…is to not abuse their children or force them to be homosexual.
The paper found that none of the 78 [National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study] adolescents reports having ever been physically or sexually abused by a parent or other caregiver. This contrasts with 26 percent of American adolescents who report parent or caregiver physical abuse and 8.3 percent who report sexual abuse.
[…]On sexual orientation, 2.8 percent of the NLLFS adolescents identified as predominantly to exclusively homosexual.
I can’t wait for the religious right to desperately attempt to spin this into showing how everyone deserves a Mom and Dad, or that gays aren’t fit parents, or that gays secretly want to turn children gay. Really, what can they say? The heterosexual abusers aren’t True Christians? 2.8% homosexuality is still too much?
…Oh wait, that’s exactly the sort of stuff they’re likely to say. I give it a day before a press release is out.
When are people going to realize it’s better for children to be raised by adults who want them than by adults who can accidentally create them?
Shouldn’t you cringe at the fact that they produced a ±0.1% figure from 78 participants? Although it’s all very nice, that’s a ridiculously low number given what they compare it to.
Sadly, I fear these data will do very little to lessen homophobic bigotry against lesbian parents. The ‘oft quoted axiom is relevant here, that it is difficult for someone to reason themselves out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
That’s what I was thinking, too.
i cant recall where I read it, but I remember reading paper from a british site last year where they found that children raised by lesbians tend to have higher IQs, and those raised by gay men will have higher incomes
How the simplest conclusion that “…it’s better for children to be raised by adults who want them than by adults who can accidentally create them?” Can escape anyone is beyond me.
Jen, that last sentence is an elegant sledgehammer. It’s beautiful.
That number is thanks to shoddy reporting on behalf of the Huffington Post (and I guess me, since I was too lazy to fix it). The pdf of the actual article is much more in depth: http://www.nllfs.org/images/up…
According to some “family values” web sites, 2.8% is pretty close to to the stats for the general population.
Haha, I love this! Jen, your last comment was spot on. This is exactly the kind of study my religious nutjob family will hate to hear. Their objections to legalizing gay marriage are that a) homosexuality is morally wrong, b) the SOLE purpose of marriage is to procreate (yeah….) and c) it is “proven” that gay parents are detrimental to children.At least on the last point, here’s some solid evidence for them! Which they’ll ignore, of course. :) The religious aren’t much for evidence, are they?
I was raised by lesbians! The thing about your last line, though, a lot of gays from our parents’ generation (I was born in the mid-eighties, my parents in the late fifties) had hetero families first, then came out, so I, along with a lot of my lesbian-raised friends growing up, were from unintentional pregnancies. Maybe that’s changing now, though.
My sister is a lesbian, and she and her partner want to have kids some day. If anyone tries to say that my sister would be an unfit mother, or that her kids would be better off with some set of foster parents, well, I really hope for that person’s sake they have really good medical coverage. Grrrr… sorry. The whole idea of homosexual couples being unfit to raise kids just gets my hackles up. Aside from my sister my family has a few gay friends that we deeply care about, and would completely and utterly support having kids.
*stupid zealous religious fanatic voice (which sounds remarkably like my dumbguy voice)*”Well, y’see, it doesn’t say anything about teh gays, and we all know that gay men are doing terrible things to their kids, and it’s just proof of the moral depravity of the US, and besides, people lie and no one wants to say their mom did anything bad, and since lesbians are two mothers…”*end stupid zealous religious fanatic voice* Remember who we’re dealing with. They can justify ANYTHING, regardless of how rational it actually sounds.
Homosexuals are lovely.
I cannot understand how, in today’s society, this is even an issue. Really. Anti-homosexual bigotry is just incomprehensible to me, even more so than racist or religious bigotry (even if homophobia largely stems from a religious basis).That said… I really like your extrapolation from this result. I wonder what the results would be if they were to do a different study, on parents (heterosexual or homosexual) who wanted the children versus those who had them accidentally; I think you may be quite right that there’s a confounding variable there.As somebody who suspects he was an unwanted child, well… hmm, let’s not say anything at all. I think my parents wanted children, they just didn’t want one like me (although of course they deny it), which is a different issue entirely.
I was raised by two women and i think i turned out pretty darned good.
“shoddy reporting on behalf of the Huffington Post “Does it do any other kind?
Parenthood is so gay.
The report also suggested that male children of lesbian couples were “late bloomers” in terms of sexual experience — which frankly I saw as a good thing — and I’m surprised the headlines weren’t all “Lesbo Moms Emasculate Sons!1!1″Very interesting studies, though. Best to go thru the set of PDF’s and ignore HuffPo’s writeup, though.
BadSec said: “The religious aren’t much for evidence, are they?”Of course they are.When it supports their position. ;-)
Well, according to Proverbs you shouldn’t spare the rod so obviously these lesbos aren’t tr00 Christians!It’s a nice study and I’m encouraged by the results, but this isn’t going to make the religious right bat an eyelid. They don’t need to spin the results, because they already live in a world where not beating your child bloody is a bad thing.
But you don’t understand that it is a father’s right (or in one rare case I know of a mother’s) to have sex, heterosexual of course, with their off-spring. In the mid 70s a friend of mine was a cop in a small town around West Lafayette, after drunk driving their biggest problem was father-daughter sex abuse.
“daughters with lesbian mothers more likely to be bisexual.” that’s unsurprising to me, and telling. i bet the haterz will jump all over that one. they tend to really get angry about anything that reveals truth about the patriarchy.
/silly disqus/ but yeah, i’ve noticed that in the lesbian households with daughters i know. don’t take this the wrong way, but i’d consider myself somewhat a failure as a mother if i raised a girl and she *didn’t* at least experiment with bi and/or homosexuality. i don’t mean to disparage heterosexuality, but rather indicate that i believe human sexuality is much more complicated than is as constructed by our patriarchy. teaching my daughter about that would mean that of her own accord, she’d eventually seek out the truth of that herself. i don’t have kids, so wdik.
I’ll have to read the paper itself later, but on the face of it this is a good statistic to keep handy.
Very well put. I certainly believe human sexuality is more of a sliding scale than the socially defined points of homo- / bi- / hetero- sexuality. Surely it’s far better for a child to grow up knowing that s/he was free to explore their sexuality and come to their own understanding of who they are than rather than conform to social constructs.
The sample is suspect. There was an awful case of abuse by a lesbian couple in Akron a few years ago, although it was only the boys who were mistreated, if I recall.
The religious freaks will twist it somehow, as they always do. But hopefully this study will nudge the people on the fence in the right direction.
1) citation?2) so? There are thousands to millions of awful cases of abuse by straight couples, so this could still be representative.
As a slight diversion, I’m not too worried about what orientation my daughter develops. I’m more concerned about raising her with an open mind and sex-positive worldview. Her mother, unfortunately, is likely to be a horrible influence in this regard (we’re in the process of divorcing, for mostly unrelated reasons; I will be having primary custody for the foreseeable future and probably the rest of her adolescence). Anyone have any suggestions for how I can help encourage this without being creepy or inappropriate? :/
just send her to blogs like Jen’s a lot. teach her to think critically and ask questions about what she’s told about herself and her body. but mostly, immerse her in the writing of women you respect and think are good for her.
this is totally anecdotal and i wouldn’t argue it in a scientific debate. but every lesbian or bi daughter of a lesbian or bi woman? “oh, i get it now. it’s the Patriarchy” was the seminal moment. we’re like a minority of a minority of a minority; that is: we’re the women who embrace the more radical ideology attendant to lesbianism and bisexuality and trans-identity. the Patriarchy is a horrible thing, and if you understand what all of it means, or most of it, you understand that sexual conformity is a big part of that. choice is tantamount, of course, but one wants to have the true freedom to be able to choose something other than total conformity with the cardinal forms/praxis of the patriarchy. monogamous, “marriage only” sexual heteronormativity for women and girls is literally the definition of patriarchal conformity and submission.
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ld…My point is that they report 0% in a sample of 78 couples. This is way too small for such a definitive statement. It makes the sampling itself very suspect.For the record, I simply don’t care if children are raised by a man and a woman, two women, two men, or even a group family. What matters is that the children are protected.
Assuming the sample is representative, that indicates an abuse rate of less than 1.28% and probably less than half that. What’s your point?
…and why did you feel the need to add that disclaimer? No one said anything….
That’s surprisingly simple. After all, that’s a big part of where I picked up my tendencies in that regard. (Although I suspect the amount of pornography I consumed as a teenager has something to do with both my sex-is-fun-ism, and my being utterly jaded on conventional model looks. >.>)Even better, there’s a clause in our marital settlement agreement specifying that she’s not to be brought to religious services without the consent of both parents before she’s 13, so even if her mom goes back to licking cats (not a sexual reference), she won’t be getting that cult-of-virginity bullshit. >.>
The idea of having a man and a woman as parents comes from traditional gender roles (look at that pic. Who would be everybody supposed to look at if there were no dad?). But such gender roles change along society, they become blurry and ultimately dissappear. There’s no unavoidable need for a traditional, one man one woman couple when both parents have a professional career and they also share the housework and the education of their kids.
It’s the standard, “I don’t hate gays and I even let them use my bathroom” that people add when they feel like they’re saying something bigoted in order to convince themselves that they’re not a bigot. It doesn’t always indicate that the person saying it is a bigot, but it still usually means the person should’ve thought about what they were trying to say a bit longer.
Yeah, not like some awesomely reputable publication, like Jezebel. http://jezebel.com/5687494/stu……oh wait.
I think it’s mostly a fear, justified or not, that they will be accused for being homophobic for questioning the results of the study.
I know.
You are lost, bereft of the warm comfort of our lord and savior, aren’t you, you godless heathen?
What’s bigoted about pointing out that a small sample is small? If anything, it is, or should be, redundant.
I just wanted to be clear on the direction that I am coming from. My problem is with studies in the social sciences making any extrapolation from such tiny sample sizes. Populations with a ‘failure rate’ of that order require huge sample sizes to get any predictive value, and those conclusions are extremely sensitive to the slightest bias.
Not exactly fear, just dealing with past experience, in which I have been accused of being homophobic, communist, fascist, sexist, and a whole lot more. Most of these accusations have been a result of questioning ‘facts’ that turned out not to be true.
Religionists love the No True Scotsman Fallacy almost as much as they love causal misattribution.
If she’s college bound, steer her towards colleges that have the best records of social tolerance. I found this list:http://www.advocate.com/articl…
How does that make the sample suspect?
Start by leaving a few Judy Blume books around. Seriously.
If you look at the publications themselves (and not the breathless media reporting) you will note that the study itself cautions against extrapolating too much on account of their sample size. The most they say is that further study is recommended.
Not at all surprising that there would be occasional instances of abuse. This study looked at only 78 children – so, at most, 78 families (probably less, since there are likely 2- or more children families in the study), so it isn’t exactly strong grounds for saying ZERO, but VERY LOW is supported by the data, far lower than heterosexual couples.
The Onion already has a response! XDhttp://www.theonion.com/articl…
Given that I have to deal with the “Children are better off with a Mother and Father” crap from even moderately religious liberals I know, I have been waiting to use this study next time someone mentions it ^-^
“Kevin Sims – Interline Clerk:Based on my knowledge, they probably don’t have much time to interact with their children at all given that they’re always slowly taking off each other’s matching cheerleader uniforms or playfully sudsing one another up.” WIN!!!!!