What you’re asking us to believe, reality doug, is that these people are inferior parents, in spite of many studies that say otherwise, based on what you feel in your gut is right. You don’t have any evidence–anecdotal or otherwise–that it’s biology rather than stability and permanence that produces good results for children. I understand that you don’t like being called a bigot, and I won’t call you one. (I don’t know you, and people are complicated.) But what is clear is that you’re comfortable holding bigoted views, in the face of disconfirming evidence. 

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Doug’s frothy ranting about “name calling” and “biggoted hate filled political religion” and “bitter[ness” made me think of another Esrati.commer’s phrase “irony button on” for some reason.

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Geez…. I have so many options….

For instance… I do like sticking my [deleted for obscenity] of a wonderful, willing woman who chooses not to have another child, so maybe I am a Man born into a women’s body……

I also like a good [deleted] while getting a good [deleted]……

Of course I also believe I got a GREAT Education because the Womens Rights Movement had not depleted my school of OVERQUALIFIED female teachers and the DRAFT Deferment for Male Teachers subject to the Military Industrial Complex’s desire to fight the Vietnam war provided me with the Education required to overcome the bigotry and ignorance foisted upon me by my Southern Baptist upbringing…., so I wish you would have had the same experiences as me because I detect a somewhat intelligent creature lurking behind the rhetoric you espouse……

I know this will be deleted, but I loved writing and thinking about it…..Silence should be the appropriate response to your CRAZY rant ole Dougie boy……but the email will go out prior to the deletion…..

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Here’s a fun CollegeHumor video on Obama’s coming out.

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Well I guess you are right Doug, I used bigot in the manner you describe, but they way you come off on your statements and you bandy the term Liberalism like it is a stupid thing to be but I will have pity on you because I see that you are challenged, conservative and homophobic, which means you are probably just dumb.  May God have Mercy on Your Soul.

A new study finds links between low intelligence and racism, prejudice and homophobia  

Smackdown!. What do you think? 8  3

Poorly-rated. Bozo: 1  13

Doug complains, “You can’t argue the facts so you use slogans and name calling to silence and bully others.”
 
 
Doug, we can’t argue the facts because you’re not interested in facts.  You’ve been very clear that you care not one whit about studies.
 
 
 
And Doug, you need to learn the difference between bullying and satire. As The Economist pointed out in an editorial, “Christians, gays and bullying: A race to take umbrage,” a few weeks ago when Christianists were whining about Dan Savage’s having “bullied” them:
 

Bullying is the strong picking on the weak, not the other way around (the other way around is satire).

 
 
 
What power do we homosexuals have against you as a heterosexual?  Have we the power to take away your right to marry or to have or adopt children?  Use the common sense you claim to love so much, man; we’re a minority, you’re a majority. I can certainly make fun of you, but I cannot bully you or silence you.
 

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You can’t argue the facts so you use slogans and name calling to silence and bully others. You claim someone bullied you so it is then ok to bully others with names and slogans. The Catholic Church did this to people a long time ago, good job on using the same tactics.
 
A few thoughts:
“You can’t argue the facts” is particularly absurd, coming from someone who casually dismisses actual scientific research as mere “government studies” and gets his facts from how he feels.
The problem with the Catholic Church in Galileo’s case was actual legal persecution of those who believed differently, not name-calling. The problem was also the dismissal of science in the name of “common sense” and widely accepted folk wisdom, not the other way around. This particular historical analogy really isn’t helping you at all.

I would also add that it’s an easy, cheap way to avoid serious debate to merely assume your opponents are arguing in bad faith, or are merely bullies, name callers and so on. Your second paragraph seems like a fairly clear effort to change the subject–or to invite insults, to prove you right about how mean those liberals are. I’m going to ignore it (I’m actually not a fan of the liberal position on gun control, anyway, so it’s not directed at me I guess. But that’s not the point.) I haven’t called you any names, or insulted you, and I don’t intend to, no matter how much you bait me.
I’ll repeat my challenge: actual, peer-reviewed research has suggested that children raised by a stable same sex couple do just as well, developmentally, as children raised by their two biological parents. You are extremely confident that research is wrong, so much so that you’ll waive it off as mere “government studies” unworthy of consideration, without even bothering to check to see if they are, in fact, government studies. I’d like to hear more about why you are able to be so confident. It seems to me you’d need to be personally familiar with a number of children from both groups to be confident in making generalizations. So, again: how many families with a stable same sex couple raising children are you, personally, familiar with? How have their children turned out? If the answer to the first question is “none” or “very few”, how can you possibly be so confident the peer-reviewed scientific research is wrong?

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Reality Doug, you state “the left” resorts to name-calling, sloganeering, smears, and taunts…and then, a sentence later, you engage in (wait for it) name-calling, sloganeering, smears, and taunts.

I mean really…awwww forget it.  Why argue with the hopeless

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Reality Doug there are many heteros whom never should have had children, but they do to check the boxes.  They rear terrible children.  However, most active parents know it takes a village…..so maybe you did not have the village, maybe you were home schooled or lived in a sheltered world.  I do agree with these statements…

“A male raised by an involved father will look at his father as a role model. The father can pass the wisdom he has learned in life as a man and function as the ultimate roll model for the child.”

It means your Father was a bigot and you are too.
 

Smackdown!. What do you think? 7  3

Reality Doug,

The heliocentric vision of the world was developed via the scientific method, and it directly challenged the conventional wisdom/common sense that just seemed right to most people who could see with their own eyes the sun moving around the earth. People have actually studied how kids turn out when raised by gay and lesbian couples. And it turns out they do just fine! (Or as well as the rest of us, anyway). But that can’t be right, according to you, because it doesn’t conform to how you feel. It’s rather ironic you’d bring up Galileo; it’s apt, but in the precisely opposite direction you seem to think.

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Esrati.com visitors who like to read (as opposed to those who prefer to rely only on “common sense”) might enjoy two recent articles by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg.
 
The first, “A mother’s work is never done (especially with 4 kids under 3),” is a profile for Mother’s Day that he wrote about a stay-at home mom. The mom in question happens to be a lesbian, but she wasn’t chosen because she’s a lesbian, and, while the fact that her partner’s a woman is mentioned in the piece, it steers clear of politics (unless you think that merely talking about lesbian families is political).
 
In the second article, “Gay marriage bans are faith flexing its muscles,” Steinberg talks about how he came to profile a lesbian family and goes on to talk politics. He says:

Rep. Joe Walsh, if you recall, made one of the more popular lunges: claiming that gays make bad parents. That isn’t true. But even if it were true — are we now not letting people marry based on what kind of parents they’d be? Because meth addicts and senior citizens can marry.

 
He goes on to say:

I believe most people opposing gay marriage are not bigots — they’re just immersed in their own insular worlds and don’t know any better. As I sat in that small house in Skokie, the thought grew: If only those religious folk could see this family living, reading, loving, praying, tickling together, they wouldn’t try to set their faith as a stumbling block before them. That’s inhuman, and it’s changing. Many religious folks have made the leap; the rest will. Or they’ll die off and their kids will.

 
So my dig at the start of this comment about some people preferring to rely only on “common sense” was wrong-hearted. In the end common sense is why marriage equality will prevail. Doug may go to his grave believing that kids need both a mom and a dad, but the longer queers are out and raising families, the more people will realize that queers raising kids isn’t bad. They’ll understand that based on their common sense having seen us and our families.

Well-loved. Brilliant: 16  0

“Reality Doug”–

First, what do you mean by government studies? The studies David Lauri linked to were not conducted by a government agency, they were conducted by private researchers and published in non-government, peer-reviewed scholarly journals. I’m not sure why it matters, unless you think the goverment is incompetent to conduct such a study, but this is independent scholarly research we’re talking about here.

As for the “common sense” test, our species is inflicted with a condition known as confirmation bias. We have beliefs and worldviews, and we become attached to them. When we confront evidence that supports your worldview it re-enforces it, and when we confront evidence that doesn’t fit, we discount it or waive it away. Your challenge question reveals the cognitive blinders of confirmation bias. You ask:

Ask any reader of this blog that was raised by two biological parents and ask them if they would have been better off replacing one of them with a non-biological parent. 

As it turns out, I’m a reader of this blog, and I can say with some certainty that I would take that bargain. It just so happens that one of my biological parents is a terrible person who has no business raising children. Replacing him with random dude off the street would have improved the quality of my childhood in at least 98% of cases. Now, I’m not normal, but I’m also that unusual–the world has plenty of lousy people, and a good number of them become biological parents. It’s difficult to believe you’re not aware of this, but your question suggests you deny it’s even possible.

I expect your conviction comes from the following observation. Most children raised by 2 biological parents are also raised in conditions of stability and consistency. What your observation–most people like their biological parents and appreciate them–can’t tell us is whether it’s the biology that’s doing the positive work, or the consistency. That’s why we have to do the study–our casual observations aren’t reliable.

Be honest–how many people do you know who were raised by a stable, consistent family with 2 same sex parents? I’m guessing the answer is “not enough to make any generalizations about how that works out for them relative to children with 2 biological parents”.

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Can you read, Doug?
 
For while you say that I’m referring to “government studies,” had you actually bothered to go to either the second link or the third link in my comment above you’d have seen that neither refers to “government studies.”
 
The first refers not to a government study but rather to a five year review by sociologists Stacey and Timothy Biblarz of the University of Southern California, who conclude:

No research supports the widely held conviction that the gender of parents matters for child well-being. Children being raised by same-gender parents, on most all of the measures that we care about, self-esteem, school performance, social adjustment and so on, seem to be doing just fine and, in most cases, are statistically indistinguishable from kids raised by married moms and dads on these measures.

 
The second refers not to a government study but rather to a study by Nanette Gartrell, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco, and Henry Bos, a behavioral scientist at the University of Amsterdam, who

were surprised to discover that children in lesbian homes scored higher than kids in straight families on some psychological measures of self-esteem and confidence, did better academically and were less likely to have behavioral problems, such as rule-breaking and aggression.

 
 
Moreover your implication that gay and lesbian couples seek to “depriv[e] a child of a biological parent” shows an incomplete understanding of how many queer couples get kids. While it’s true that some queer couples are able to buy sperm from donors or to hire surrogates, many queer couples adopt kids that heterosexual people are carelessly creating.
 
Just as gay marriage is not the problem with the institution of heterosexual marriage (those really concerned about the sanctity of heterosexual marriage should ban heterosexual divorce), so too is queers having kids not the problem with the 408,425 children in foster care in the United States.  Want to fix the problem of kids in foster care?  Banning gay adoption won’t fix it — putting birth control in the water so breeders stop having unwanted kids might.
 
Indeed, none other than Maggie Gallagher, former president of the National Organization for Marriage and current president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy (and another advocate of “traditional” marriage who, like our dear mayor, who doesn’t share a common surname with her spouse) is shown on video as saying that “extended foster care for chidlren is not preferable to adoption by homosexual parents”:

Q: Is extended foster care for children preferable to adoption by homosexual parents?
A: I don’t think so; most likely no.

Well-loved. Brilliant: 14  0

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