Saturday, March 23, 2013

Remember, you're not allowed to ask certain questions at a University







LEARNING, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


Divemedic said...

Although I am not gay, I oppose using this study to attack gay marriage for the same reason why I oppose using science to attack gun owners:
I don't care if a thousand people committed (molesting, rape, murder) yesterday because they were (gay, gun owners, or of a certain race) I didn't, so piss off.

Dave said...

Kind of like what happens when studies show that blacks have vastly disproportionate violent crimes rates. I seem to remember someone crunching the numbers and coming up with the result that, if you removed America's black population, the US violent crime rate would be less than Canada's. Can't remember where/when I saw that though.

For another date point, Houston actually has, percentage-wise, a bigger minority population than Chicago. But Houston's minority population is mostly Latino, while Chicago's is mostly black. That'd be another item that might help account for the difference in murder rates, along with gun laws.

But you don't dare say that, because that'd be racist.

Sevesteen said...

"Identifies as entirely heterosexual" sounds like a question carefully worded to elicit a specific response. An initial study of bisexuality used self-reported orientation, with no further screening. It measured physical signs of arousal when various images were displayed, and virtually none of the subjects displayed significant arousal to both genders. (A later test used past history rather than self-reported identification, and found bisexual arousal patterns). I think it is far more likely that someone raised by gay parents would identify as bisexual despite only having straight sex than someone raised in the Westboro Baptist church.

Old NFO said...

Yep, sucks when the truth actually gets in a peer reviewed journal... :-)

Jake (formerly Riposte3) said...

Assuming I'm understanding both the study itself and the various articles pointed to in the one you linked to, it appears that - inappropriate personal attacks on Regnerus aside - there truly is a serious flaw in the study's comparisons: Except for one, the "gay parent" respondents were all subject to unstable parenting environments (divorce, adultery, probable hostility between the parents, etc.), but were being compared to respondents from stable parenting environments (successful, 18+ year marriages).

In other words, while the raw data may be useful in other analyses, this particular study says more about broken families vs. intact families than it does about gay families vs. straight families. It would be more appropriate (and potentially useful) to compare the broken gay families with broken straight families than with intact straight families.