Are you seriously defending a man who deliberately studied broken families and just two same sex couples and drew broad generalizations about same sex parenting?
Are you seriously defending the notion that we should study the effects of gay parenting by taking the word of volunteer high-income couples instead of actually studying the children?
There is over thirty years of evidence from over a half dozen countries which supports my argument
Not really. For example, now that we have some comparable data sets coming in from Europe, it seems to suggest that gays are
significantly more likely to get divorced than heterosexual couples; a condition which you yourself points out is damaging to children.
Your intellectual honesty apparently extends to coming up with a vague conspiracy theory for a man who was paid by a conservative organization to produce a result that could be used for political purposes and which was repudiated by the journal where it was published and by the university in which he was employed.
:yawn: and was then attacked by people who work at liberal organizations who wanted results that could be used for
their political purposes, and were in no way interested whatsoever in allowing this topic to be publicly debated.
But no! It could not be bad research! It was ten gays and their mafia and agenda! Ridiculous.
This is what is called "a strawman". Hyperbole does not become you in this discussion - but thank you for so adequately demonstrating what I described earlier.
I said that divorce and separation are bad for children in my post
And I would agree.
Where is your evidence that gender is the factor that causes problems?
In the data. Again (I notice you somehow failed to quote this): take a look at the large population of men that we have today who were raised by two women and try to tell me that they do not suffer from a greater incident of almost every single social malady, from higher drug usage to higher dropout rates to higher incarceration rates, to lower income and socialization...
She is a pediatrician. And I did not denigrate her a bit. Only pointed out that she is human and subject to confirmation and cultural bias.
Actually you accused her entire work of being confirmation bias and unempirical. Here you are saying it:
Critical Thought said:
These books kind of confirm my argument. For one, they are not empirical, they are from the subjective opinion of the author, who is in turn subject to her own worldview and its subsequent cultural bias and her own confirmation bias.
I have worked with people with considerable experience and study who would disagree with the premise that gender is innate or a vital factor in raising children.
:shrug: good for them I suppose. About a million years of evolutionary biology and everything we know about biochemistry and physiology disagree, but merely being in contradiction to reality has never stopped man from trying to force an ideological preference on nature before.
I am not even sure she is making that argument. She is just one expert either way.
True. She is there mostly because you opined that you did not see a natural link between natural gender differences and their effects on the raising of children - and she happens to have written two books on that topic that are very well received among the populace that you apparently do not understand. They are offered to you
only if you
honestly wish to understand those who disagree with you. If (as I said before) you wish to continue to mischaracterize their position as in the OP in order to denigrate them, you are free to do that as well - it is certainly easier.
If you have clear evidence that gender is innate then let us see it.
That Gender is Innate? Really?
Um. Alright, two simple examples:
men feature 7 to 8 times as much testosterone as women, a chemical which can have powerful shaping effects on behavior.
Women's brains respond differently than men to the sound of a baby crying, and they
have the ability to breast-feed as homo sapiens have infant care handled by the female.
Generalizations exist because there is such a thing as a bell curve. The existence of outliers does not obviate the existence of a mean.
What is the observable and measurable evidence?
for Dr Meekers' books? They are cited in the back.
You want to criticize the research on gay parenting but you swallow the opinions of one expert as if the are Gospel.
This is a strawman. I pointed out to you a
good example of how the people you disagree with think, as it was clear you did not understand them, and you are reacting with hyperbole.
I am sure it is a good set of books with some really pragmatic advice but that does not make it scientific fact or a comment on the necessity of gender roles in parents.
Again. Absolute necessity =/= Optimal.
For all this talk can you actually find any commentary from Dr. Meg Meeker on gay parenting and same sex marriage?
You know, I spent about 10 minutes, and I didn't - I saw some material from her saying that the popular pressure on girls to engage in public displays of affection with other girls in order to get the attention of boys was damaging. My guess would be that - given her own findings on the rich value of the special gifts that only fathers / mothers can bring to bear for their children, that she would not consider homosexual couples to be equally optimized as heterosexual couples for the task of child-rearing.
