Tag Archives: Same-sex relationship

Christians and LGBTQ Equality: There Is No Middle Ground

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In response to my post “‘It’s no sin to be gay.’ See how easy that is, Andrew Marin?” folks have made the point that Andrew’s work is valuable, because he is “building bridges” — because he is, as one reader put it, “creating stepping stones from one end of the spectrum to the other.” They appreciate Marin establishing a neutral, non-judgmental, values-free middle ground where parties on either side of the gay-Christian debate can meet to together discuss and explore the issue.

The problem, though, is that when it comes to the issue of LGBT equality, there is no such thing as a values-free middle ground. There can’t be, because that is a moral issue. And that means it’s about a very definite right and wrong.

And it’s a moral issue of no small consequence. There couldn’t possibly be more at stake. The people on one side of this debate — the majority, which wields all the power — are claiming that, in the eyes of God, those on the other side are less than human.

No matter how strenuously he or she might deny it, the fact is that any Christian who does not forthrightly and unambiguously assert that there is nothing whatsoever inherently immoral about same-sex relationships has chosen a side in this conflict. To a starving man, the person who can’t decide if they want to share their food is no better than the person who refuses to (emphasis added).

– more at John Shore, Huffington Post

 

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Gay marriage Not thinking about the children

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THOSE who oppose gay marriage often argue that having gay parents is hard on children. This has been a hard argument to make, because there simply isn’t that much data about the effects of growing up with gay parents, and what little there is—such as the 2010 study that found a 0% rate of child abuse in lesbian households—tends to undermine it. Some will believe that has changed this week with the publication of a new study by Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas, on “adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships.” As Mr Regnerus explains, in an accompanying essay at Slate, there are significant differences between that group and those who grew up in intact biological families (ie, a mother and a father, no adoption, no divorce). “On 25 of 40 different outcomes evaluated, the children of women who’ve had same-sex relationships fare quite differently than those in stable, biologically-intact mom-and-pop families,” he writes, “displaying numbers more comparable to those from heterosexual stepfamilies and single parents.”

The study has been greeted with fierce criticism, and for good reason. Mr Regnerus’s methodology stacked the deck against gay parents. There aren’t that many young adults around who grew up with openly gay parents, so he drew a bigger circle. Anyone who reported that either of their parents had a same-sex relationship while they were growing up was put into the “lesbian mothers” or “gay fathers” category, regardless of whether their parents had been married or divorced, whether the kids were adopted or biological, whether the parents seemed happy or not, whether the same-sex affair was a one-time encounter or the basis of the household, and so on. (By this silly standard, the number of children growing up with a gay parent is about to skyrocket.)

-more at Economist

As I read the study, it’s not remotely comparing gay parents with straight parents – it’s comparing parents who are faithful to their spouses, with those who are not. To draw a comparison between gay and straight parents from his sample, he should have compared parents who had a same-sex extra-marital affair, with those who had an opposite- sex extra-marital affair. This he has not done, but the chances area there would have been minimal difference.

The real lesson, as the Economist points out in their conculuding paragraph, is that children need stable families. For those who are being raised by same- sex parents, that probably means we should support gay marriage – for the sake of the children.

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Does a new study indict gay parenthood or make a case for gay marriage?

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Is same-sex marriage a good idea? Or is an intact biological family the best environment for raising a child? The answer may turn out to be yes and yes.

That’s the curious implication of a study reported yesterday in Social Science Research andoutlined in Slate today by its principal investigator, sociologist Mark Regnerus. The study, which found inferior economic, educational, social, and psychological outcomes among children of gay parents, comes across as evidence that homosexuals are unfit to raise kids. But the study doesn’t document the failure of same-sex marriage. It documents the failure of the closeted, broken, and unstable households that preceded same-sex marriage.

-full analysis as Slate

 

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