From the Witherspoon Institute's Public Discourse blog:
A Married Mom and Dad Really Do Matter: New Evidence from Canada
by Mark Regnerus
A new academic study based on the Canadian census suggests that a married mom and dad matter for children. Children of same-sex coupled households do not fare as well.
... A study published last week in the journal Review of the Economics of the Household—analyzing data from a very large, population-based sample—reveals that the children of gay and lesbian couples are only about 65 percent as likely to have graduated from high school as the children of married, opposite-sex couples. And gender matters, too: girls are more apt to struggle than boys, with daughters of gay parents displaying dramatically low graduation rates.
Unlike US-based studies, this one evaluates a 20 percent sample of the Canadian census, where same-sex couples have had access to all taxation and government benefits since 1997 and to marriage since 2005.
[Douglas Allen] he was able to isolate and analyze hundreds of children living with a gay or lesbian couple (either married or in a “common law” relationship akin to cohabitation).
So the study is able to compare—side by side—the young-adult children of same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples, as well as children growing up in single-parent homes and other types of households. Three key findings stood out to Allen:
- children of married opposite-sex [i.e., normal] families have a high graduation rate compared to the others; children of lesbian families have a very low graduation rate compared to the others; and the other four types [common law, gay, single mother, single father] are similar to each other and lie in between the married/lesbian extremes.
- Employing regression models and series of control variables, Allen concludes that the substandard performance cannot be attributed to lower school attendance or the more modest education of gay or lesbian parents. Indeed, same-sex parents were characterized by higher levels of education, and their children were more likely to be enrolled in school than even those of married, opposite-sex couples. And yet their children are notably more likely to lag in finishing their own schooling.
... What is surprising in the Canadian data is the revelation that lesbian couples’ children fared worse, on average, than even those of single parents.
A lotta drama, a lotta instability, not a lotta money. Many lesbian couples are, in effect, single mothers squared.
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96 comments:
Maybe more meridional family values are needed.
My father was gay - one of the reasons I emigrated to New Zealand.
I am conflicted about this subject.
1). My father never molested me, but there is not much I wouldn't give to retrospectively undo his gayness.
2). The problem with growing up with a gay father, straight mother and "uncle" is all the little things. Gays try to be feminine but the result is quite simply grotesque.
3). He died of Alzheimer's Disease and the last coherent thought he had in his head was that he was a woman in a man's body. That would indicate that he couldn't help it, but I still wish he could have lived a lie for all our sakes.
4). I post as 22pp22 on Takimag and in the DT. I have had a couple of online conversations on this subject and I have learned that people like me are better off keeping our mouths firmly shut. The Great and the Good are simply not prepared to listen to us. PCers reserve special venom for people from my background who don't toe the party line.
My brother's policy of ignoring reality is the best one.
Data like this comes as no surprise to me, but it won't make a blind but of difference. It a religion to PCers. Reason doesn't come into it.
girls are more apt to struggle than boys, with daughters of gay parents displaying dramatically low graduation rates.
So, alas, the Nurture does matter, too.
My father was gay - one of the reasons I emigrated to New Zealand.
Why did you have an urge to move to NZ because of your dad?
Not much there you couldn't predict. Lesbians also have pretty high rates of domestic violence and stalker exes, as I recall.
I'm assuming single parents are both divorced and never married?
So, lots of categories, but if I'm reading this right, the group that fared the worst was daughters of lesbian couples.
I guess the importance of the father-daughter relationship can't be understated. Not only is it an important figure in your life that dotes on you and stresses the importance of staying off the pole, it's also someone who can model the best in male behavior.
OK, looks like daughters of gays actually fared worse, but the same point applies. If the males in your life display stunted maturity (to borrow agnostic's theory), you're not going to have any concept of what real heterosexual men are like.
I think Steve's touched on this before with regards to female ballet dancers being isolated from men who are not either (1) gay or (2) out to exploit them.
Countenace has a good point. The cited data needs to be reviewed with appropriate adjustment made for adoption.
"Since gays and lesbians cannot (yet) procreate on their own, they have to adopt. And since most lesbians are leftists, they might have a tendency to adopt "fashion accessories" from Africa or non-white "projects" a la the borrowed generations."
As best I can tell from reading celebrity stories, lesbians tend to be proto-eugenicists who demand tall WASP-y sperm donors with high SAT scores.
On the other hand, it's the ueber-heterosexual celebrities like Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie and Sandra Bullock that go the adoption route.
Philip Cohen, sociologist, is critical of this study... Can someone (Steve?) who, unlike me, is qualified to make sense of the statistics, explain what's going on?
http://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2013/10/11/the-douglas-allen-study-of-canadian-children-of-gaylesbian-parents-is-worthless/
Cohen does, however, kindly put up his PDF copy online!
http://www.terpconnect.umd.edu/~pnc/allen-ss-grad.pdf
Facts? How quaint.
As if that will do anything in a debate with the left.
No wonder single mothers are now sacred objects. Drama and instabilty. Chick crack.
They were not able to get specifically at adoption, but they did include models with certain child controls including visible minority and disabled. Visible minority is pretty broad, as the researchers note - "The census identifies many visible minorities, but only has a broad based question on race. Hence, the same race variable likely contains significant measurement error." They did a good job with the data available.
Without access to the study it's hard to say, but I'd assume most of the children of gay couples are adopted. This means these kids are unfortunately largely from parents who couldn't handle kids. Some of this dysfunction is likely to be genetic.
I'd be interested to see a similar study of children adopted by straight parents vs gay parents.
Nor is it able to establish the circumstances of the birth of the children whose education is evaluated—that is, were they the product of a heterosexual union, adopted, or born via surrogate or assisted reproductive technology?
Failing to control for these factors makes the whole study "drama."
I can't figure out why lesbians don't make good parents. My best guess: they're too self-absorbed.
My second-best guess: the study didn't control for biological relatedness between parents and children, for example by comparing lesbian and gay households in which one parent was a biological parent (I skipped around and didn't read it too carefully).
My third-best guess: Like the half-black-half-Asian lesbian in The Wire, lesbians don't tend to be nurturing (even if they aren't self-absorbed).
"girls are more apt to struggle than boys, with daughters of gay parents displaying dramatically low graduation rates"
That's interesting, I was under the impression that boys had worse outcomes on various measures from living with a single mother than girls.
Since gays and lesbians cannot (yet) procreate on their own, they have to adopt. And since most lesbians are leftists, they might have a tendency to adopt "fashion accessories" from Africa or non-white "projects" a la the borrowed generations.
Yeah, adoption was the first potential explanation that came to my mind. It doesn't even have to be interracial. What sorts of white people put their kids up for adoption? Presumably young, prole single mothers, who are unlikely to be passing on a genetic predisposition for high achievement.
I've always heard that the children of gays and lesbians grow up to do just fine. I've never investigated that claim, but it does coincide with the general finding from behavioral genetics that the family environment typically has little effect on most long term outcomes.
This is a classic Steve Sailer topic. Get on the case, Steve.
2Degrees said...
My father was gay - one of the reasons I emigrated to New Zealand.
Pardon my prying, but without revealing too much, how has this changed your life? Do you, or will you have children? Are any of your relatives gay? Do you support gay marriage to prevent sham marriages like your parents? I support gay marriage without kids, but it seems the genes want their way and they will IVF themselves into the future. I'm sure you must have pondered why gayness hasn't gone extinct, do you have any theories why the trait persists?
An achievement gap? Clearly more funding is needed to help same sex families overcome it! What will schools do to fix their problem?
Not all lesbian & gay couples adopt, many have their own children from earlier heterosexual relationships. This seems to be more frequent among lesbians than it does among gays.
Wow. Yikes.
This appears to be one of those studies that simply must be destroyed by our betters in any way possible.
It's actually pretty astonishing in its implications. I mean, the children of gay parents are better educated than average, and yet the children turn out far worse educated?
One thing one wonders about is the genetic background of the children of gay/lesbian couples. Who are the sperm donors for the lesbians? Who contributes the egg for the gay couples? Are the children often adopted?
This study seems to be no end of trouble for the PC patrol. If the children of lesbians do so badly because of environment, that's really bad. If they do badly because of genetics, that's worse.
What's a non-traditional mother or father to do?
I thought that most lesbians had a child from a heterosexual dalliance or invitro.
The former suggests an unstable home life, the latter suggests some level of wealth.
Well hang on - strictly speaking there's no such thing as a child of a gay or lesbian couple. These may be the biological children of a single member of the partnership but more likely these children are adopted. Generally, adopted children arise from similar (usually worse) circumstances to single parent families.
So isn't an IQ heritability explanation much more likely here than the quality of adopted parents?
Not that that can be mentioned, since if anything it's even more heretical than the idea that homosexuals make worse parents.
My husband had a lesbian co-worker who used her egg and and donor sperm and had the embryo implanted in-vitro into her partner's uterus. So her wife was basically the surrogate for her child.
That story had an interesting outcome (from our perspective): the women separated a few years later and the stay-at-home partner kept custody of the child and a whole boat-load of spousal support (or whatever the legal definition was at the time- gay marriage had not been legalized yet).
Let me just add- the lesbian co-worker was full on crazy but the company was scare to fire her because she was a lawsuit waiting to happen. They caught her on camera stealing from her co-workers and they still didn't fire her. There was a quiet celebration when she quit.
Aside from the vastly increased likelihood that children of same-sex couples are adopted (you'd think they would have controlled for this)...there is also the undeniable fact that discrimination against gays/lesbians in the form of bullying might play a role.
This is a study of high school graduation rates, meaning the kids are over 18...We don't know the average age..but let's assume most of them went to elementary school in the mid-late 90's.....there was not nearly the level of acceptance of gay families then and many of the kids surely were tormented for their Faggot Daddies and Dyke Mommies...possibly turning them a bit of attending school at all....
With gay men you have to control for adoption somehow. I had a gay classmate who raised an adopted black child with his "husband". The kid, last I heard, was becoming a police officer - a far cry from the social status of his Ivy League parents, but, on the other hand, the kid is almost certainly much better off than he would have been had he been raised in an Oakland ghetto.
I'm not surprised that gay men seem to do better than lesbian couples. The gay couples I've known seem like nice guys who care about their kids. Lesbians are often just mean and angry.
Gays don't have to adopt to have kids. They can use donated sperm or eggs as the case may be. I know of a lesbian who had herself impregnated with her gay male friend's sperm. That's probably not uncommon.
Two comments must've gone into the spam filter, triggered by scare words relating to gays or something...
Well, at least with all of those flannel shirts around their kids will never lack clothing or warmth.
"Since gays and lesbians cannot (yet) procreate on their own, they have to adopt. And since most lesbians are leftists, they might have a tendency to adopt "fashion accessories" from Africa or non-white "projects" a la the borrowed generations.
Maybe that explains the disparity."
Some adopt. Many use in vitro fertilization.
Perhaps the problem is not so much the lack of a father as the lack of a mother. Real life lesbians (as opposed to fantasy lesbians) tend to be impatient and angry, not good qualities for a mom.
But I do agree that the adoption issue needs to be looked at.
Unless I'm mistaken, Allen measures graduation for the age group 17-22 when many are still in high school. So it's reasonable to assume that many graduate when they no longer live with their parents. If that's the case then we'd have to know if children of same sex parents leave home at the same time as other children.
Not to say that I think gay parents are as good as regular, but since someone delivered the pdf (thanks) we could discuss the actual study.
Judith Rich Harris, in the Nurture Assumption, shows us that the shared home environment has little effect on offspring.
It is all genetics.
In the case of gays, they are getting adopted kids. These are kids people don't want.
In the case of lesbians ...
I think "Peter the Shark" is onto something. I used to work in a creative field so I've known lots of gays and lesbians. Gay guys on average are nicer people than lesbians. Plenty of both were emotionally messed-up but at least some of the guys got along well with others. The lesbians were just angry.
Perhaps its because a lot of them adopt low quality children.
Anon 11:45
That's a good turnaround, you should go take a victim's studies major.
Regnerus hasn't been shipped to Guantanamo yet?
From Anonymous at 8:23
> Failing to control for these factors makes the whole study "drama."
Somewhat ... but not fully.
First off, from the culturally dominant perspective of the nuturists, it's not. It contradicts the gay is wonderful\sacred\the-best-thing-since-sliced-bread that we're getting now. To dodge it they have to introduce nature.
Secondly, the technical point, they apparently (going from comment, not reading the paper) did account for visible minority\disabled angle, so we're left with the skew between adopted and natural children within racial groups.
Thirdly, the "single mother" group, with the exception of divorced college educated moms--a small fraction of the "single mother" cohort--is pretty much the same gene pool as within race adoptees. The lesbians do worse.
Fourthly, however cloudly the light on the comparison with normal marriage natural children, there's the comparison between homosexual couples. I think lesbians are quite a bit *more* likely to have their own children than gay men. And to have them with guys they've selected as "good material". (I could be wrong, my personal sample size is zero gay men raising kids, and three lesbian couples raising one of the partners kids. Generally lesbians find it quite easy to have their own children, plenty of men will volunteer for duty, while despite how herd followingly PC women are, not many want to bake a kid for a gay couple to raise.) If this is the case, then we can say that lesbians create particularly *bad* households.
But ... yeah. A truely iSteve quality study would account for adoption as well as parental education (as marker for genetic quality).
I will say, after a few years of parenting--my three kids are now all off at UW, and i'm a month into empty-nesterhood (which sucks--i miss them)--i think my kids would have been "good kids" under most circumstances. I certainly don't think i added too much to their IQs, which--all slightly different--were discernable very early on. (You could have taken their IQ test scores for entrance to the gifted program at age six and called their SAT scores at age sixteen.)
But my take on parenting is more like "you can't make your kids something they are not ... but you can screw them up."
Normal married couples, loving and raising their own kids is far and away the best way to not screw 'em up.
To "Anonymous"
Helps the thread if you folks give yourself a name.
It doesn't have to be you, or your screen name in some other context, or even consistent across iSteve comments (though that's nice) ... just something.
Click the Name\URL botton, and you can be whatever, "Bob1897", ... you're still anonymous but *distinctly* anonymous.
Yes, gay/lesbian adoption is a matter for which you have to control, however...if adoption is causing most of the disparity, you'd expect the children of gay couples to do worse than those in lesbian couples. The two most likely routes to fatherhood for gay men are adoption and prior hetero relationships. Surrogacy is hellishly expensive.
Lesbians, however, can also be artificially inseminated or get "knocked up" by a hetero friend, which isn't all that unlikely, since many lesbians actually are bisexual.
Aside from their messed up family lives, perhaps higher amounts of testosterone or other hormones is harmful to their children in utero.
Anonymous said...
2Degrees said...
My father was gay - one of the reasons I emigrated to New Zealand.
Pardon my prying, but without revealing too much, how has this changed your life? Do you, or will you have children?
You are not prying as I volunteered the information and no body knows who 2Degrees is anyway.
1). My parents' marriage was not a sham in that it produced two kids. My father came out when I was a child and said he had always been a woman. My "uncle" died when I was quite young so I never knew him that well.
2). I initially planned to remain single, but one thing led to another and I did get married, but neither of my wife's pregnancies went to term.
I took a trip up to the North Island and saw who is having kids. Maori gangbangers will screw anything - including their own offspring, male or female. Not all Maori are like that, but the large number who sport gang patches definitely are.
I now regret not having had kids. My father's genes are preferable to better than those being transmitted by Hone and Ngaire and their ten offspring.
Yes, being raised in a gay household screws you up. There is a reason why the children of gay parents are often "damaged". As I said, it's the little things and the playground persecution dished out by the children of liberals. More conservative parents avoid the topic like the plague. Gays also have a completely screwed up set of priorities and when they congregate start to live by their own rules. In Britain in the 1980's, they even had their own patois mainly to describe the male body. Bona lallies means nice legs.
3). I do suspect that many of my relatives are gay - five unmarried aunts on my father's side. That would mean that male and female homosexuality might have the same genetic cause.
4). Yes, I emigrated to New Zealand to put the planet between my old life and my new one. My father's homosexuality was a major factor, but no the only one.
5). There will be a surge in the number of gay parents, but gays will continue to have children with straights.
5 a). Gays love to make statements - especially in how they dress. They put alot more effort into being women than bona fide women do. Having kids is just such a statement.
5 b). Let's be clear on one thing. Most gays know that gayness is an aberration. They continue to harbour doubts even after they have embraced their true nature. They will continue to have children by normal means until they decide to turn. That will not change.
My father always believed that gays were making a mistake in becoming quite such a vocal interest group. He believed they were incapable of not being corrupt. He used to try to dress me in a gay friendly fashion for job interviews. On one occasion, he knocked on my door and handed over a lavender coloured shirt. I now wish I had worn it!
"Without access to the study it's hard to say, but I'd assume most of the children of gay couples are adopted."
Please stay put. The Thought Police will be there momentarily.
It's indicative of a blog where HBD is so taken for granted that no one here has pointed out the painfully obvious: adoption is not an excuse these gay and lesbian couples can use in their defense. It's an HBD explanation. It implies that genetics affect outcomes. We can't have that idea getting into peoples' heads.
If the children of gays and lesbians do worse, then it must be because gays and lesbians make horrible parents.
The survey asked this:
...young adults in the Canadian census were asked, “Are you the child of a male or female same-sex married or common law couple?”
I'll bet at least 10% of respondents misunderstood that. Since act ual children of same-sex couples are a tiny fraction of the population, most of the "yes" answers were spurious. But they did overrepresent bad readers. So there's your low graduation rate etc.
Putin's blocking the Syrian was a huge gift to Obama.
Obama avoided a war and could lay the blame on Putin.
Double blessing.
"He died of Alzheimer's Disease and the last coherent thought he had in his head was that he was a woman in a man's body."
I don't think that's really typical of gay men, although I've known of some who said similar things. Mostly though they have fondness at all for females, and in fact are often deeply mysogynistic. There was an article on that subject in the local alternative rag back in the 90s. The aversion that gay men had towards women (for the most part) was discouraging for the lesbians who thought there ought to be solidarity among "gays." But they may have been just as bad in the reverse, just more ideologically driven. Gay men are more personally driven.
"Without access to the study it's hard to say, but I'd assume most of the children of gay couples are adopted. This means these kids are unfortunately largely from parents who couldn't handle kids. Some of this dysfunction is likely to be genetic.
"
Many of the lesbians' children are actually biological offspring of one of them. There are some couples in my area (known for the that sort of thing), and one of them told me that they planned for her to be the mom for one kid, and the other to be the mom for the other kid. A mutual friend was to provide the artificial insemination. As it turned out, the one woman had both kids. And both kids are seriously problematic, with mental and behavioral (and I think also physical) problems. They are not deformed, but they are not normal either.\
I don't know if artificial insemination is the problem, the genes of the people involved, or the home (they are fairly well off, but both have to work.)
Sci-fi at my doorstep, I call it.
>>Many lesbian couples are, in effect, single mothers squared.
Brilliant and hilarious observation.
2 degrees, you have my sympathies. I know several people whose fathers have been gay and they have major psych issues.
It's obvious that Peter the shark has no clue what he is talking about. Or maybe he is gay himself? In any case an asshole. Gay men are masters of subtle devastation. Lesbians are more forthright. It's an inversion of the usual sexual roles, because homosexuals are inverted.
That's why the Venn diagram is wrong. Gay and straight men really have nothing in common, despite having the same Seinfeldian equipment. The brains are different.
If gay men "do better" it's only because the bar is so low and the kids are still young. The report measured school graduation rates and what else? Come back when the kids are 40 and compare the kids of lesbians to the kids of gay men.
Gay fathering, at least among the privilege, was not uncommon in 19th and 20th century Britain. Oscar Wilde was hardly alone, he just flaunted it. This goes well beyond Bloomsbury.
A forgotten writer, Simon Raven, wrote about this in a series of books. Homosexuality was simply a part of upper class public school life, continued as best one could into the army and later life. He himself bred one unwanted son, married and divorced the mother quickly, never lived with her. The wretched son was gay himself, idolized his awful father, and committed suicide by drowning at 55. His books all treat homosexuality in a very matter of fact fashion as if to say, "What else?" He treats heterosexuality as the aberration, and women as intruders in the real world of male sexual desire.
Waugh only hinted at this in BRideshead. He himself had affairs with men at Oxford despite fathering 6 (or 7?) children....he based Lord Marchmain on William Lygon, who fathered 7 children despite being homosexual.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lygon,_7th_Earl_Beauchamp
Lygon was not really an exception to the behavior of his class, he was just a bit exaggerated. The more I read about the public school educated Oxbridgeans from around 1900 to the 1950s the more amazed at how gay they were I became. Then I got jaded. Except for a few, they were all pretty much doing it, and it leaves a lifelong mark.
(sarcasm alert) Stereotypes of lesbians, Jews, blacks and women are reasonable and based on truth. Stereotypes of the groups favored on this blog (upper class British) are baseless and slanderous.
How well do children do after they have been kidnapped by Gypsies?!?!
"Staggering story of the healthy Spanish basketball team who PRETENDED to be mentally handicapped to win Paralympic gold"
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2458715/Spanish-basketball-team-pretended-disabled-win-Paralympic-gold.html
"A former Spanish basketball boss has been found guilty of fraud 13 years after he presided over one of the biggest scandals in sporting history.
Fernando Martin Vicente, the former head of the Spanish Federation for Mentally Handicapped Sports, fielded athletes with no disabilities at the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney in order to win the gold medal."
"The scandal broke in November 2000 when Carlos Ribagorda, a member of Spain's gold medal-winning intellectually handicapped basketball team in Sydney, claimed that he and other athletes in categories such as track and field, table tennis and swimming were not mentally deficient.
'Of the 200 Spanish athletes at Sydney at least 15 had no type of physical or mental handicap - they didn't even pass medical or psychological examinations,' he wrote in the magazine Capital just days after the Paralympics ended.
Ribargorda said he had played for the Spanish Paralympic basketball team for over two years but had no mental handicap.
He said the only test he had been asked to complete at his first training session was six press-ups, after which his blood pressure was taken, nor did he face an intelligence test when he was in Australia.
The final team did comprise two players with IQs below 70 as required, but the other ten posed as mentally disabled players with the help of fake medical certificates they were provided with.
At one point during the first game of the tournament, when they were leading China by 30 points, Ribagorda claimed the coach told the players: 'Lads, move down a gear or they’ll figure out you’re not disabled.'
They went on to beat Russia in the final. But their deceit began to unravel when a picture of their victory celebrations on the court was published by Spanish sports daily Marca.
Soon, readers started commenting that they recognised some of the players and revealed how they weren't disabled at all, it was reported by The Local.
Martin Vicente resigned as the head of the Spanish Federation for Mentally Handicapped Sports, which was responsible for screening some participants in the Paralympics in Sydney shortly after the Capital article was published, saying he accepted 'total responsibility'.
They were forced to return their medals and the category of intellectual disabled basketball was removed from the Paralympic program after the 2000 Games.
He had argued that psychological evaluations of mentally deficient athletes as difficult and that mistakes had been made.
'If someone wants to cheat, it's difficult to detect. It's easy to pretend you have little intelligence but the opposite is difficult,' he said when he announced his resignation."
"not a lotta money"
The lesbians I know all have pretty good jobs, but no kids. Are lesbian mothers and lesbian non-mothers the same demographic?
With shutdown over, I guess Atlas didn't shrug. If anything, Big Business joined with Obama to dump on the Conservatives.
And yet, Conservative dummies watch stuff like ATLAS SHRUGGED and imagine the rich industrialists/capitalists being on their side.
Riiiiight. The Zuckerbergs and Gateses of the world are on the Conzo side.
"Gays don't have to adopt to have kids. They can use donated sperm or eggs as the case may be. I know of a lesbian who had herself impregnated with her gay male friend's sperm. That's probably not uncommon."
OK, Lesbians can get sperm from some company without knowing who the father is.
But when a lesbian gets impregnated by a homo male, isn't he the real father? If he steps out of the life of his own kid, where is the morality? If the kid is told that his/her 'real parents' are two lesbians, that is a lie.
But if lesbians can acquire sperm, homo men cannot have kids. They must impregnate a woman to have a kid. So, if they pay a woman to have a child for them and then walk out of the life of her own child, where is the morality?
Will there be technology in the future where uterus/ovary/etc can be implanted inside a homo male?
Thus far, sex change operation has been cosmetic--changing outer appearance--and chemical(hormonal injections), but will there be a time when the transformation is deeper and more fundamental, as in implanting female organs inside the bodies of transy males?
Dr. Frankenstein was ahead of his time. Monster science awaits us in the future to cater to the whims of rich decadent perverts with powerful allies.
I guess the recent 'controversy' over 'Redskins' is a means to show that Liberalism isn't ONLY about homos.
Gee, Liberals care about Indians too.
"Let me just add- the lesbian co-worker was full on crazy but the company was scare to fire her because she was a lawsuit waiting to happen. They caught her on camera stealing from her co-workers and they still didn't fire her. There was a quiet celebration when she quit."
A nation of cowards.
First of all, there are a bunch of twin studies that show that identical twins raised separately are more alike than fraternal twins raised together. I recall once speaking to a psychiatrist who worked at a facility for troubled teens. He said that of all children about 1% are adopted children. At that facility a large (75% or so) were adopted. I validated that wild number with another psychiatrist. My takeaway is that children pretty much grow up to be their biological parents, not their adoptive parents.
"Are lesbian mothers and lesbian non-mothers the same demographic?"
Not really. With the former, both lesbianism and motherhood tend to be only a couple of phases of a turbulent life.
Cohen's fisking is reasonably convincing. The study has flaws. So do all other studies on this subject. It's a hopelessly messy thing to study, you need to select your sample very carefully and to control for a great many things. Getting a large enough sample is difficult.
The effect size is quite large, though. I'm not sure if the problems Cohen points out fully explain that.
Adoption is not an excuse for the failure of gay & lesbian parents, because Leftists believe in nurture over nature.
Don't fight a Lefty's battle for him. If Leftists want to use the nature excuse, then they're going to have to accept all of its ramifications.
International Jew said...
"The survey asked this:
""...young adults in the Canadian census were asked, “Are you the child of a male or female same-sex married or common law couple?”
"I'll bet at least 10% of respondents misunderstood that. Since act ual children of same-sex couples are a tiny fraction of the population, most of the "yes" answers were spurious. But they did overrepresent bad readers. So there's your low graduation rate etc."
Yes, that could be. These kind of questions need to list a lot of examples to make their intent clearer.
For example, about a decade ago, a study announced that there were a higher percentage of gay male "domestic partners" in Wyoming and Alaska than in Washington DC. I suggested that while the bureaucrats in DC likely understood this new federal term, out on the range, the phrase was interpreted as "pardner."
"And yet, Conservative dummies watch stuff like ATLAS SHRUGGED and imagine the rich industrialists/capitalists being on their side."
Anyone who had read the book (yes, there was a book before the movie) would know that it contains characters like James Taggart and Orren Boyle: rich industrialist looters who would fit in just fine with Zuckerberg and Obama.
d said (sarcasm alert) Stereotypes of lesbians, Jews, blacks and women are reasonable and based on truth. Stereotypes of the groups favored on this blog (upper class British) are baseless and slanderous.
I spent two years in a British boarding school. There is no question that those institutions led to an increase in homosexuality in the past. I don't think any upper class Brit would deny that. Now fewer children go to boarding school, and if they do go, great efforts are made to ensure that they socialise with women at the dreaded Sixth Form Dance.
The homosexuality they encouraged was not of the fairy queen variety. Men who would otherwise have leaned towards being straight (with bisexual tendencies) became Rugger Buggers and went off to found the empire. You can see that in the fact that so many Kiwi men LOVE rugby.
"I'll bet at least 10% of respondents misunderstood that. Since actual children of same-sex couples are a tiny fraction of the population, most of the "yes" answers were spurious. But they did overrepresent bad readers. So there's your low graduation rate etc."
That makes a lot of sense. The numbers are otherwise rather shockingly out of expected range.
It would be good to perform other kinds of checks, to see if, for example gay/lesbian parents might report the graduation rates of their children (I have no idea if this is in the data), or if anything the children report about their parents doesn't in aggregate match up with data about gay/lesbian parents -- such as their level of education, etc.
I'd also expect that most gay/lesbian parents live in cities, or at least that the demographics can be established. Certainly place of birth of supposed children of gay parents, which surely should be known from census data, should match up well with where gay parents live, if the question was generally answered correctly.
To take in a different direction from my last post, one thing that makes me think the author(s) of this study might not simply have relied on the answer to the question are some of the numbers involved.
It says that 20% of the Canadian census was used as some sort of basis. That would cover 7.8 million people. But the number of cases examined was said to be in the hundreds. Is it really possible that distinctly less than 1,000 children among 7.8 million have been raised by gays or lesbians -- that is, only about 1 in many thousands?
I'd have to guess that there was an aggressive winnowing process that removed most spurious cases from the analysis -- though maybe these situations really are very rare indeed.
"A forgotten writer, Simon Raven, wrote about this in a series of books. Homosexuality was simply a part of upper class public school life..."
Sometimes I wonder: if future generations look back and judge us based on our popular writings and other documents like TV shows, what percentage of the population will they think was homosexual today? Maybe 25%? And of course they will think our homosexuals were unfailingly smart, good-looking, well-adjusted, and wealthy too.
Imagine what it would be like if future archaeologists were only able to unearth half a season of Will & Grace and a full collection of the Muppet movies.
And yet, Conservative dummies watch stuff like ATLAS SHRUGGED and imagine the rich industrialists/capitalists being on their side.
Admit it. You haven't read Atlas Shrugged, have you?
I don't defend the novels claims, but it emphatically does not claim this. In fact, the principal baddie is an industrialist who works with government regulators.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/women-and-thrones/
Shoot me!
http://youtu.be/OOlYFq_Cd14?t=5m6s
Of all the dirty lowdown cheating in sports, this one really takes the cake.
I mean it's one thing to cheat to beat the best. But cheating to steal the trophy from retarded players? That's like stealing candy from a child.
Btw, with all the WWT in the news, maybe we can forgive the East German female swimmers of 1976.
If men can declare themselves women and compete against women in the Olympics, why shouldn't female athletes mess around with their own hormones?
Gays and lesbians combined are 5% of the population (being very generous). Of that number, 20% cohabit or gay-marry (again, being very generous). And of that 20%, about 20% of those have kids either heterosexually in a prior relationship/marriage or via surrogacy/male friend/IVF/etc.
So being really generous, about 1/5 of 1% of the general population is gay/lesbian, living with someone long-term and has kid(s).
This is about 1 in 500. And that's being generous.
""...young adults in the Canadian census were asked, “Are you the child of a male or female same-sex married or common law couple?”
Now that I think of it, how could this question in isolation tell the author(s) of the study whether the parents are lesbians or gay?
There must be more to what's going on here than that single question.
"Arnold lobbies for White House run"
http://pagesix.com/2013/10/18/schwarzenegger-mounting-legal-challenge-to-run-for-president/?_ga=1.92001241.23114098.1367942166
"Action star and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been lobbying for support to change the law to allow him to run for president in 2016, Page Six has exclusively learned.
We’re told Ahnold has been openly talking about his political ambitions while in New York to promote his new movie with Sylvester Stallone, “Escape Plan.”
One source said: “Schwarzenegger has been talking openly about working on getting the constitutional rules changed so he can run for president in 2016. He is ready to file legal paperwork to challenge the rules.”
Arnie was born in Austria, and the US Constitution prevents foreign-born citizens from holding the nation’s top job. Any amendment to the Constitution must be approved by two-thirds majority in the House and the Senate.
But Arnold, who became a US citizen in 1983, still could mount a legal challenge. In 2010, he appeared on the ‘Tonight Show,’ and was asked by Jay Leno if he would make a White House run if the law were changed.
Schwarzenegger replied, “Without any doubt.” With America becoming more diverse, it is not clear what would happen if Arnie or any other foreign-born naturalized citizen decided to run.
Columbia University Law School professor Michael Dorf, an expert in constitutional law, said about the Governator’s case in 2007, “The law is very clear, but it’s not 100 percent clear that the courts would enforce that law rather than leave it to the political process.”"
"Today's #Dailychart looks at teachers' social status. What value and respect do different societies accord teachers? One way to gauge this is by identifying other professions that people associate with teaching. The most common profession, cited in 14 of 21 countries surveyed by Varkey GEMS Foundation, was social worker. America and Brazil leaned closest to librarian. The most interesting outliers are in Asia."
2degrees,
"They will continue to have children by normal means until they decide to turn. That will not change."
I think you are right. And what I've seen is that married gay men drive their wives crazy. They demoralize them and make them miserable. What happened with your mother, if I may inquire?
Regarding the present, Britain's upper classes still do the boarding prep and public school route. Eton has reasserted itself as the prime minister and his cabinet factory. Take a look at Cameron & his cabinet.
@cail corishev,
Simon Raven is not to be compared with latter gay "gay is great" propagandists. He didn't glamorize homosexuals. My point is, he wrote about it as if it were the norm - and in his class, it was. He wrote the truth about his class. The environment they were raised in was suffused with romantic pederasty. Those aristocrats who made it to full blown heterosexuality had divorce after divorce. A very decayed and unstable class, under stress from all quarters.
A lesson for the restuvus.
"Schwarzenegger replied, “Without any doubt.” With America becoming more diverse, it is not clear what would happen if Arnie or any other foreign-born naturalized citizen decided to run."
It's all besides the point. So many real rulers of America are not even American or weren't born in America. Just look at Soros, Murdoch, and Netanhayu.
Since gays and lesbians cannot (yet) procreate on their own.
It will always take one man and atleast 1 woman to make a child.Always.You bought into the gay dream.That if they could do away with the need for 1 sex in procreation then that makes Sex irrelavent.
I am astonished that they were allowed to publish this study.
Sometimes I wonder: if future generations look back and judge us based on our popular writings and other documents like TV shows, what percentage of the population will they think was homosexual today? Maybe 25%? And of course they will think our homosexuals were unfailingly smart, good-looking, well-adjusted, and wealthy too.
According to a Gallup poll in May 2011, about half of all Americans believe homosexuals make up 25% of our population. And these people live in this time and place. So it wouldn't surprise me if future generations felt the same way.
BTW the Gallup site was down when I typed this. You can google gallup may 2011 gay poll to find the link.
Canada has had same-sex marriage since 2005. Couldn't the study have compared children raised by same-sex "married" couples to those raised by heterosexual married couples? Or if 2005 is too recent, couldn't the study have compared children raised by unmarried same-sex couples to those raised by same-sex couples (some who were both biological parents, and some where one or none of the couple was a biological parent of the child, so that the homosexual angle will be the only variable between the two grooups)? As it is, the apologists for SSM will point to the difference are claim that the comparison was apples-to-oranges.
The homosexuality they encouraged was not of the fairy queen variety. Men who would otherwise have leaned towards being straight (with bisexual tendencies) became Rugger Buggers and went off to found the empire. You can see that in the fact that so many Kiwi men LOVE rugby.
And the elephant walk, I suppose.
It's hard to imagine anyone supporting Schwarzeneger for pres, let alone sitting by while the courts pervert the constitution. Again.
Child of homosexual partners says that raising a child in a homosexual household is a violation of the child's rights.
http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/safran/stories/s3868285.htm
Cail C said - Sometimes I wonder: if future generations look back and judge us based on our popular writings and other documents like TV shows, what percentage of the population will they think was homosexual today? Maybe 25%? And of course they will think our homosexuals were unfailingly smart, good-looking, well-adjusted, and wealthy too.
Wasnt there a survey a while back that asked people to estimate what they thought the gay/lesbian %age of the population was? Im pretty sure the absurd 25% figure was what emerged. A belief that can only have come from watching TV.
*"Arnold lobbies for White House run"*
The idea was slightly less ridiculous in 2004, when he was still a popular governor, but it's hilariously absurd to talk about it today. Should he somehow be allowed to run, he's got nothing to run on.
2degrees/pp22pp
Hi, I realised Id read your mention of your gay father here before, him encouraging you imply to interviewers that you were gay for career advancement.
My mother's 1st cousin has three children (so they're my 2nd cousins) two boys and one girl. And thats two gays and a lesbian. Three out of three in one family. Thats got make one think that something biological going on.
One of the lads has quite a high profile PR job, Ive got a pic off google just now with him escorting a super hot footballers wife out of a nightclub. Because he can be trusted not to interfere with the merchandise?
No names!
Also pp22pp - we follow each other on Disqus. Ive certainly voted for comments of yours at the DT and elsewhere - see you back in the trenches man!
Comparing children from opposite sex and same sex households is pretty worthless without controlling for
* adoption
* the children being from another relationship
* the family moving house
Obviously these will be huge confounders.
The thing that's most striking to me about the abortion debate, and how abortion propaganda is carried out in the media, is how the establishment ignores what a good substitute adoption is for abortion. The whole thing boils down to women and libs demanding the right to kill their babies because they don't want to carry them to term. Having children and raising them doesn't enter into it, because demand for adopted children far exceeds supply. That single word, "adoption," answers almost all of the pro-abortion side's arguments. It certainly answers all the post-natal issues. The right to abort is about the right not to be pregnant.
It just occurred to me that homosexuals are natural allies for the pro-choice side. Abortion rights mean nothing to homosexuals in terms of their own interests, except that they dramatically reduce the number of children available to homosexuals for adoption. But as usual, propaganda and power alliances trump ideology and issue alliances.
Interesting, but far less meaningful than the commenters here are making it out to be. I have written a blog post in response to this study:
Apples, Oranges, and Lesbians: The Nurture Assumption Just Will Not Die | JayMan's Blog
"A new study (recently discussed by Steve Sailer) has found that the children of gay and lesbian parents have a lower high school graduation rate than those of straight parents.
The finding of this study seems straightforward – indeed, I was able to say it in a sentence. However, the conclusions we are able to draw from these finding are anything but.
...
So case closed, right? We can now safely conclude that two opposite-sex parents are important for children’s development, yes? Of course not, not even close."
My mother's 1st cousin has three children (so they're my 2nd cousins)
Those kids are your 1st cousins once removed (i.e. one generation removed). Their kids would be your kids' 2nd cousins. 1st cousins share a set of grandparents, 2nd cousins share a set of great-grandparents, 3rd cousins share a set of great-great-grandparents, etc.
Yikes. Just realized that Dalek_1963 was writing about his mother's 1st cousin's kids, who are indeed his 2nd cousins. Apologies.
Totally anecdotal, but the first lesbian I ever knew (met at work in 1983) told me that her son dropped out of high school on the first day of 9th grade after black kids beat him up to take his new shoes and new jacket. This probably happened in the mid to late 70s. The lesbian was the only one in the all-female office who backed me up when I said that I didn't want my children to attend public school.
Because lesbians and gays are very liberal, and like to live in "edgy" city neighborhoods, their children are more likely to be beaten up by blacks & hispanics, either because they are white, or because they are the children of gays & lesbians.
A decent percentage of gay couples may be able to put the children in some gay-friendly independent school, but lesbians typically cannot manage anything beyond public school. So a big part of the "low school achievement" of non-straights is probably closely linked to urban living.
The Canadian whites were probably also a lot more likely to admit that they had gay/lesbian parents than the blacks.
"d..... said...
(sarcasm alert) Stereotypes of lesbians, Jews, blacks and women are reasonable and based on truth. Stereotypes of the groups favored on this blog (upper class British) are baseless and slanderous."
I don't remember upper-class Englishman (we are primarily talking about Englishman in this context, not Scots) ever having been a favored class at iSteve.
And, given how much it has been written about or hinted at in fiction and non-fiction since the 1920s to the present day, I don't think that anyone has ever seriously questioned the reality of english public-school homosexuality. Robert Graves alludes to it in his memoir "Good Bye to All That". I believe that Orwell talked about it too (he was agin' it). In Orwell's case, his revulsion to the homosexuality he saw displayed at Eton may have informed his dislike of the English upper-class every bit as much as the class-snobbery he saw (and felt) there.
Priceless:
http://www.webofstories.com/play/norman.routledge/129
Speechless.
People in Britain pay $65K per year to send their kids to be educated by guys like him.
I don't think there's any possible way lesbians adopt as much as gay men. For the reasons listed above, plus the simple fact that, when a straight couple splits up, the woman almost always gets the kids.
So, if a man and a woman have kids, and the man runs off to be with another guy, he won't bring the kid with him. If they have kids, and the woman goes off to be with another woman, she probably will.
Because of that, I'm skeptical of the idea that adoption is the reason kids do worse in lesbian-run families. If that was the reason, they would almost certainly do worse in families run by two gay men.
But then we get comments like this:
"Judith Rich Harris, in the Nurture Assumption, shows us that the shared home environment has little effect on offspring.
It is all genetics."
I don't know when it happened that Judith Rich Harris became the authority of choice for arguments from authority in the HBDsphere, but doesn't anyone find it annoying besides me?
Still, I'm not sure Harris is exactly wrong here. I just think she's not making the argument people think she is.
This study is about high school graduation rates. Typically, you graduate from high school while you're still living with your parents. And I don't think Harris ever argued that your parents don't have an influence on life outcomes that happen while you're still living with them.
For example, someone who has a genetic predisposition for poor impulse control will still likely have a better diet while they are living with their parents, if their adoptive parents are more conscientious. They're the ones who buy the food, after all. The question is, do they maintain it years from now, when they're on their own?
Which this study can't tell us, because the kids all seem so young. Their genes may just not have had enough time to assert themselves, and even if they had, it wouldn't necessarily affect whether they graduated from high school or not.
Because, while we often use graduation rates as a proxy for IQ or conscientiousness (which it surely is), it's also obviously at least partially a proxy for "Do your parents actually give a damn about whether or not you go to school, and if so, how good are they at enforcing their rules?".
I am skeptical, though, about the way people often seem to use Judith Rich Harris to say "Well, it really doesn't matter who gets to adopt kids, because their genes will influence how they turn out more!".
Which may be true. But frankly, I would prefer it if someone leads an average life as an adult, but has memories of a happy childhood, than someone leads an average life as an adult, but has memories of chaos and drama.
I mean, how could that not be a good thing by itself?
Especially when you consider the fact that a lot of these kids come from pretty shaky genetic backgrounds to begin with. It's entirely possible that, if they regress to a pretty low mean, their childhood might be the last chance they have to really be happy. You could even argue that that makes it more important that we choose adoptive parents wisely.
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