You may have read the completely misleading headline this week: “Children of Same Sex Couples are Happier and Healthier than Peers, Research Shows” (Washington Post, July 7).
The sensationalized headline is yet another example of the mainstream media and their active agenda to push the redefinition of marriage across America. You’ll remember the Pew Research study of media coverage of gay marriage where they found that stories sympathetic to redefining marriage outnumbered those sympathetic to preserving marriage by a five to one margin. The media’s bias and intellectual dishonesty when it comes to the marriage debate allows them to trumpet a recent Australian study as if it is proven fact, while at the same time being highly critical of the New Family Structures Study and other research that challenges their political posture on the issue.
The subject of the headline is a farce of a study based on bad methodology. The survey the Post reports on was done in Australia and purports to show that children of same-sex parents actually are better off than their peers being raised by a mother and father. We know of course that there is no basis for such an outrageous claim, and a closer look at this Australian survey itself confirms our skepticism about it.
The so-called study does not use random sampling — the gold standard of any type of research — but rather self-selected subjects who knew the purpose of the study beforehand! Furthermore, the same-sex parents in the study self-reported all the information, including the answers to how their children were faring — in other words, the children themselves were not consulted.
So we have a supposed study where the participants are self-selected, they know the subject matter (and its political significance) and they get to report the results themselves, with no attempt to independently verify the facts. Gee, I wonder how that will turn out!
Of course, every parent wants their children to reflect well on their parenting skills, and would you really expect someone to volunteer to provide an example that casts their own parenting in a negative light? All this makes the data gleaned from this survey virtually worthless.
For a fuller review of this survey and the most basic errors it commits in its biased effort to promote the redefinition of marriage, visit today’s issue of Public Discourse, where Texas University researcher Mark Regnerus demonstrates why the report is ‘suspect science’ and reveals why we cannot trust the results or the headlines surrounding this charade of a “study.”
In discussing the flaws in the recruitment/self-selection process, Professor Regnerus states,
I don’t know if there’s any other way to say this than to suggest that… this is not the way to build a sense of average same-sex households with children. To compare the results from such an unusual sample with that of a population-based sample of everyone else is just suspect science. And I may be putting that too mildly[emphasis added].
I think he is putting it too mildly. This isn’t science at all, but an agenda dressed up in a lab coat and paraded around for an adoring media. But like in the old story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, some of us simply cannot be convinced to play along with the charade.
Don’t buy the hype. Three hundred some parents volunteering to lavish praise on their own children is not a substitute for the wisdom of the ages that you and I have inherited and that tells us what common sense can plainly see: kids deserve, and do best with, their own loving mom and dad.