FotF has a history of distorting studies to support their anti gay agenda. IMO there is no “Oops I misunderstood” excuse.
They took a study that said, “This study concludes that apples are good for kids”
and tried to pass it off as concluding “Apples are much better for kids than oranges”
I’m tired of the religious excuse for embracing ignorance that results in serious harm to others. It needs to be called out at every opportunity.
So thank you Al.
Then again, If Minnery and that fine Christian group FotF had been honest to begin with we wouldn’t be having this discussion. IMO, there’s no comparison. Franken is allowed to enjoy busting their lies about gays.
It doesn’t matter if there were any SS couples in the study or not. The study had nothing to do with hetero couples as compared to SS couples. For Minnery to claim it did is a distortion and IMO intentional, since they’ve done it before.
The chief author of the study said Franken was right on.
No, but they are exposed as dishonest and completely lacking in evidence to support their position. That’s a victory.
Doggone it, you people don’t like him?
I’m kinda curious about this myself - it may not even have occurred to the author of the study to include same-sex couples while sampling “nuclear families”. I’d also want to see the study before calling pwnage.
:dubious: Tell it to Abe Lincoln.
“At least one” was in reply to Bricker’s implication that, because gay marriage was not legal in many states during the period in which the study was conducted, it’s believable that no gay married couples were included in the data. In actuality, I would believe that there was more than that, although, obviously, not as many as straight married couples.
For me, the determining factor is that the lead author spoke up publicly to support Franken’s position. She could have stayed quiet. She could have said, “Well, we didn’t define “nuclear family” as a married couple with one man and one women, but Fof is correct that every married couple we studied was straight.”
The lead author came flat out and said, “Senator Franken is right”.
Therefore, any suggestion that maybe Senator Franken is* wrong*, is clearly incorrect.
This, in my opinion, excludes the possibility that Franken is being unreasonable in assuming that the study included gay married couples, due to the scarcity of said gay married couples. It also, imo, excludes the possibility that perhaps Focus on Family was correct in assuming that the married couples were all straight, in contradiction to Franken’s assertion.
The author endorsed Franken’s take on the study. She flat out denied the FoF take on the study. She didn’t have to do so publicly, but she did. Therefore, I believe that Franken’s take on the story is correct.
Bullcrap.
Franken never said the study included same sex married couples. He merely said that the study did not exclude them, a point on which everyone agrees.
The fanciful idea that it included a same-sex married couple is pure wishful thinking, unsupported by citation and unlikely in the extreme.
This is GD, where cites to facts carry the day.
Franken spars with hearing witness - POLITICO BRICKER bent the facts yet again. It neither excludes or includes.
Bricker,
Is it your contention that the study cited by Minnery in any way provides any evidence that straight married couples are superior to gay married couples in terms of the outcomes measured by the study?
Do you in any way dispute that Minnery, either out of intention or negligence, presented that study as evidence for something that the study in no way provides evidence of?
Do you in any way dispute that Franken called Minnery out on that and that doing such was appropriate?
The worst part is you just KNOW FOF will keep printing this lie, keep distributing this lie, and keep citing that same study to support the same lie. So will fox news.
The definition of nuclear family used in the study does include same-sex married couples.
The study itself almost certainly did not include any same-sex married couples in the nuclear family category, due to the paucity of available same-sex married couples during the years 2001-2007.
No.
No.
No.
DSeid,
Do you agree that the study is silent on the issue of the benefits of same-sex marriage?
Do you dispute that Dangerosa said in post 47, “It certainly does refute FoFs position, which is that gay marriage harms children;” that Knorf said in post 44, “[The study is] a strong argument for allowing gays to marry (since the document presents that married couples–opposite gender or not–are better parents), and not at all an argument that gays shouldn’t marry, which is what FoF tried to say it was;” and that sachertorte said in post 62, “The conclusion is that gay families are hurt by not having access to marriage?”
Do you agree that each of these statements makes a posiitve statement about the study that the study does not support?
FoF claimed that the study provided an argument against same-sex marriage. The study certainly did not provide such an argument, so the claim which FoF made was incorrect. This alone would be enough to say that Franken proved FoF wrong.
Further, to the extent that the study provides an argument either way concerning gay marriage, it actually provides an argument in favor, albeit a weak one. The study shows that, among the families studied, marriage of the parent-figures provided a better outcome for the children. This does not conclusively prove that this is the case for same-sex-couple families, since there were at best very few same-sex-couple families in the study. It would therefore be an extrapolation, and extrapolations are not always valid. However, absent any inclusive study to the contrary, an extrapolation is at least circumstantial evidence. This study does provide some positive and nonzero amount of support for the premise that marriage of the heads of family in a same-sex relationship would provide better outcomes for the family’s children, which in turn is a positive and nonzero argument in favor of recognizing same-sex marriage.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that the study supported the idea that gay marriage benefits children - although I don’t see why it wouldn’t if it benefits children of straight parents. But that the study does not say that gay marriage harms children. Refute was probably the wrong word.
True. And I don’t dispute that statement.
It’s when people go further and try to claim that the study shows benefits from same-sex marriage, and there I disagree. For what it’s worth, I’m confident that there ARE such benefits, undoubtedly virtually identical to the benefits conferred by more traditonal marriage. But the study doesn’t support that.
No. I contend that the reality is that NO same-sex couples actually were in the study as “nuclear families,” since there were less than 5,000 families in the study, drawn from across the country, and for three-sevenths of the 2001-2007 timeframe covered in the study, it would not have been possible to find even one same-sex married couple.
So the extrapolation is even more severe than you note: it simply becomes a matter of reasoning that same-sex couples would provide a similar level of stability. I agree that this is a generally valid inference.
But you cannot offer the study to prove this point, for reasons that should be obvious.
I think you’re overreaching quite a bit there and assuming causality when all we have is correlation.
I’m all in favor of getting rid of hateful law like DOMA, but is there any evidence that children raised by same-sex couples in committed relationships who are prohibited from marriage by state law are worse off than children raised by same-sex couples who are married?
I agree with everything you wrote here.
Yes. Silent on benefit or harm.
No. And her correction stands on its own.
Glad we are all on the same page.
