FLAWED PAPER CLAIMS TO OVERTURN 30 YEARS OF CREDIBLE RESEARCH ON GAY PARENTING

Conservative Author Behind New Paper Marked by Poor Methodology, Faulty Conclusions

Joint release from glaad, Freedom to Marry, HRC and Family Equality Council June 12, 2012

Washington, DC – A flawed, misleading, and scientifically unsound paper that seeks to disparage lesbian and gay parents was roundly criticized today by organizations that protect and advance the freedoms and equality of Americans who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT).

The paper, “New Family Structures Study,” written by right-wing author Mark Regnerus (of the Department of Sociology and Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin) and funded in large part by the anti-gay Witherspoon Institute, makes a number of claims about negative outcomes for children raised by gay and lesbian parents.  However, for the most part, the paper doesn’t even look at same-sex couples raising a child together in a long-term committed relationship.

The Family Equality Council, the Human Rights Campaign, Freedom to Marry, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation (GLAAD) pointed out that numerous flaws and a biased agenda undermine the claims made by the paper.

“Flawed methodology and misleading conclusions all driven by a right-wing ideology,” said Jennifer Chrisler, Executive Director of the Family Equality Council. “That alone should raise doubts about the credibility of this author’s work. But on top of that, his paper doesn’t even measure what it claims to be measuring.”

“Because of its serious flaws, this so-called study doesn’t match 30 years of scientific research that shows overwhelmingly that children raised by parents who are LGBT do equally as well as their counterparts raised by heterosexual parents,” said Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin.

Griffin and Chrisler added that those conclusions are backed up by every major child welfare organization—whose sole objective is to ensure child welfare– along with the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National Association of Social Workers, who all confirm that LGBT parents make good parents.

Chrisler also said that these 30 years of research are grounded in the day-to-day reality witnessed by millions of Americans.

“Everyday people in this country see real-life examples of the love, commitment and caring these parents provide to their children, said Chrisler. “These parents are raising their children to be kind to their friends and neighbors, support their communities and uphold American values.  One biased paper cannot undo the truth nor demean the value of these families.”

Regnerus is well known for his ultra-conservative ideology and the paper was funded by the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation – two groups commonly known for their support of conservative causes. The Witherspoon Institute also has ties to the Family Research Council, the National Organization for Marriage, and ultra-conservative Catholic groups like Opus Dei.

Freedom to Marry President Evan Wolfson said it is these anti-gay groups and their dangerous ideologies that, in fact, create some of the biggest legal, social, and economic challenges that LGBT families do face.

“The two million kids being raised by 1 million gay parents in this country are doing great, and would do even better if their parents didn’t have to deal with legal discrimination such as the denial of the freedom to marry, and ongoing attacks such as this kind of pseudo-scientific misinformation and the disinformation agenda that’s funding it,” said Wolfson.

GLAAD President Herndon Graddick added, “A growing majority of Americans today already realize the harms this kind of junk science inflicts on loving families. If the media decides that this paper is worth covering, journalists have a responsibility to inform their audiences about the serious and glaring flaws in its methodology, and about the biased views of its author and funders.”

Key problems with the “New Family Structures Study” include:
The paper is fundamentally flawed and intentionally misleading. It doesn’t even measure what it claims to be measuring. Most of the children examined in the paper were not being raised by parents in a committed same-sex relationship—whereas the other children in the study were being raised in two-parent homes with straight parents.

Given its fundamental flaws and ideological agenda, it’s not surprising that the paper doesn’t match the 30 years of solid scientific research on gay and lesbian parents and families. That research has been reviewed by child welfare organizations like the Child Welfare League of America, the National Adoption Center, the National Association of Social Workers and others whose only priority is the health and welfare of children and that research has led them to strongly support adoption by lesbian and gay parents.

In addition, the paper’s flaws highlight the disconnect between its claims about gay parents and the lived experiences of 2 million children in this country being raised by LGBT parents.  Americans know that their LGBT friends, family members and neighbors are wonderful parents and are providing loving and happy homes to children.

The paper fails to consider the impact of family arrangement or family transitions on children, invalidating any attempt on its part to assess the impact of sexual orientation on parenting.  The paper inappropriately compares children raised by two heterosexual parents for 18 years with children who experience family transitions – like foster care – or who live with single or divorced parents, or in blended families. Moreover, the limited number of respondents arbitrarily classified as having a gay or lesbian parent are combined regardless of their experiences of family instability.

in Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Breathe Papa, Breathe

by Anthony M. Brown –

My two year old is a shaman. Nicholas is the light of my husband’s and my life since he graced us with his presence in 2009. He recently had his first semi-serious fall. I say semi-serious because I don’t have a frame of reference for this, thankfully. He took a tumble and cut his forehead. It was clear that he was going to need stitches and, as he bled on my husband’s shoulder and we ran to get a cab to visit the Urgent Care in our neighborhood, I was beside myself. Until this moment, I didn’t understand just how emotional your child hurting themselves is for the parent.

I was still upset when we arrived at our destination and Nicholas saw my fear. He looked right into my eyes and, with a sweeping hand gesture, said, “Breathe Papa, breathe, breathe.”

I had no choice but to laugh, cry and hug him all at the same time. But I calmed down. And this proud papa can thank his little guru of a toddler for that.

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Zach Wahls, His Two Moms, & The Future of Same-Sex Marriage

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Same-Sex Parents Lobby Congress For Equal Rights

NPR.org by 5.17,2012

On the edge of the National Mall on Thursday, dozens of moms, dads and kids pose for a group photo framed by the U.S. Capitol. They’re just some of the approximately 700,000 same-sex families across the country, despite laws in some states that make raising children difficult for gay couples. Now, they’ve come to Washington to ask lawmakers to make their lives a little easier.

“Today in the United States, there’s kind of a patchwork of state laws,” says Jennifer Chrisler, herself a same-sex parent and executive director of the Family Equality Council, which organized the lobbying day. Chrisler says public policy toward same-sex families is out of sync with reality.

“The 12 states where [same-sex] couples are most likely to be raising kids are states like Mississippi and Montana and Kentucky and Louisiana,” she says. “And those are the states that actually have some of the worst policy.”

In fact, the highest share of same-sex couples is in Mississippi, which bans gay adoption altogether.

Click here to read the entire article.

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In Choosing a Sperm Donor, a Roll of the Genetic Dice

May 14, 2012 – New York Times
By JACQUELINE MROZ

Sharine and Brian Kretchmar of Yukon, Okla., tried a number of medical treatments to conceive a second child. After a depressing series of failures, a doctor finally advised them to find a sperm donor.

For more than a year, the Kretchmars carefully researched sperm banks and donors. The donor they chose was a family man, a Christian like them, they were told. Most important, he had a clean bill of health. His sperm was stored at the New England Cryogenic Center in Boston, and according to the laboratory’s Web site, all donors there were tested for various genetic conditions.

So the Kretchmars took a deep breath and jumped in. After artificial insemination, Mrs. Kretchmar became pregnant, and in April 2010 she gave birth to a boy they named Jaxon.

But the baby failed to have a bowel movement in the first day or so after birth, a sign to doctors that something was wrong. Eventually Jaxon was rushed to surgery. Doctors returned with terrible news for the Kretchmars: Their baby appeared to have cystic fibrosis.

“We were pretty much devastated,” said Mrs. Kretchmar, 33, who works as a nurse. “At first, we weren’t convinced it was cystic fibrosis, because we knew the donor had been tested for the disease. We thought it had to be something different.”

But genetic testing showed that Jaxon did carry the genes for cystic fibrosis. Mrs. Kretchmar had no idea she was a carrier, but was shocked to discover that so, too, was the Kretchmars’ donor. His sperm, they would later discover, was decades old, originally donated at a laboratory halfway across the country and frozen ever since. Whether it was properly tested is a matter of dispute.

Sadly, the Kretchmars’ experience is not unique. In households across the country, children conceived with donated sperm are struggling with serious genetic conditions inherited from men they have never met. The illnesses include heart defects, spinal muscular atrophy, neurofibromatosis type 1 and fragile X syndrome, the most common form of mental retardation in boys, among many others.

Hundreds of cases have been documented, but it is likely there are thousands more, according to Wendy Kramer, founder of the Donor Sibling Registry, a Web site she started to help connect families with children who are offspring of the same sperm donor.

 

 

Click here to read the entire article.

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Gay on TV: It’s All in the Family

May 8, 2012
New York Times, By

On “Glee” this spring, a transgender character named Unique is competing in a sing-off. On “Grey’s Anatomy,” Arizona and Callie are adjusting to married life, having been pronounced “wife and wife” last year.

On “Modern Family,” the nation’s most popular television show, Cameron and his partner Mitchell are trying to adopt a second child.

What’s missing? The outrage.

The cultural battlefield of television has changed markedly since the 1990s, when conservative groups and religious figures objected to Ellen DeGeneres coming out and “Will & Grace” coming on.

Today, it’s rare to hear a complaint about shows like “Modern Family” or the drama “Smash,” which has five openly gay characters, or the sitcom “Happy Endings,” which, against stereotype, has a husky and lazy gay male character.

To the contrary. Mitt Romney is known to be a fan of “Modern Family,” and a Catholic group gave it a media award this month.

Next week in New York the major networks will announce a slate of new shows, including a sitcom on NBC that features a gay couple and their surrogate. The title: “The New Normal.”

At a time when gay rights are re-emerging as an election year issue — in part because of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s stated support for gay marriage on Sunday — activists and academics say that depictions of gay characters on television play a big role in making viewers more comfortable with their gay, lesbian and transgender neighbors.

Click here to read the entire article.

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For Obama, It’s About the Children

May 12, 2012, 4:43 pm

New York Times

By KENJI YOSHINO

In a historic interview last week, President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage. As he discussed his journey toward that position, the president sounded many familiar themes, like the importance of distinguishing between civil and religious marriage and of living up to American ideals of fairness. At the core of his narrative, however, was a relatively novel element — an affirmation of gay couples as parents.

The president repeatedly attributed his “evolution” to his contact not only with gay couples but also with their children. He described thinking about staff members “who are incredibly committed, in monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together.” He discussed meeting same-sex couples and seeing “how caring they are, how much love they have in their hearts — how they’re taking care of their kids.”

Later in the interview, he wondered whether opponents of same-sex marriage had “had the experience that I have had in seeing same-sex couples who are as committed, as monogamous, as responsible — as loving a group of parents as any heterosexual couple that I know. And in some cases, more so.” Indeed, except for his marquee declaration that “same-sex couples should be able to get married,” the president never spoke of “gay and lesbian couples” or “same-sex couples” without alluding to the children of those couples.

The president’s invocation of children as a reason to support same-sex marriage is striking. His position may be controversial among some gay individuals, who, like some straight individuals, do not want their right to marry to be linked in any way to procreation. Yet a strong justification for the president’s stance can be found in the argument it implicitly seeks to rebut. Traditionally, the well-being of children has appeared squarely on the other side of the ledger, functioning as the prime secular argument against same-sex marriage.

Click here to read the entire article.

 

in Legislation / Parenting / Personal Stories  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

The Real Lesson of North Carolina’s Amendment 1

ColorLines.com by Kenyon Farrow, May 11, 2012

President Obama’s public support of same-sex marriage helped upright the frowns of many LGBT marriage activists. The president’s endorsement came the day after North Carolina voters passed a constitutional amendment to ban recognition of any form of relationship that is not a legally married hetereosexual couple. While the passing of Amendment 1 may seem like a big blow to same sex-marriage activists, the grassroots organizing that came together to fight it may actually be the most important win for North Carolina, and a sign that activists in the state are building a better social justice infrastructure for the future.

What’s most important for the gay marriage advocates to remember is that Amendment 1 was never just about same sex marriage—that was already illegal in North Carolina. The bill was written and heavily promoted by Alliance Defense Fund, a right-wing legal advocacy group, and bans all legal protections for unmarried people. It ends people’s ability to get health insurance under domestic partnership plans. The bill even threatens the rights of unmarried parents to visit their children.

While this has been true in many of the now-30 constitutional amendments at the state level, the LGBT organizations have failed, in their desire to win “marriage equality,” to get ahead of the right-wing message to really paint it for what it is: a religious conservative policy agenda to remove anything resembling state support for “inappropriate” gender, romantic or sexual relationships. That includes, but is not limited to, same-sex marriage.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

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GLAD Publishes Transgender Family Law Book

Mombian.com May 3, 2012

Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) has just announced the publication of Transgender Family Law: A Guide to Effective Advocacy, “the first book to comprehensively address legal issues facing transgender people in the family law context and provide practitioners the tools to effectively represent transgender clients.”

Co-editor Jennifer Levi, director of GLAD’s Transgender Rights Project, called the book “a road map for transgender individuals and their attorneys to navigate the family court system in this evolving area of law.”

To read more, click here!

She explained, “Some of the most heartbreaking stories I have heard in my career as an LGBT legal advocate involve transgender people in family courts. The rights of transgender people—as parents, spouses, and simply as human beings—are often trammeled in family court because of pervasive bias and misunderstanding. ”

in In the News / Legal / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Breaking down barriers so foster kids can find a family

Seattle (CNN) — David Wing-Kovarik and his partner, Conrad, were ready to adopt a child.

They moved through all their requirements smoothly, even completing an orientation and training course for prospective parents.

Then they were confronted with their first real stumbling block.

“Our adoption agent said, ‘Well, you both look the same on paper, so who’s going to be the parent?'” Wing-Kovarik recalls.

In Arizona, where the couple lived at the time, only individuals and legally married couples may adopt from the U.S. foster care system. But because a same-sex couple cannot legally marry in the state, only one parent can be granted legal rights to the child.

“We saw (it) as a disadvantage to the child,” said Wing-Kovarik, 47. “We, frankly, got very angry about it when we thought about everybody else that was in the (training) class. None of them were asked this question. And it came down to the fact that we were a male couple. This was when we first experienced how being that gay couple just adds to the complexity of the whole process. It makes it much harder.”

In 18 states and the District of Columbia, same-sex couples can jointly petition to adopt a child. But in the other states, such as Arizona, the law either restricts joint adoption or is unclear.

That only adds confusion and frustration to what is already a “mind-numbing” adoption process, Wing-Kovarik said.

“It makes your head spin with the questions that are asked of you, with the forms that you have to fill out,” he said. “And then you have on top of that the fact that your family might not be that mom-and-dad home. You’re that gay or lesbian family … and the questions begin to change.”

To read the complete article, click here!

in Foster Care / Foster Parenting / Parenting / Personal Stories  by Anthony Brown 0 comments