An honest question (same sex marriage/parenting related)?

[Anonymous]

What does "do better" mean? What are your measurable parameters?
Completion of hs? College? Goa?
Self reported happiness scale?
Job? Income?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wow, some serious crickets in this thread.

YES or NO. It's easy. Would you folks support doing a very careful randomized study to answer this question. Either you're pro-science or you're not. Let's let the NIH do it. It's not like I'm calling for the Heritage Foundation to do it.

Science has already spoken. Two homosexuals can not reproduce using their own bodies. You should take a hint from that.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don't think you need to do such a study. Just ask the children of gay couples once they reach adulthood if they were happy with their given situations and allow them an honest, anonymous way to share their thoughts. Only they can tell us if this works well. If they're happy, functional people, perfect. If they express doubts or say their childhoods lacked something, then maybe they're onto something and their feelings need to be respected.

That's a laughable way to do science. That's like the thread in the relationships page asking if people post hoc regret their divorce. ppl justify things post hoc to rationalize their own experiences. I'm sure if Amy Winehouse came back she'd say "No regrets man".... lol.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What does "do better" mean? What are your measurable parameters?
Completion of hs? College? Goa?
Self reported happiness scale?
Job? Income?

Depression? Teen pregnancy? Trouble with the law? Graduating. Yeah, standard things we value in society.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wow, some serious crickets in this thread.

YES or NO. It's easy. Would you folks support doing a very careful randomized study to answer this question. Either you're pro-science or you're not. Let's let the NIH do it. It's not like I'm calling for the Heritage Foundation to do it.

Umm, where are you getting all these adoptable infants from?

Yes. I'd support it. And I'd be confident that it would show that good parenting is down to people and not sexuality. But at that point, I'd expect people like you to stop believing in science and accuse the people running the experiment of pushing a political agenda.

Good for you. And you're wrong about me. I have my priors, but I favor making policy based on rigorous data/science. So, if the NIH did a clean random experiment and found that the children randomly assigned to married gay couples did just as well as the children randomly assigned to heterosexual married couples, I would favor both gay adoption and gay surrogacy parenting. If, on the other hand, the children did far worse with the gay married couples, I'd question why we should take children away from either their mother or father. BTW, I'd say the same thing for surrogacy pregnancies undergone by single mothers too. My point is I want science to guide us on what's best for kids, not ideology.

You make it sound like these children are forcibly taken away from birth parents who want them to be placed with gay families. Do you understand what surrogacy is? And as a PP already pointed out, are you aware of the fact that the vast majority of children adopted by gay families only have the foster care system as an alternative? Foolish policy prescriptions that have no basis in reality are not the hallmark of a scientific mind.

[Anonymous]

And as a PP already pointed out, are you aware of the fact that the vast majority of children adopted by gay families only have the foster care system as an alternative? Foolish policy prescriptions that have no basis in reality are not the hallmark of a scientific mind.

Do you have a source for that?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You don't need to randomly assign babies. All you have to do is to randomly select a large sample of children raised by same sex parents and by heterosexual parents. Account for things like household income and parents' education.

This has been done, actually. Children of gay parents fare slightly better.

There is no experimental research on this question. There are only observational studies. When you read media reports that "gay kids fare better" beware the fine print. The vast majority of these studies use snowball/convenience sampling. They aren't worth the paper they are written on and many of the random sample studies show that gay kids do not do better. Either way it's all junk because they are not experimental studies. They are correlation, not causation.

There are many many questions, including this one, that would be unethical to investigate experimentally. That doesn't mean that any attempt by science to explore them is "junk science". Despite what your 2nd grade teacher taught you, there's not one single scientific method. Science uses many methods, and ethical considerations are a big part in deciding what to use.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wow, some serious crickets in this thread.

YES or NO. It's easy. Would you folks support doing a very careful randomized study to answer this question. Either you're pro-science or you're not. Let's let the NIH do it. It's not like I'm calling for the Heritage Foundation to do it.

Umm, where are you getting all these adoptable infants from?

Yes. I'd support it. And I'd be confident that it would show that good parenting is down to people and not sexuality. But at that point, I'd expect people like you to stop believing in science and accuse the people running the experiment of pushing a political agenda.

Good for you. And you're wrong about me. I have my priors, but I favor making policy based on rigorous data/science. So, if the NIH did a clean random experiment and found that the children randomly assigned to married gay couples did just as well as the children randomly assigned to heterosexual married couples, I would favor both gay adoption and gay surrogacy parenting. If, on the other hand, the children did far worse with the gay married couples, I'd question why we should take children away from either their mother or father. BTW, I'd say the same thing for surrogacy pregnancies undergone by single mothers too. My point is I want science to guide us on what's best for kids, not ideology.

You make it sound like these children are forcibly taken away from birth parents who want them to be placed with gay families. Do you understand what surrogacy is? And as a PP already pointed out, are you aware of the fact that the vast majority of children adopted by gay families only have the foster care system as an alternative? Foolish policy prescriptions that have no basis in reality are not the hallmark of a scientific mind.

You're evading the point. What if the evidence shows that the best possible thing for a child is to be raised with his or her mother and father. If this can be demonstrated (and there's a lot of reasons to suspect that it is true), why on earth (same sex or hetero) would you create life under these circumstances that wouldn't be in the best interest of the child. An adopted kid is different. It already exists and needs a home. But why would anyone purposefully introduce a child into a home without his or her natural mother and father. What possible reason (outside of an adult's desires) would that serve?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Wow, some serious crickets in this thread.

YES or NO. It's easy. Would you folks support doing a very careful randomized study to answer this question. Either you're pro-science or you're not. Let's let the NIH do it. It's not like I'm calling for the Heritage Foundation to do it.

Oh FFS, stop throwing around terminology like you're some kind of hot shot. No one would ever do a randomized trial study like this. It would be highly unethical for one and too difficult to control for variation as well. Kids available for adoption don't come out of a breeding farm like lab rats.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wow, some serious crickets in this thread.

YES or NO. It's easy. Would you folks support doing a very careful randomized study to answer this question. Either you're pro-science or you're not. Let's let the NIH do it. It's not like I'm calling for the Heritage Foundation to do it.

Oh FFS, stop throwing around terminology like you're some kind of hot shot. No one would ever do a randomized trial study like this. It would be highly unethical for one and too difficult to control for variation as well. Kids available for adoption don't come out of a breeding farm like lab rats.

The bold part above gives away the fact that you don't have any idea what a randomized experiment even is.... controls aren't needed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't think you need to do such a study. Just ask the children of gay couples once they reach adulthood if they were happy with their given situations and allow them an honest, anonymous way to share their thoughts. Only they can tell us if this works well. If they're happy, functional people, perfect. If they express doubts or say their childhoods lacked something, then maybe they're onto something and their feelings need to be respected.

That's a laughable way to do science. That's like the thread in the relationships page asking if people post hoc regret their divorce. ppl justify things post hoc to rationalize their own experiences. I'm sure if Amy Winehouse came back she'd say "No regrets man".... lol.

So you have no interest in hearing from say a woman raised by two men if she felt an actual need for a mom? What if women raised by only men said they didn't care one way or another if they had a mother.

Sure, some people regret their divorce. Others may say the situation was far from what they ever wanted for themselves. What's wrong with asking someone raised by a gay couple if this would have been their first choice?

In the end, it's a great topic for a book? Researchers and journalists have written books that contain slews of interviews with all sorts of distinct groups that are in situations some of us may not envy- unmarried, childless by choice or by circumstance, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't think you need to do such a study. Just ask the children of gay couples once they reach adulthood if they were happy with their given situations and allow them an honest, anonymous way to share their thoughts. Only they can tell us if this works well. If they're happy, functional people, perfect. If they express doubts or say their childhoods lacked something, then maybe they're onto something and their feelings need to be respected.

That's a laughable way to do science. That's like the thread in the relationships page asking if people post hoc regret their divorce. ppl justify things post hoc to rationalize their own experiences. I'm sure if Amy Winehouse came back she'd say "No regrets man".... lol.

So you have no interest in hearing from say a woman raised by two men if she felt an actual need for a mom? What if women raised by only men said they didn't care one way or another if they had a mother.

Sure, some people regret their divorce. Others may say the situation was far from what they ever wanted for themselves. What's wrong with asking someone raised by a gay couple if this would have been their first choice?

In the end, it's a great topic for a book? Researchers and journalists have written books that contain slews of interviews with all sorts of distinct groups that are in situations some of us may not envy- unmarried, childless by choice or by circumstance, etc.

sure you could add that datapoint but it doesnt beat a randomized study using objective data. but a few cases? those are anecdotes. anecdotes are for losers. large N random studies are for winners.

[Anonymous]

How about including situations where a child is raised by two adults who are not gay/lesbian, but who are of the same sex?

For example, how about a grandmother and great aunt? Or how about two uncles? Or two aunts? Should these children be placed with a hetero couple instead of being raised by two people who are the same sex?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
How about including situations where a child is raised by two adults who are not gay/lesbian, but who are of the same sex?

For example, how about a grandmother and great aunt? Or how about two uncles? Or two aunts? Should these children be placed with a hetero couple instead of being raised by two people who are the same sex?

sure. again, i don't think we'd find that any different. not here to say anything negative about gays. just think that we should investigate whether mothering/fathering are unique and helpful to a child's development.

[Anonymous]

sure you could add that datapoint but it doesnt beat a randomized study using objective data. but a few cases? those are anecdotes. anecdotes are for losers. large N random studies are for winners.

Are you the same poster who was on the Common Core standardized testing threads and who thinks that describing people through numerical analysis is the cat's meow?

You didn't take enough humanities courses in college.