Tweet
FRC’s Kenneth Blackwell
“The Family Research Council and other so-called “pro-family” groups can’t use facts against the gay community, so they hope to beat us down through the constant repetition of lies.”
I’ve said it once and I will say it again. Once the religious right finds a factoid or meme to use against the lgbt community, they will continue to repeat it even though the factoid or meme has been refuted.
Earlier this week, I wrote about how the Family Research Council was repeating a lie that the Obama Administration declared war on mothers in its Supreme Court brief against the California anti-marriage equality law, Prop 8.
Yesterday, FRC took that lie further via an employee, Kenneth Blackwell, in a recent piece he wrote, Obama Drops His Family Friendly Mask:
Last week, President Obama dropped the family friendly mask. He sent his Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli up the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court with a simple message:
Dump Dads. Lose Moms.
That’s because the Solicitor General speaks for the President. In the most august and formal way, it is this officer who carries the President’s deepest convictions to lay them before the nation’s High Court. What the Solicitor General actually said was this:
“As an initial matter, no sound basis exists for concluding that same-sex couples who have committed to marriage are anything other than fully capable of responsible parenting and child-rearing. To the contrary, many leading medical, psychological, and social-welfare organizations have issued policy statements opposing restrictions on gay and lesbian parenting based on their conclusion, supported by numerous scientific studies, that children raised by gay and lesbian parents are as likely to be well adjusted as children raised by heterosexual parents.”
“The weight of the scientific literature strongly supports the view that same-sex parents are just as capable as opposite-sex parents.”
Actually, the weight of scientific evidence proves no such thing. All the work of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute (www.marri.org) shows that children do best in a family where mother and dad are married and where the family worships regularly.
As for children raised by two adults of the same sex, the most extensive study ever done was that of Dr. Mark Regnerus. Dr. Regnerus of the University of Texas conducted the largest, most rigorously controlled study in history. Here’s what the U.T. study found:
The results of the NFSS [National Family Structures Study]research revealed that the “no differences” claim — the claim that children raised by parents in gay or lesbian relationships fared no worse and in some cases better than children raised by intact biological parents — was not true. On the contrary, the children of these households, on average, did worse than children raised by their biological, still-married parents.
The weight of scientific evidence — as opposed to Donald Verrilli’s politically correct posturing — shows that his statements before the High Court are “not true. Remember, we are talking about the well-being of the children, not whether the adults in these relationships are well-satisfied with their domestic arrangements.
Mr. Blackwell omits a lot of truth to reach the point of this passage.
He said the weight of scientific evidence does not prove that same-sex parents are just as capable as opposite-sex parents in the raising of children.
Mr. Blackwell conveniently forgets that the Obama Administration brief he tears down clearly cited both the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics as well as the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry as proof that same-sex parents are just as capable as opposite-sex parents in the raising of children (page 21 of the brief).
Furthermore Mr. Blackwell did not mention that independent from the Obama Administration brief, the APA submitted another brief to the court saying the same thing (i.e. same-sex parents are as capable as opposite-sex parents in the raising of children). And joining them in this brief was the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the California Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychoanalytic Association and the National Association of Social Workers.
Finally, it is very ironic that Mr. Blackwell cites the Regnerus study as proof that his scientific proof that same-sex parents are not just as capable as opposite-sex parents because of the following simple fact:
The American Sociological Association condemned the Regnerus study in its brief submitted to the Supreme Court. In the brief, the ASA also said that same-sex parents are just as capable as opposite-sex parents when it comes to the raising of children.
So when Mr. Blackwell says that the weight of scientific evidence does not prove that same-sex parents are as capable as opposite-sex parents in the raising of children, he is clearly not being truthful. Not even a little bit.
Do me a favor, folks. Don’t shake your head, suck your teeth and go “there they go again” at yet another time you have seen the Family Research Council blatantly lie about the gay community. Demand that more time and knowledge be invested in uncovering how organizations like FRC distort science or push blatant lies against the lgbt community.
Organizations like the Family Research Council don’t rely on truth. They rely on repetition. They repeat a point while deliberately ignoring the simple fact that the point has been refuted by those who know better.
And they also rely on the gay community and others becoming blase or jaded about their constant lying. The Family Research Council and other so-called “pro-family” groups can’t use facts against the gay community, so they hope to beat us down through the constant repetition of lies.
It’s not necessarily the Christian thing to do, but I guess they figure God will turn a blind eye because they feel that they are lying on His behalf.
You see, this is the problem. This is the reason for the lgbt community’s anger towards groups like FRC who claim to uphold their version of Christian values. It’s not that we are intolerant of their beliefs or views.
We are just intolerant of their lies.
18 Comments
The whole thing is a side issue anyways. Gay people don’t need to prove that they are good parents anyways. Aside from the fact that this a reversal of the burden of proof, there are any number of situations that are shown to be less ideal for children. Single parents, poverty, etc. Yet no one is suggestion passing any laws to prevent straight people in certain circumstances from becoming parents.
lying for the lord. willard was an expert at it.
As you should recall, Blackwell’s reputation was built on RIGGING ELECTIONS… So, if you’re listening to him, you’re lost, BUT, just watching / listening to TONY PERKINS, you should know right away (if you’re actually alive) that the FAMILY RESEARCH COUNCIL is ALL a lie…
What’s worse is not only do they lie, they then turn around and project their lying onto others, falsely accusing other people of lying:
It would be nice to see some of the facts of the studies in this article. How do the different studies prove that one type of parent is better than another?
what standard do they use?
Not much else to be expected from a hate group.
I don’t think the studies say that one type of parenting is better than the other. The studies say that children in same-sex households do just as well as children in opposite-sex households. And the studies in question can be found within the links I provided.
If the FRC’s lips are moving lies are coming out. They can’t exist without lying.
First off, the Regnerus study is junk — it’s been trashed by other sociologists, and Regnerus himself was finally forced to admit that you can’t draw any conclusions on gay parenting from that study. (The methodology was sorely lacking — Regnerus contrasted the children of intact heterosexual families and what can only be termed “everyone else” — foster children, adopted children, single-parent families, divorced families, etc., solely on the basis that the subjects thought that one parent or another had had a same-sex relationship at some point. Only two subjects were actually raised by lesbian parents, none by gay men.)
Second, the bulk of the research indicates just the opposite of what Blackwell claims — the legitimate studies are remarkably consistent in their findings, which are that the children of same-sex couples perform just as well in all measurable areas of psychosocial development as their counterparts raised by straight parents. (And if you take into account the deficit they start off with — many are adopted from broken homes, unwed mothers, and the like — it’s entirely possible that gay men and lesbians are better parents.)
The criteria used are generally performance in school, the children’s attitudes, do they make friends easily, etc.
Blackwell’s just spouting the party line a la Tony Perkins, who is quite possibly the most shameless liar in the public sphere.
The amicus brief from the American Psychological Assn., et al. discusses gay parenting and the studies in Section C, starting on page 41 of the PDF (p. 18 of the body of the brief).
The whole brief is worth reading — sets out a solid ground for discussions of homosexuality, “gay” as an identity, etc., etc., etc.
The brief takes on the Regnerus study at p. 52 (p. 29) and does a thorough job of debunking it.
“Actually, the weight of scientific evidence proves no such thing. All the work of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute (www.marri.org) shows that children do best in a family where mother and dad are married and where the family worships regularly.”
Hmmm… raised by a mother and father who are married, family “worshiped” regularly (in fact, so regularly that for me to become a Baptist missionary after college in my twenties was little more than a next step), and each of us (my two sisters and I) has grappled in adulthood with the mental and emotional weights of both institutions (family and church), and the patriarchal impact on our lives and sensibilities. I am one story, and long ago lost contact with the church people of my young adulthood; but recalling those people and relationships, I find it hard to believe that the hetero church sensibility was doing such a bang-up job for its children or that gay parents, generally more open and less patriarchal, couldn’t do it better.
“Marriage and Religion Research Institute” — with a name like that, what does anyone expect them to come up with?
It’s not really news when the FRC is lying. It would be news if there were an instance where they were telling the truth.
One of these days, it will be news if some enterprising members of the gay community actually uses their lies against them rather than going “ho-hum.”
People tend to continue to do bad things when they feel they can get away with them. And FRC continues what they do because very few will take what they do and use it against them in a tactical sense.
The problem is that people like Tony Perkins get a free pass from the press and the talking heads — until recently, they were never challenged, and if anyone actually appeared on our side, they were ill-equipped to deal with Perkins, who’s a slippery snake and uses the format of these shows to his advantage — if anyone questions anything he says, he just comes up with a torrent of BS and changes the subject, trying to use up the time. The only two guests on any of these shows I know of who ever called him a liar on the air were Dan Savage (of course) and David Boies, who was so subtle about it that I wonder if the audience got it. Both Carol Costello and Soledad O’Brien have challenged him, but they work under constraints of civility that only seem to apply to non-wingnut outlets (Fox not being one of them). The networks, both broadcast and cable, are scared to death of them, and have no use for actual journalism anyway.
The problem with nailing their lies in the gay blogosphere is that it seldom goes beyond that, and we already know they’re liars.
I hate to say it but in the gay mainstream media, they get a free pass also. I would absolutely kill to see a cover story in the Advocate about what FRC does. I think this may be the root to the problem. If the movers and shakers who garner more attention in the gay community aren’t making noise, then the mainstream press won’t pay attention.
I don’t know that The Advocate can handle something like that — it’s gotten to be pretty lightweight.