. We rely on the police to control gangs, but the important, and often absent, control is that exercised by fathers. A fatherless boy doesnâ€™t have a man with whom to identify and is more likely to have trouble forming a healthy masculine identity.A father teaches a boy how to properly channel his aggressive and sexual drives. A father also commands a form of respect from a boy that a mother doesnâ€™tâ€“â€“a respect more likely to keep the boy in line. So boys without fathers are more likely to become delinquent and end up incarcerated. The prison population has quintupled since the Sixties — roughly the same rate of increase as the percentage of kids growing up without fathers.

Rob Tisinai

Dan, I have to say that it doesn’t look like you’re even trying here. I’ve asked you over and over whether your studies about fatherless kids are looking at broken (single-parent) homes or kids with two committed lesbian parents.

Now you give us this: “Boys in father-absent families are twice as likely as those in two-parent ones to go to jail.”

You realize, don’t you, that your statement says nothing AT ALL about opposite-sex parents vs. same-sex parents. It only compares single-parent homes to two-parent homes. That’s not what we’re talking about.

Eric in Oakland

Dan said: “A little dose of reality would do you folks some good…”

You mean the kind of “reality” that is the exact opposite of scientific evidence?

Dan Farrell

You can’t take a father-absent family and just plug in one more woman to get a better result. People aren’t fungible.

Scott P.

Rob, I came to that conclusion after just three of the troll’s rambles. He’s not here for any honest reason.

Eric in Oakland

“You canâ€™t take a father-absent family and just plug in one more woman to get a better result. People arenâ€™t fungible.”

You are the one denying the differences between people if you think ANY man can “show a son how to control his impulses” and provide “roughhousing” better than ANY woman?

I have a sister-in-law who plays football with all her nieces and nephews. She also boxes and is a very good mechanic. In your little stereotypical world view, you would probably see her as very masculine. Contrariwise, there is the example of Lael, who has commented on this thread.

Your precious gender stereotypes are not innate and do not fit most people. The are just social constructs and hold-overs from a chauvanistic past.

Candace

Methinks the troll has some serious issues involving his own father and is projecting a little too much in this thread.

Dan, I agree with other posters that you’re not being honest in your answers and since it’s very apparent that you aren’t convincing anyone here of anything, then your dishonesty is only directed at yourself.

You might want to get some therapy to find out why you do that.

David

“I canâ€™t believe itâ€™s so necessary to state the obvious: Children need the cuddling and so on that a mother can provide!”

Dan Farrell, I’m going to be blunt with you. The only thing that a parent of one gender can provide that the other cannot – is sex.

There is no personality trait that women have a monopoly on, nor is there any personality trait that all women, or even all mothers, manifest.

There is no personality trait that men have a monopoly on, nor is there any personality trait that all men, or even all fathers, manifest.

You are making parenting about genitalia, and that is very disturbing.

“A little dose of reality would do you folks some good” This sort of snarky comment discredits the entirety of your posts. It has been pointed out to you, repeatedly, that your opinions here do not represent anyone else’s reality. Additionally, your derogatory and abusive claims, as “decades of experience observing this in all its form” creates overt persecution, violence and murder targeted at GLBTQ people.

Don’t snark at us about our own reality.

Dan Farrell

“I have a sister-in-law who plays football with all her nieces and nephews.” That’s the most characteristic response of all I’ve heard on this thread and others I’ve taken part in. You can find a lot of things out there — even on the physical side (women who are stronger than the average man, men who are weaker than the average woman etc etc). But it’s typically the men out there doing the football thing and that sort of stuff. But the men aren’t around as much any more because of the loosy-goosy social attitudes about sex being whatever you feel like doing with whomever whenever. As a result, more young girls are pregnant, more young boys are acting out, including illegally, and the whole society is paying the price in mental illness and prisons bursting at the seams.

MJC

Martin Ssempa could not have said that better!

David

“Thatâ€™s the most characteristic response of all Iâ€™ve heard on this thread and others Iâ€™ve taken part in. ”

And yet it is an example of the very standard you repeatedly employ: “decades of experience observing this”. So, the standard of observation and anecdote is valid when you use it, but false when others do. That indicates that your argument is false.

“But itâ€™s typically the men out there doing the football thing and that sort of stuff.”

Good grief, football has only existed since the mid 19th century. Meanwhile, anthropologists have established that the work load consistently assigned to women, through most of human history, is at least as heavy, if not more so, than that assigned to men.

Your remarks simply do not reflect reality, Dan Farrell. And you continue to dodge the reality that anti-gay prejudice, which you have endorsed here, demonstrably harms real human beings.

Aaron

I’ve just read through all of the comments above and find them to be an excellent study of a great deal of the fundamentalist evangelical rhetoric that gets thrown around as “fact.”

I will be returning to seminary for my final year in a few weeks and look forward to the lively discussions that the above have inspired me to begin with some of my dear, albeit misguided, conservative friends.

Peace on you all. :)

David

“As a result, more young girls are pregnant, more young boys are acting out, including illegally, and the whole society is paying the price in mental illness and prisons bursting at the seams.”

Actually, a very strong case can be made that the behavior you are complaining about, Dan, correlates with conservative gender roles, social and political ideologies, and the economic consequences of conservative policies.

After all, boys ‘acting out’ are just acting out the gender role of aggressiveness, lawlessness, and ego modeled for them by conservative clergy, politicians, businessmen and ideologues. As conservatives have framed sexuality entirely in terms of genitalia, rather than respect, fidelity, love, authenticity, and trained boys that unfettered heterosexual sexual expression is proof of their masculinity, they’ve taken to engaging in sex at younger ages, pressuring girls to comply.

Face it, the social mess our society is in now reflects the work of the “traditional family values” folk and their propaganda war on women, GLBTQ people, and liberty.

Eric in Oakland

Rob, at the end of your article, you say “Really, isnâ€™t it time they admit theyâ€™re just making this shit up?”

Dan Farrell’s responses illustrate just how unlikely such an admission is. No amount of logic, scientific studies, real world examples, or exposure of the anti-gay lies will ever be enough for some people. Cherished hatreds and deep seated bigotries are not so easily given up. It is too comfortable to blame difficult problems on an unpopular minority and cling to simple fantasies than to seek solutions in the real world.

My sincere hope is that most people are not so deeply invested in homophobic and misogynistic mythology as Dan. Despite his anti-scientific convictions, parents do not require a penis or vagina in order to raise healthy and well adjusted children. If Dan believes a child can only be taught discipline and respect by someone with a penis, then I pity any child in his care.

mikeksf

“Finding a path back toward a degree of intolerance wouldnâ€™t be a bad idea if it can somehow be done with humility”

Dan, could you please practice your idea of humble intolerance just a bit. Your diatribe really does smacks of egocentrism. If you simply keep taking that backward path you’re on, pretty soon you’ll discover your natural state of intolerant humility. Go ahead, don’t be afraid. I already think you’re intolerant, and I think this blog should make you feel humbled.

Could ” humble intolerance” be the new “compassionate conservative”? Is this the same as” love the sinner, blah, blah, blah”.

penguinsaur

A SINGLE PEER-REVIEWED STUDY THAT SHOWS SAME-SEX COUPLES MAKE WORSE PARENTS THAN STRAIGHT ONES.

As far as I can tell from skimming his posts Dan’s argument has been to claim that it’s just obvious that kids need a mom and dad and the proof is all around us, but at the same time he can’t find a single peer-reviewed study that has noticed this obvious proof all around them.

David

â€œFinding a path back toward a degree of intolerance wouldnâ€™t be a bad idea if it can somehow be done with humilityâ€ ”

I missed that one. Its a nice fantasy.

However, intolerance is intrinsically a matter of pride – which C.S. Lewis, among others, called the worst and first sin. Intolerance is the state of believing that others are inferior to one’s self and one’s select group – that’s pride at work. This particular form of pride, which is the self-regard corrupted to the extreme, is the opposite of humility (humility being self-regard without the perception of superiority over others).

Intolerance in intrinsically incompatible with humility – while tolerance and acceptance are expressions of humility.

I’m still waiting for Dan Farrell’s long list of “health risks” associated with being a lesbian. Or, more specifically, associated with lesbian sex.

grantdale

Mmmmm, les-bean sex. Oh.oh. Sorry, where was I? Emily: stop it. (words like that will make Dan go and commit yet another mortal dirty sin. Shudder.)

Hoo-kay…

“I tried to say something to that friend and now he wonâ€™t speak to me.”

People, I suspect that is the story of Dan’s life.

There are only so many pompous insults offered as baseless ‘common sense’ that any normal person can — no, should — endure from a NOM stooge.

Nothing said, no evidence presented, no pointing out of the obvious fallacies will make a whit of difference to the underlying attitude that is driving this sort of behaviour from people like Dan. If it were possible to make any difference you would have thought that the 3 weeks of intensive scrutiny in the Prop 8 trial would have done it. But, no, the Dans could offer nothing but their own nasty opinion; and that was proven wrong in any case.

Gay couples are going to continue to successfully raise children whether married or not, or whether Dan agrees or not. And, eventually, we too are going to join the embarrassingly long list of people previously denied but now enjoying full legal rights. As promised all those years ago.

Ignore him. Scrape Dan off your shoe and pretend you never stepped on him in the first place; as you should do with all opinionated but ignorant people.

ps Rob T: I think the word you are looking for is ‘hypothesis’, not ‘theory’. A theory needs at least some basis.

Dan Farrell

There were comments above about people needing certain physical attributes in connection with parenting. That’s the opposite of what I’m saying. That’s what I think YOU’RE saying — that gender is anatomy. The complementarity of the genders in child-rearing is emotional and psychological. There’s an immense amount of delusion out there about how these factors are nothing but a social construct, just because there’s a degree of overlap, but children are suffering as a result, which is the same as saying the whole human race is suffering as a result.

Lorenzo from Oz

There are quite a few studies of children brought up by same-sex couples. They regularly show that, if anything, such children turn out slightly better on average than those raised by opposite-sex couples. I suspect that is a selection effect (i.e. there are more hurdles to being an same-sex parenting couple so they may be, on average, slightly more committed to parenting) but it does show that “children need a mother and a father” is just not supported by the evidence.
Even with single parents, if one controls for socio-economic status, the negative effects disappear. In other words, being raised by a poor single parent is not a good look for children: apart from that, the effects become about individual parenting, not categories.
So, if one wants to “talk down” a group of parents, just make sure they include low socio-economic status single parents.
And yes, that does mean one could “prove” heterosexuals make worse parents by including single parents in the “heterosexual” group.

Lorenzo from Oz

Also, studies have also tended to find that the same-sex oriented tend to be “cognitively cross-matched”. That is, gay men tend to include typically “female” cogntive traits and gay women tend to include typically “male” cognitive traits.
This may not be a huge shock, if one thinks about it.
So, being raised by a same-sex couple may not be as purely a “one sex” experience as one might think.

Dan Farrell

David,

What you’re saying is for anyone to comment on someone else’s deviant sex life, such as my approaching my friend about his adultery and abandonment, cannot be compatible with humility. I think actually it can work if the relationship goes deeper than talking about superficialities. People have to get more intentional about mentoring one another. The alternative is awful to contemplate. What my friend has done, I believe, will have more lastingly painful consequences that the crime committed by most people who are now in jails. That doesn’t mean he should be sent to jail, but it does suggest that society needs to find ways of handling these things in the court of social approval and disapproval.

Priya Lynn

Dan said “The heart of the heart of the whole thing is that human beings need to have the influence of a motherâ€™s parenting style AND a fatherâ€™s parenting style or else they are handicapped to the extent that one is lacking…If a boy only has women to raise him, he might turn out fine, but an extremely large percentage of them donâ€™t.”.

That is a lie and your constant repetition of it won’t make it true. The fact is that an overwhelming volume of peer reviewed research shows that children of same sex parents do just as well, if not better than the children of opposite sex parents.

Richard Rush

Dan Farrell suffers from multiple psychological disorders which include:

Gay Obsession Disorder,
Gender Obsession Disorder, and
Genitalia Obsession Disorder.

And it seems rather appropriate that the acronym for all three of them is GOD. The catalyst for Dan’s condition could be different, of course, but somehow I doubt it.

grantdale

People have to get more intentional about mentoring one another.

That isn’t anything near a constructed form of language. It’s the type of blither you hear from cranks.

I declare Dan as a Sarah.

Dan Farrell

If I have a condition, I would call it broad-mindedness. The comments of so many on the issue are narrow-minded because: (1) they see marriage relationships as a private matter — a right that is no one else’s business. In reality, it’s much more than a right. No one ever dressed up and showed up to a ceremony to celebrate my right to free speech or free assembly. They do when people get married, however, because the whole community is part of the bargain and provides honors, privileges, and benefits for the sake of social stability.

(2) people aren’t connecting the dots between social and psychological dysfunction on the one hand and growing up with a loving mother and father on the other hand. But if you examine the connection carefully, you find that it’s much stronger than economics or any other causative factor. There are some great studies on this by Patrick Fagen of the Heritage Foundation.

So in short, marriages where only the two lovers are present should be null and void. Funny, I imagined that the day I get married, I would invite people not because I want their approval, but because I want to tell them they’re part of my life too. In short: I’m inviting people who I want to share my private life with, not people whose absence will somehow make my marriage feel “less complete.”

Oh, and Dan, maybe people didn’t show up at a ceremony to celebrate your right to free speech or free assembly because you didn’t invite them to. See, ceremonies need invitations. No one is going to come up to you and spontaneously celebrate your rights.

Scott P.

grantdale, from what I’ve seen Sarah uses lolspeak for effect, Dan just blathers.

Regan DuCasse

Wow…
Dan, if you’re still here: each little piece of information you’re invoking are disconnected from important context and comparisons to same sex couples.

Your comments are mostly entrenched in OLD FASHIONED ideals regarding the prescribed roles of gender, with NONE of the actual individual’s character or abilities involved.
It’s all quite easy to say men only do this, and women only do this, because their physical traits dictate it.
But that’s reductive, unrealistic and to this day, women are FORCED into those prescriptions, disregarding their abilities as INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE, rather than women.
Your information ASSUMES a lot about women that’s NEVER been true, actually.
But as far as the real world goes. Poverty, domestic violence and illiteracy are feminized in the world.
The brutality of men, in enforcing prescriptions based on religious dogma is following anti gay sentiment as an extension of this misogyny.
Here in America, assaults on females is still distinct and prevalent.

Does it not occur to you that the incidence of homosexuality and transgenderism is an extension of built in survival for our species AGAINST the violent misogyny we witness every day?
That men and women who are in between those artificial standards of gender, are actually the protective and functional BRIDGE between men and women.
THAT is what should be obvious.

As for the pathologies and criminal statistics among fatherless children.
As stated, this is not compared to lesbian couples, but against the emotional trauma of ABANDONMENT.

Those of criminal status know that their fathers rejected them, likely abused and neglected them before that profound abandonment. Which leads to the very poverty and lack of economic security that could keep these young people from risking crime and prison.

Just because YOU are stupid Dan, and buy into every lame assed theory as if it’s gospel is lazyness on YOUR part.
We are not stating opinions here like you.
But irrefutable facts.
And YOUR information, and how it’s disseminated has as much credibility as information on blacks coming from committed segregationists.
You don’t WANT to know any differently, because then you’d have to understand something about gay people you just don’t want to.

That heterosexuality give no more moral or intellectual superiority to a person, than white skin ever did.
See?
All the information you’ve collected is from as suspect a source.
And you deserve to be called out on WHY you use those sources, and who has the cred to tell you.
DO you get your info about Jews from non Jewish, anti Semitics?
Then why is your information from non gay, anti gay sources any better as credible and trustworthy?

And if you don’t want to be considered a bigot, maybe you shouldn’t use information FROM bigots and distorted sources to make your case.

David

“There were comments above about people needing certain physical attributes in connection with parenting. Thatâ€™s the opposite of what Iâ€™m saying.”

No, it is not, Dan, because your fantasy about personality traits intrinsically linked to gender, is just a fantasy.

“Thatâ€™s what I think YOUâ€™RE saying â€” that gender is anatomy. The complementarity of the genders in child-rearing is emotional and psychological.”

And that is a fantasy, and a very unhealthy one that contradicts the lives of most of humanity. There are no emotional or psychological traits that are restricted to one gender or the other.

“Thereâ€™s an immense amount of delusion out there about how these factors are nothing but a social construct,”

Dismissing the experience of most of humanity as delusion, is arrogant, and evidence that you have no fact-based, or experience based, argument to present.

“What youâ€™re saying is for anyone to comment on someone elseâ€™s deviant sex life, such as my approaching my friend about his adultery and abandonment, cannot be compatible with humility. ”

Absolutely. But guess what, I’m not the inventor of that, Jesus Christ is. Your assumption that a component of someone else’s life is ‘deviant sex’ is pride. You are concluding that because you do not approve, or because you find it icky, your disapproval defines that other person and his/her actions, life, emotions, motives.

That is pride. You are deciding that your opinion, your knowledge, your self-righteousness makes you qualified to judge someone else.

There is a point that you are missing – your heterosexual norm appears as deviant to other people. The idea of sex with someone of the opposite gender is repugnant, deviant, to people who are attracted to their own gender. Your sexuality is not superior, or normal, simply common. The moment you characterized homosexuality as deviant, you articulated an extraordinary level of pride. You simply are not qualified to judge other people’s sex lives.

“I think actually it can work if the relationship goes deeper than talking about superficialities.”

This next sentence reveals the ego, the pride, in your behavior. You think that you can fix someone if they fit your standard of what is, or is not, superficial. It is all about you, Dan, and that is not humility, it is pride and arrogance.

“People have to get more intentional about mentoring one another.”

There’s pride again, presuming that you are qualified to mentor – guide and instruct, someone else.

“What my friend has done, I believe,”

There’s your ego again.

You’ve remained silent about the strongest criticism directed at you.

The condemnation you’ve articulated against GLBTQ people directly causes harm to real human beings. Yet, out of pride, you continue to malign us. It is pride, Dan, that inspires you to argue that your family is superior to ours. It is pride that inspires you to argue that your theories are superior to our life experiences.

You aren’t being humble when you judge our lives, your being prideful and arrogant.

Dan Farrell

“People have to get more intentional about mentoring one another.”

“That isnâ€™t anything near a constructed form of language.” I apologize for the inadequacies of my self-expression, but what I’ve said does in fact contain meaning worthy of careful consideration. We live isolated lives, notwithstanding the blogosphere and all that, and if we have weaknesses about things that would harm ourselves and others, and all of us have these things, then the best thing is to set up deliberate structures in which we can confide in certain others and accept the insights and correction we may receive from them. I’ve seen this work. But it has to be intentional, deliberate, systematic.

Ben in Oakland

Some information about why some people might want to see a proctologist.

Incidence Rates And Costs Of HPV Infections There are an estimated 5.5 million new cases of HPV genital infections each year in the USA. Approximately 20 million people in the U.S. are currently infected with genital HPV. Over 5 million new infections of genital HPV are recorded every year in the U.S. There are over one hundred known strains of HPV There are over thirty known strains of genital wart causing HPV, which are sexually transmitted. Genital HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States. 50%-75% of sexually active people will be infected with genital HPV infection at some point in their life. By the age of fifty, 80% of women will have contracted the genital infection of HPV. Women have a far greater risk of contracting the disease because they are more conducive to infection. In the United States, the total costs associated with HPV was 3.8 billion in 1994. HPV Statistics, Women, And Cervical Cancer Cervical cancer is the second most common cancer among women.

I can only conclude that being a woman is a deviant and abhorrent lifestyle.

If i were going to be making that kind of conclusion.

Tommy

If I have a condition, I would call it broad-mindedness.

What you call it and what it is are two entirely different things. In my reading of your posts, there is nothing approching broadmindedness.

The comments of so many on the issue are narrow-minded because: (1) they see marriage relationships as a private matter â€” a right that is no one elseâ€™s business. In reality, itâ€™s much more than a right.

Thatâ€™s not narrow minded.

No one ever dressed up and showed up to a ceremony to celebrate my right to free speech or free assembly.

Yes, yes they do. That would be every single protest in the history of America.

2) people arenâ€™t connecting the dots between social and psychological dysfunction on the one hand and growing up with a loving mother and father on the other hand. But if you examine the connection carefully, you find that itâ€™s much stronger than economics or any other causative factor. There are some great studies on this by Patrick Fagen of the Heritage Foundation.

The Heritage Foundation is a conservative, poltical thinktank, and so is inherently untrustworthy. Patrick Fagenâ€™s articles (not studies) are merely thinly disguised propaganda. I canâ€™t even find what his PhD is in nor where he received it from. And unless he managed to get half a dozen of them his articles are wildly outside of his expertise since he hops around from economics to psychology to political science.
Oh, and those actual studies you refuse to cite compaire single parent homes to doul parent homes. Not same sex couples homes to oposite sex couples homes.

What youâ€™re saying is for anyone to comment on someone elseâ€™s deviant sex life, such as my approaching my friend about his adultery and abandonment, cannot be compatible with humility.

Labeling it devient isnâ€™t. I would also not make the comparison that loving gay families are the equivilent of adultery. Although I am not sure what is â€œdevientâ€ about adultery or abandonment, as they seem quite common. In particular amoungst the highly religious.

There were comments above about people needing certain physical attributes in connection with parenting. Thatâ€™s the opposite of what Iâ€™m saying. Thatâ€™s what I think YOUâ€™RE saying â€” that gender is anatomy.

Gender is a social construct, and as such is a continuum (with at least five separate and distinct points along it). Might I recommend Sexing the Body by Ann Fausto-Sterling?

Thereâ€™s an immense amount of delusion out there about how these factors are nothing but a social construct,

Please, prove it is delusion.

children are suffering as a result, which is the same as saying the whole human race is suffering as a result.

How? Be specific and support your answer with peer reviewed research published in respectible journals.

But the men arenâ€™t around as much any more because of the loosy-goosy social attitudes about sex being whatever you feel like doing with whomever whenever. As a result, more young girls are pregnant, more young boys are acting out, including illegally, and the whole society is paying the price in mental illness and prisons bursting at the seams.

And what corrolates well with young girls getting pregnant? Religion. So it appears that the loosy-goosy social attitudes about sex are the only thing preventing teen pregnancy.

Oh, and our prisions are bursting at the seams because of our rediculous drug policies.

You canâ€™t take a father-absent family and just plug in one more woman to get a better result. People arenâ€™t fungible.

Prove it.

grantdale

Oh my Buddha,

I point out this as empty:

People have to get more intentional about mentoring one another.

And get this by way of explanation:

I apologize for the inadequacies of my self-expression, but what Iâ€™ve said does in fact contain meaning worthy of careful consideration. We live isolated lives, notwithstanding the blogosphere and all that, and if we have weaknesses about things that would harm ourselves and others, and all of us have these things, then the best thing is to set up deliberate structures in which we can confide in certain others and accept the insights and correction we may receive from them. Iâ€™ve seen this work. But it has to be intentional, deliberate, systematic.

Never ever argue with someone not wearing pants*, or who is plainly a sandwich short of a picnic.

FAIL.

Dan Farrell

Well, grantdale, all I can say is that I’ve established this kind of relationship for myself and helped a few others do the same. It works.

Anyway, what I think we’re facing today is very serious social breakdown, with rates of crime and depression several times higher than before the sexual revolution and the two developments are connected. Those who don’t think there’s a craving for the particular kind of attention that a man can offer kids ought to do what I did not long ago among some inner-city kids and set up a weekly after-school program. You don’t need any skills related to handling kids (I’m good evidence of that) and you don’t have to prepare much of a program. If you’re a man, all you have to do is show up, engage them in conversation and care about them. They’ll soak it up, and the explanation was simple in the case of the group I had: I look like a father. Very simple, but they hadn’t seen their fathers for years. They came back, voluntarily, week after week.

You’re lumping in single-parent families and same-gender families again, Dan. You’re comparing orphans who lost a parent to children who have two parents already. That comparison doesn’t work: they LOST their fathers so they sought to replace them because they had them before. A kid who grows up with two mothers will never feel the loss of a father they never had.

penguinsaur

And after 100 posts Dan has still not posted A SINGLE PEER-REVIEWED STUDY to back up his claims.

Because he’s a liar who knows that no such studies exist

Tommy

Anyway, what I think weâ€™re facing today is very serious social breakdown, with rates of crime and depression several times higher than before the sexual revolution and the two developments are connected.

Please prove it is the sexual revolution and not the Controlled Substances Act which created the drug trade. Prove it was the sexual revolution and not the opening of legal loopholes which caused manufacturing jobs to move overseas, creating greater economic disparity. Please prove it was the sexual revolution and not the fact that real wages have stagnated or regressed for the middle and lower classes requiring both parents to work and to work harder longer hours, causing latch-key kids.

Please, prove it was the sexual revolution and not these other, more obvious economic causes.

Those who donâ€™t think thereâ€™s a craving for the particular kind of attention that a man can offer kids ought to do what I did not long ago among some inner-city kids and set up a weekly after-school program.

I did. I spent 3 years working with under privileged children in Appalachian Ohio, seeing poverty as bad as any third world country.

Those kids just want positive reinforcement. It doesn’t really matter if it comes from male or female. They just want SOME attention which they can’t get because their parents are working as much as humanly possible to simply provide what little nourishment they have.

Dan Farrell

A scholar named James Q. Wilson offers the following:

“After holding income constant, boys in father-absent families were twice as likely as those in two-parent ones to go to jail and girls in father-absent families were twice as likely as those in married families to have an out-of-wedlock birth.What all of this means for the rest of society is evident on the evening news programs. Boys without married fathers populate our street gangs, and these gangs are responsible for an inordinately high level of violence. We rely on the police to control gangs, but the important, and often absent, control is that exercised by fathers. A boy growing up without a father has no personal conception of what it means to acquire skills, find a job, support a family, and be loyal to one’s wife and children. Research on the link between unemployment rates and crime has shown that the connection is very weak. The connection between crime and father absence is much higher. Boys in single-parent families are also more likely to be idle rather than in school or unemployed and to drop out of high school. These differences are as great for white families as for black and Hispanic ones and as large for advantaged children as for disadvantaged ones.”

Dan Farrell

Look, here’s another way that the thinking about this can be narrow-minded. People aren’t seeing the perspective of time in this. I’m a geezer. My city is New York, and I was a volunteer in a neighborhood called Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1964, although not for long, because some race riots ensued that summer. Trust me, there was more poverty in those days, but families were mostly together. Today the crime rates are almost five times higher and the problems are more deep-seated. In those days of racial turmoil, certain leaders could calm things down and deal with certain structures that could make a serious difference in a short time. Not so when kids are running wild and the rate of illegitimacy is over 80%. What happened was a change of mores in the white community, and when the middle class gets a cold, the poor get pneumonia. All this can turn around if people abandon the “anything-goes” ethos and promote a family framework that maximizes the power of mothers and fathers — both.

Lael

I won’t waste further time or effort on convincing a bot of anything. The responses are rote and only within a hair of any variation at all.

I will leave with this quote.

“Convince a man against his will and he will be of the same opinion still.” Anne McCaffery, Masterharper of Pern*

*Notice, source and author? Heh.

“father-absent families were twice as likely as those in married families”
“Boys without married fathers”
“Boys in single-parent families…”

I didn’t read “kids in happily married same-gender families” there.

penguinsaur

â€œAfter holding income constant, boys in father-absent families were twice as likely as those in two-parent ones to go to jail”

So.. who the hell asked you for a study about single parent households? In case you haven’t noticed this site kind focuses on one issue and it’s not single-parents.

Adam

Dan Farrell (who else?): “if we have weaknesses about things that would harm ourselves and others, and all of us have these things”

This is begging the question of whether homosexuality (or adultery, or any “deviance”, I suppose) is harmful. Your entire thesis collapses if we remove this presupposition. So let’s examine it.

You seem to be positing that homosexual relationships are harmful to the direct participants, to any children of homosexual parents, and to society at large, and on the basis of this harm, gay people should refrain from any expression of their homosexual inclinations. Please correct me if I’ve misrepresented you.

Assuming that this is your argument, what you appear to be missing is evidence that homosexual relationships actually cause harm. What makes you think they do? Evidence shows that gay people who are taught to repress their identity are harmed, and that gay people permitted to express their identity are happier. So what’s the harm that homosexuality causes to gay people?

Evidence shows that children raised by a gay couple perform just as well on a broad range of indicators as their peers raised by a heterosexual couple. If the child of a gay couple was not in the care of that gay couple, where would the child be? Deep within the machinations of social services? In a single-parent household? Both of these alternatives have been shown to cause genuine harm to a child’s development. So what’s the harm that homosexuality causes to the children of gay people?

Society is a bit tougher, since it’s not well-defined, but it seems to me that if repressing homosexual behaviour (and by that I mean forming relationships as well as having sex) causes greater harm to gay people (and hence the people close to them) and greater harm to the children of gay couples, then it is counter-intuitive that society is somehow harmed by gay people living openly.

I’m very interested to learn about the harm that gay people visit.

Tommy

A scholar named James Q. Wilson offers the following:

Another person employed by a conservative thinktank.

â€œAfter holding income constant, boys in father-absent families were twice as likely as those in two-parent ones to go to jail and girls in father-absent families were twice as likely as those in married families to have an out-of-wedlock birth.

Again and again and again: single parents vs. two parents is not gay parents vs. straight parents.

What all of this means for the rest of society is evident on the evening news programs. Boys without married fathers populate our street gangs, and these gangs are responsible for an inordinately high level of violence.

Gangs which only exist in the forms they do because of the fact that CSA makes the illegal drug trade monstrously profitable, and one of the only ways for impoverished young people to advance economically. You know, just like in the era of prohibition.

A boy growing up without a father has no personal conception of what it means to acquire skills, find a job, support a family, and be loyal to oneâ€™s wife and children.

That’s just simply false.

Research on the link between unemployment rates and crime has shown that the connection is very weak.

That’s because the average length of unemployment even now is merely half a year. Crime, however, does correlate to poverty and a lack of economic opportunity that incentiveizes illegal economic activity.

The connection between crime and father absence is much higher. Boys in single-parent families are also more likely to be idle rather than in school or unemployed and to drop out of high school. These differences are as great for white families as for black and Hispanic ones and as large for advantaged children as for disadvantaged ones.â€

He openly states in this section SINGLE-PARENT FAMILIES. Why would you offer this as evidence when it is utterly irrelevant to your entire point?

Look, hereâ€™s another way that the thinking about this can be narrow-minded.

Okay, I’m ready…

People arenâ€™t seeing the perspective of time in this.

I’m reasonably certain they are. In fact, my last few posts have included at least some references to history as has this one.

Trust me, there was more poverty in those days,

I’d like to see the statistics for this statement.

but families were mostly together.

Again, statistics and I’d like to see a concrete definition of what “together” means. There were divorced couples long before there was divorce.

Today the crime rates are almost five times higher and the problems are more deep-seated.

…because of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.

the rate of illegitimacy is over 80%.

Now this I have to see statistics on.

What happened was a change of mores in the white community, and when the middle class gets a cold, the poor get pneumonia. All this can turn around if people abandon the â€œanything-goesâ€ ethos and promote a family framework that maximizes the power of mothers and fathers â€” both.

FALSE! All this happened because congress made marijuana illegal. Thus made the growing, transport and sale of marijuana highly profitable. Thus made it the only viable means of economic improvement for millions of impoverished citizens. And since it was illegal it resulted in the criminal organizations themselves acting as police and militia. Just like what happened in prohibition.

It didn’t help that at the same time legal job options that payed well and had good benefits were being shipped overseas and real wages stagnated or regressed.

ebohlman

Regan: While it’s true that the deleterious effects of “fatherlessness” seem only to occur in boys whose fathers abandoned them, there’s some new evidence that what’s going on isn’t emotional trauma; it’s that fathers with undiagnosed ADHD and dyslexia are more likely to a) have kids with the same conditions and b) leave their partners. It’s very preliminary, but it’s plausible and what’s interesting is that it took the “gayby boom” to provide enough data to formulate the hypothesis (it had been previously observed that boys whose fathers died didn’t seem to experience those effects, but they were (fortunately) too small a group to draw conclusions from).

Dan: The crime rate, in particular the youth crime rate, is now as low as it was before the “sexual revolution.” While there’s been a slight uptick in the teen pregnancy rate in the past few years, the rate is still at close to a historical low. Teenagers’ actual sexual behavior (as opposed to what they talk about) hasn’t changed much in the last 50 years.

Dan Farrell

Violent crimes were under 300,000 in the early Sixties; they’re at 1.38 million now. Illegitimacy was around five or six percent then; now it’s over 40%. Incomes have risen pretty steadily over the years. I felt pretty safe around Bed-Sty in the old days; I’d stay out of there now. In the really old days, the 30s, incomes were low and so were crime rates (compared to the previous decade). Many factors can certainly be involved, of course, but none has been more potent than the loving and disciplining hand of a father. No admonition from a mother used to be more effective than “Wait till your father gets home!”

If we think that gender differences stop after the love-making act, we’d better get ready for further social disintegration than we already have. if a young boy is to become a competent man, he must detach from his mother and instead identify with his father. A fatherless boy doesnâ€™t have a man with whom to identify and is more likely to have trouble forming a healthy masculine identity. A father teaches a boy how to properly channel his aggressive and sexual drives. Being a father has been my most important role in life.

TampaZeke

“Ignorance is the Oldest Profession”

Dan could not have done a better job of proving your point about “professional ignorance” if you were paying him yourself. Dan is clearly being paid by someone to spew his ignorance. That would, by definition, make him a professional purveyor ignorance.

I’m not a big fan of the Bible, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. In Proverbs the writer teaches that one should never argue with a fool because a wise person will turn and walks away as soon as he realizes that he’s trying to reason with a fool. A wise man becomes a fool when he continues to use reason in an argument with a fool.

Dan, I for one am turning and walking away from you. I encourage the other wise people here to do the same.

Lael

Dan “Many factors can certainly be involved, of course, but none has been more potent than the loving and disciplining hand of a father. No admonition from a mother used to be more effective than â€œWait till your father gets home!â€”

So, basically, you are in fact, advocating for a return to the 50’s style of parenting. Beatings all around. I pointed out the fallacy of that my very first post. The world is a different place now. You’ll have to get rid of cell phones, computers, color tv’s, modern tv programing, roll back movies also, let’s see, why we would also need to get rid of those pesky civil rights acts from the 60’s and overturn Roe vs Wade, Lawrence vs Texas, and any other actual progress in the last 6 decades.

You can’t go backwards, Dan. Civilization won’t allow it. Knowledge won’t allow it. The struggle against stagnation and superstition always continues. Let go of yours and welcome to the real world. Live in it rather than fight it.

Dan Farrell

I’ve been accused of wanting to turn back the clock. Well, I had the flu last winter and I lay in bed for two days thinking mainly of my desire to turn back the clock to where I could be on my feet and moving vigorously. It is in that sense and to that extent that we should turn back the clock to where a maximum number of children are once again receiving the attention of both a mother and father — not giving rigidity to the roles of gender (I think I was very nurturing to my children when they were little) and yet with a healthy interplay of maleness and femaleness.

Richard Rush

Adam said,

Society is a bit tougher, since itâ€™s not well-defined, but it seems to me that if repressing homosexual behavior (and by that I mean forming relationships as well as having sex) causes greater harm to gay people (and hence the people close to them) and greater harm to the children of gay couples, then it is counter-intuitive that society is somehow harmed by gay people living openly.

I’d like to expand on this a little: I’ll say unequivocally that society does benefit by gay people having full equality.

Society benefits when people are living productive contented lives that include strong relationships with family, friends, and a loving spouses. Ignorance has led many families to be literally torn apart through rejection of gay family members.

Society is negatively impacted when gay people are forced to live fearfully in the shadows and often prevented from achieving their full productive potential.

Society benefits when the children of gays benefit because those gay parents are accepted as equals. And there is a huge benefit when the parents of gay people accept their gay sons and daughters, and are thus involved in their grandchildren’s lives.

Society benefits (and this is a biggie) when gay people are so equal that gay men don’t feel compelled to deceive a woman into a marriage destined to be dysfunctional. Most people are completely ignorant of how prevalent this has been throughout history. I could tell many stories about people I know who have lived it, and in some cases are still are living it (I just met another one last night). There is one question I always want to ask those who say gays have the same rights as everyone else, which is to marry a person of the opposite sex: “Would you want your daughter to marry one of those men?”

Homosexuals have always existed, will continue to exist, and that is just a fact. So there is a choice to be made: Society can continue to promote fractured families, sham marriages, disadvantaged children, and unrealized potential, or they can choose to improve the quality of life for everyone by treating us as equals. It really is that simple.

Those who believe that homosexuality is harmful are simply living in the fact-free reality of a superstitious fantasy-land.

Tommy

Violent crimes were under 300,000 in the early Sixties; theyâ€™re at 1.38 million now.

The population of the United States in 1960 was 180 million. The Population of the United States now is 307 million. More people equals more crime. And in the 1960’s fewer things were crimes, again see the CSA.

Incomes have risen pretty steadily over the years.

No, inflation has risen pretty steadily over the years. Income has stagnated or regressed.

I felt pretty safe around Bed-Sty in the old days; Iâ€™d stay out of there now. In the really old days, the 30s, incomes were low and so were crime rates (compared to the previous decade).

Could it be that the previous decade was the decade of prohibition? And we are now in our fifth decade of drug prohibition?

Many factors can certainly be involved, of course, but none has been more potent than the loving and disciplining hand of a father.

FALSE! Again, the CSA.

No admonition from a mother used to be more effective than â€œWait till your father gets home!â€

Actually that’s an all around terrible idea. It creates delayed negative reinforcement, and forces the father into an adversarial relationship with the child. It is all around bad parenting.

If we think that gender differences stop after the love-making act, weâ€™d better get ready for further social disintegration than we already have.

Prove it. In fact, prove there are gender differences in the first place. Prove there is a solid difference that all men have to all women.

if a young boy is to become a competent man, he must detach from his mother and instead identify with his father.

This Freudian psychobabble is in direct contradiction with your previous statements such as, “Children need the cuddling and so on that a mother can provide” and your advocation â€œWait till your father gets home!â€

A fatherless boy doesnâ€™t have a man with whom to identify and is more likely to have trouble forming a healthy masculine identity. A father teaches a boy how to properly channel his aggressive and sexual drives. Being a father has been my most important role in life.

Wow… that’s disturbing. Untrue, but disturbing.

Tommy

Iâ€™ve been accused of wanting to turn back the clock.

Not by anyone here, so I do not know why you are addressing it to us.

Well, I had the flu last winter and I lay in bed for two days thinking mainly of my desire to turn back the clock to where I could be on my feet and moving vigorously. It is in that sense and to that extent that we should turn back the clock to where a maximum number of children are once again receiving the attention of both a mother and father â€” not giving rigidity to the roles of gender (I think I was very nurturing to my children when they were little) and yet with a healthy interplay of maleness and femaleness.

You mean back to the days of segregation? Back to the days of unequal pay for equal work? Back to the fertile ground that created the African American, Women’s and Gay civil rights movements? We’ve progressed as a society and it has been, mostly, a good thing.

The only thing we need to turn back the clock to is rolling back the Drug Laws and rolling forward the labor movement. Then everything you attribute to the sexual revolution will vanish.

Actually, I read an article back in high school that said in Japan, (at the time, in the early 2000’s,) the mother was more feared than the father.

I am not Japanese descended, but this is true of my own family. Physical “discipline” was more feared from Mom than from Dad. She grew to regret all of it, actually. And today she spares the rod entirely, and yet her youngest child is probably one of the best-adjusted of all 4.

Dan Farrell

Tommy’s been smoking funny cigarettes (which may explain his fixation on the drug laws). “In fact, prove there are gender differences in the first place.”
Ultimately, that is what the whole question of gay marriage comes down to. If you see it as beneficial, you’d have to deny gender differences. Tommy has brought the whole argument of gay marriage to the point of its final absurdity. On that note I’ll sign off.

Tommy

Tommyâ€™s been smoking funny cigarettes (which may explain his fixation on the drug laws).

What a lovely way to distract from your inability to actually refute one of my points.

Ultimately, that is what the whole question of gay marriage comes down to.

No, it doesn’t. It is merely what you chose to base your house of cards opposition to marriage equality on.

On that note Iâ€™ll sign off.

Conveniently before you actually proved there were gender differences.

Regan DuCasse

Dan, I said something VERY important that you completely ignored.

I don’t get my information about Jews from non Jewish anti Semitics. And segregationists, while insistent on having the only trustworthy information on blacks, were never ones to actually be in a position of being so.

YOU obviously have gotten your information from a source with the intention of keeping gays and lesbians in an inferior social position with no justification for it.
None.
Not any more than a segregationist or anti Semitic had for their opinions on blacks or Jews.

So YOU coming here and lecturing the majority of gay people with questionable information on THEIR lives from the sources you do cite, is offensive on it’s face.
If you’re so certain about the roles of men and women in the lives of children in particular, you’re not being very smart about how that concerns the issue of what qualifies adults to be married.
And it’s NOT children!

There isn’t a straight person alive qualified to tell a gay person about what choices they have in it, or what to do with it.
And if you can’t recognize when a gay person has the SAME qualities as someone who isn’t gay, then it’s not the gay person who should suffer the consequences of your commitment to ignorance.

Gay people know more about heteros than heteros know about gay people. And the reason why is obvious.
And it’s been very unnecessarily destructive to gay lives, just as Jim Crow has been to the lives of people of color.
There is always some asshole in the hierarchy thinks he’s entitled to dominate someone else.
Doesn’t mean they were right or had a right to do so.

Why don’t you think about THAT? And understand that the time for straight people to make the demands they do and to so easily sacrifice gay lives on the fiction of imagined superiority are over.
Your opinions are well documented, but WORTHLESS to what’s really important here.

David

“Tommyâ€™s been smoking funny cigarettes (which may explain his fixation on the drug laws).”

Given Dan’s apparent biases, this is an ad hominem, and a concession of defeat and fraud. Unable to provide a substantive response, he asserts that someone who disagreed with him is under the influence of drugs.

â€œIn fact, prove there are gender differences in the first place.â€

The request for substantive argument is ducked altogether, and instead we get more ego-driven, heterosexist nonsense.

“Ultimately, that is what the whole question of gay marriage comes down to.”

No. The question of gay marriage comes down to civil and religious equality. There are congregations and denominations that celebrate weddings for same-sex couples, their religious beliefs are treated as inferior to those of religious conservatives. For non-religious people their right not to be accountable to any religious belief is violated. For everyone, their right to the civil contract of marriage has been violated.

“If you see it as beneficial, youâ€™d have to deny gender differences.”

No, you just have to be honest. Reproduction is not a requirement for marriage, nor is child-rearing. It is arrogant of you to presume that same-sex couples are not capable of the same, or better, emotional involvement in our relationships that heterosexuals, with their 50% divorce rate, rate of molesting and abusing their offspring and spouses, have achieved.

“Tommy has brought the whole argument of gay marriage to the point of its final absurdity. On that note Iâ€™ll sign off.”

Again, by employing an empty dismissal and running away, you are admitting that all of your arguments are pointless hearsay – you cannot substantiate them with evidence, nor have you been able to defend them with logic, many in fact, contradict each other.

David

“that is what the whole question of gay marriage comes down to. If you see it as beneficial, youâ€™d have to deny gender differences.”

There is another unreality in this assertion.

If GLBTQ people were denying gender differences, we’d simply marry heterosexually and avoid the contumely of people like Dan.

There are indeed gender differences just as there are commonalities, and in my opinion and experience, GLBTQ people are more aware of both the differences and the commonalities. When one does not respond as expected to the physical presence of the opposite gender, one becomes more aware of those physical traits, and not just the obvious ones to which four letter words have been assigned. When one does respond against expectation to the physical traits of one’s own gender, one becomes more aware of those physical traits, and again, not just the obvious ones to which four letter words have been assigned.

And in living in contrast to the rigid sexual norms, one learns quickly that men and women, gay and straight, are in general all capable of the same emotional and intellectual qualities.

But a person blinded by traditional, misogynistic, manufactured gender roles continues to see only what soothes his ego and maintains his sense of entitlement at the expense of others.

MJC

David, that was eloquently put. There are indeed, gender differences, and they are detectable at so young an age that they are not likely to be “socially constructed”. The “Blank Slate” concept is dead.

Research (for example, some have mentioned Simon Baron-Cohen’s work on here, I think, but the thread is so long I don’t want to go search for it) does confirm average tendencies; empathic brains are more likely to occur in female bodies, “systemic” brains in male ones. Both of these seem to be distributed normally in the population (think of two bell curves, side by side, and intersecting in the middle).

These tendencies are probably under the influence of hormones, and I think we can all agree that hormones are a matter of degree and do affect behavior, although in a complex way. Bell curves, however, have tails on either end, and not just large groupings in the middle. Nothing in any population distribution would lead us to think that all the variance represented in the curve should collapsed to the middle. After all, who wants to be average?

Mr. Farrell gets into trouble when he tries to legislate or, at least in some way, enforce the (statistical) norm on everyone. Believing (wrongly) that society is “going to hell in a hand basket”, along with other watchers of Fox News, he can neither see nor acknowledge that the two tails of either bell curve (which might include high testosterone men (many of whom are very masculine and possibly bisexual); high-test gay men; low test, heterosexual males (possibly with more traditionally ‘feminine’ traits); very ‘masculine’ females, like girls with CAH (Congenital Adrenal hyperplasia), and so on. Perhaps he might find some tolerance for extremely feminine females with high estrogen (blondes) etc., but his sexism is apparent and has been well documented here by others.

ALL of these categories, and more, are HUMAN, and all of them, in groupings of whatever kind, can be effective parents. Families range from the single parent type to the kibbutzim in Israel. Our ancestors probably WERE raised by villages, since the nuclear family which Farrell espouses is a product of the industrial revolution (not yet two centuries old). The family has proven itself to be among the most variable and resilient of all human institutions.

Indeed, Farrell is not only a proponent of the blank slate (because he doesn’t see the genius of the child him or herself who DOES find nurturing where he or she can–including from insightful and sympathetic adults who are grandparents, aunts and uncles, coaches and teachers and who can fill in where absent or otherwise ineffective parents cannot provide. There is also the child’s own personality, which unfolds in its own logic and reaches out to meet the world. Every child expects there to be some minimal care for both survival and emotional growth.

As some have pointed out, Farrell also holds on to long discredited Freudian and Watsonian psychobabble.

And, by his admission, all of this insight came to him while he was laying in bed and, apparently, had some kind of vision, perhaps like Abram Vereide, the founder of “the Family.” But, as many have pointed out, inspiration is not science—nor is intuition. To repeat a brilliant example from early in this discussion, it “feels” right that the earth is the center of the solar system, but science teaches that it is not. Elaborate defenses of the traditional view were spun in its service, but they remain both wrong and wrong-headed.

Getting rid of our intuitions is difficult for many (it was only the last Pope, after all, who admitted the Catholic Church was wrong about Galileo, and it did so grudgingly).

I admire greatly those who entered the debate, but as many have concluded, it seems to have been pointless. As Jonathan Swift observed, “It is futile to try to reason someone out of a religious position, because they didn’t reason themselves into it to begin with”.

Jim in MA

What ever happened to the phrase “it takes a community to raise a child” ???
In other words, if they’re so concerned about female AND male parental figures, isn’t more = more? Does that extend to having 2 mothers and 2 fathers? What about grandparents? Where’s their argument that a child must have 2 female grandparents and 2 male grandparents to not turn gay? Where do you stop? Do we slide into bigamy and polyamory?
Yes, they’re absolutely making sh!t up. The only problem is people taking them seriously and feeling the need to counter their arguments with facts. You have to realize they need no facts to be right. Just their need to be teabagged by Jeebus.

Jacob

This explains so much. In ap government a conservative blurted out, “homosexuality is caused by parents who force their children into to many sports.” But this was only funny because not moments before he had said he was going to make his girls, because he was apparently going to have girls, play volleyball and basketball. And his boys were going to play football and baseball. I nearly said, so your kids are going to be gay. How do you feel about that. I witheld and chuckled silently. I never had read something like this before.

Priya Lynn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States

Dan said “Violent crimes were under 300,000 in the early Sixties; theyâ€™re at 1.38 million now.”.

Dan your BS was thoroughly debunked the last time you spewed it under the name Louis Britt:

â€œWhile the crime rate had risen sharply in the late 1960s and early 1970s, bringing it to a constant all-time high during much of the 1980s, it has declined steeply since 1993.â€.

DECLINED STEEPLY SINCE 1993 DAN/LOUIS. Thatâ€™s just when same sex marriage started to enter American discourse. By your own logic the acceptance of same sex love has reduced the crime rate.

You know your statements about the ever increasing crime rate are a lie and yet you continue to spew them. You are a thoroughly dishonest person. Harming LGBTs is far more important to you than telling the truth.

Ben in Oakland

I’ve stayed out of this conversation for the most part– too many things going on, including our first (or second, or 7th anniversary dinner, depending on when you’re counting from). but i have a few things to say.

first: good catch, Priya. You may well be right aobut who Dan really is. He may also be a certain John B. donovan. Only Dan/Louis/John know for sure. Personally, if this is the case, I don’t see how anyone could live with that kind of duplicity, but then I’ve also never understood the mindset that says whatever you do to people you don’t like is justified by your good intentions towards them, even if by good you mean “I wish you’d all shut up and die.”

Dan’s assumptions are legion, starting with:

1. gay is bad, straight is good.

2. gay is inferior, straight is superior, and naturally so. Gay people are always going to be damaged goods.

3. All men are the same, all women are the same, and this was ordained by someone or other.

4. Men and women are completely different.

5. Sex, gender, and orientation are not only exactly the same things, except when they aren’t, but are immutable, except when they aren’t, and determinant, except when they aren’t.

And my favorite:

All of history can be boiled down to the difference between the sexually pure and the sexually impure. Sexual immorality caused the fall of Rome, and is causing the downfall of america.

Scott P.

Ben, ever notice that the people who claim sexual decadence led to the end of the Roman Empire forget that it was a Christian, sexually repressed nation at the time?

Ben in Oakland

I have indeed noticed that. However, it would be as intellectually and morally lazy and self serving to claim that Christianity caused the downfall of the Roman empire as it is to claim that sexual immorality was the cause.

not to mention that Roman empire continued on for another 800 years after its alleged fall in the form of Byzantium, which itself was seriously weakened by the crusaders passing through and pillaging like there was no tomorrow, thus setting it up for the conquest by the ottomans.

Ben in Oakland

the turks, not the small item of furniture, of course.

Johnson

Over a Hundred comments later–didn’t anyone realize Dan was batsh*t crazy when he idolizes Nicolosi–“who kept boys from becoming effeminate”?

Rich

It really annoys me when heteros presume to know more about being gay or lesbian than gays or lesbians do. When I say I’ve always known I was gay, or at least different before I had the words for it, and that I was born this way they say no I wasn’t it was a choice I made for some reason. Who in their right mind would choose to be gay especially at a young age? I’ve recently found out that my parents always suspected I was gay and that they were vocal about being anti-gay when I was little and wouldn’t allow me to play with a male friend who had a bit of a lisp in an effort to encourage me to be hetero, well all it did was convince me my parents would disown me and throw me out of the house if they ever discovered the truth.

Growing up believing your parents wouldn’t love you if they knew the truth about you is as about as discouraging someone from choosing to be gay as I can imagine. It also directly lead to a 20 year addiction to opiate pain killers which started when I was 17 because they numbed the mental and emotional pain of being gay convinced my parents wouldn’t have anything to do with me if they knew (when I did tell them they were more or less accepting and have grown over the years to be very accepting), but the main reason I liked the opiate pain killers so much when I was a teen was because they made me feel like a different person, I hated myself so much at the time since I believed all the anti-gay lies I was exposed to and there was no internet or any media to give me a different perception of being gay. However I am somewhat grateful to my addiction at such a young age because if not for it I would have likely killed myself, I had tried several times before discovering the “wonder” of pills, they destroyed my life in some ways but they gave me a break from all the intense mental and emotional pain which allowed me to endure. I’m going on 3 years clean now and on methadone while I try to recover the rest of my life. Why would I have gone through all that if I had a choice in the matter? Nowadays I’m a very proud and out gay man who wouldn’t change his orientation if he could in spite of the pain and suffering caused by all the anti-gay crap I was exposed to in my younger days, its taken a long time and lot of work for me to get to this point though but I believe its made me a better person, more compassionate and understanding of others and more willing to take a stand for what I know to be right and true.

Some people like Dan are never going to understand others, while normally I’d say its best to just ignore them such debate as above I believe is very good and healthy for gay/lesbian young folks to read and hear so they can understand the truth about themselves and learn how to spot and counter anti-gay bigotry.

Also Tommy has a very good point concerning drug laws, the US has more of its citizens in prison than any other country in the world on a per capita basis. So many of those in prison are there because of ridiculously harsh drug laws where the punishment is no way comparable to the crime. I’m Canadian so not up to speed on recent developments in US drug laws but from what I understand there’s a move towards making punishments more reasonable while at the same time in Canada our Conservative PM Harper is pushing through ridiculously tough drug laws much like the US has or used to have in some cases. The facts and scientific research doesn’t support longer sentences but much like people like Dan ignore the scientific research on same-sex parenting our PM ignores the science on drug regulations and other crime and punishment issues. There’s a huge expansion of our prison system underway to make room for the massive influx of new prisoners from all of Harper’s changes to our laws, having so much more of our population imprisoned is likely going to have a very negative social effect and will likely lead to a permanent criminal underclass.

What is it about conservatives and their followers that make them ignore science to rely on their gut feeling instead?

Richard Rush

Rich,

Thanks for sharing your story. I wish a much wider audience could read it. Unfortunately, those who most need to read it, such as Dan, are so devoid of human empathy and understanding that they would encourage you to return to living a miserable life. And you should be happy to do it because your responsibility in life is to satisfy THEM. They are pathological busybodies.

Everything is always exclusively about THEM, about catering to THEIR needs, and about us recognizing THEIR uniquely superior qualifications and authority to have dominion over everyone else. Essentially, they are very needy, and like all needy people, they drain the life out of everyone around them.

I wish the best for you, Rich.

Edwin