Given those previous findings it is reasonable to conclude that if the stability of marriage is associated with better child outcomes in general then it is extremely likely to have the same beneficial association in the case of same sex gay parents. The study cited by Minnery is silent on any direct comparison of gay to heterosexual parenting, but by documenting that marriage is good for child outcomes it is suggests that gay parents married should result in better outcomes than gay parents unmarried consistent with available past data.
Man, he is who he is. Reagan was an actor, as was Arnold. Cher was a singer, then an actress, then singer, then actress. JT was an singer, then actor who is also crazy funny on SNL - and who knows. Maybe someday he’ll be a politician.
Full disclosure: I like Senator Al Franken. Don’t know much about Ann Coulter. I once picked up book she wrote and after skimming through it for about five minutes figured she didn’t like liberals. Whatever. But people told me that she could be witty.
Not in this video–she got caught in a lie and stumbled around like a kid who’s been called to the principle’s office was for stealing lunch money from other kids. Didn’t acknowledge she lied and punted the discussion to terrorist. Pathetic. And if this is her shtick, it is a wasted life, indeed.
I suspect Franken, with his gift for exposing and vividly skewering people’s reasoning, is unwittingly playing into the hands of that sector in the right wing that’s convinced that logic is basically a Jewish parlor game they want no part of. Sort of like mah-jongg with higher stakes.
I would not be at all surprised if there were zero same-sex couples in the sample-- That’s why I said “at best very few”. There certainly weren’t enough to be statistically significant. But there’s still at least some value in the extrapolation (which, again, I grant is an extrapolation) from the set of families in the sample to the set of same-sex-couple families. Now, ideally, you’d have studies which controlled for every variable imaginable. But when you lack that (i.e., always), you can’t do any better than assume, pending further data, that the results don’t change when you change any of the variables not controlled for.
Or to rephrase in more lawyerly terms: It’s circumstantial evidence. It’s not as good as direct evidence, but even circumstantial evidence has some value, no?
In this instance? No, because the FoF hypothesis is that same-sex couples are a poisonous influence on family stability. For you to test that hypothesis by beginning with the assumption that same-sex couples produce similar results to opposite-sex couples is fundamentally flawed.
It doesn’t address that hypothesis, but that hypothesis is relevant only because of the conclusion it leads to: That gay marriage ought to be prohibited. And the study does address that conclusion.
But neither does it refute that position. They may as well claim that stable isotopes of hydrogen prove their theory, and others may as well claim that stable istopes of carbon disprove their theory. They are simply silent on the matter, lending neither support nor rebuttal.
As a more general proposition, though, it’s for the party advancing a proposition to support his own proposition. Generally, this allocates the burden of proof to the party seeking change.
Sure, but (with apologies for skipping the middle two pages of this thread) we are only discussing the limited issue of whether Focus on the Family is full of shit, rather than the broader subject of whether it’s okay for gay couples to adopt.
That would be a short discussion: “Yes, Focus on the Family is full of shit.”
But in what was presumably an excess of zeal, several posters went beyond saying that FoF was full of shit for claiming the study supported the no gay adoption position, and claimed further it actually refuted the no gay adoption position. This has been a further subject of discussion, although I think we have something close to general agreement now that the study neither supports or detracts from the FoF claim that same-sex couples are unfit adoptive (or natural) parents.
Calling it “circumstantial” overly undercuts the point of the study.
If one wishes to exclude same sex couples from the meaning of the study then you would similarly have to exclude everyone not explicitly in the study. (That is, the study included X number of people and the results of the study apply to those X people and no one else).
The whole point of such a study is to draw conclusions about people NOT IN THE STUDY. Otherwise, WTF do you think the point was?
I’ll reiterate my point. The study was about marriage and the benefits of marriage to a family. To plug one’s ears and Shout “Nah nah nah nah nah, the study doesn’t actually say same-sex couples,” is incredibly short sighted. Perhaps in the legal world, that is how one operates, but this is science. Applying the study as evidence that marriage would benefit same sex couples and their families is entirely appropriate. Given the study, the onus would be on the nay-sayers to show that same-sex couples should be excluded from the meaning of the study. Saying “because God said so” doesn’t cut it. Saying that the study didn’t include same-sex couples doesn’t cut it either.
No. Science works by proposing a hypothesis, and then developing a test of that hypothesis.
In this case, the hypothesis is: same-sex couples, married or not, are of less benefit to children as parents than opposite-sex couples are.
No data from this particular study can be used to either confirm, or refute, that hypothesis.
(I of course understand that there are likely other studies that do. But not this one).
Your formulation reverses the process: you wish us to assume, without data (again, in our little world of Only-This-Study-Exists) that same-sex and copposite-sex couples provide identical benefits and then demand the opponents prove you wrong.
This is called “begging the question.” You are assuming a proposition as true to begin with.
It’s as if I claimed that parents who engaged in premartial sex provided worse outcomes for children than those who waited until marriage to have sex. Does the study support my claim? No. Does the study refute my claim? No. The study is utterly silent on the point.
