Traditional family values

qrrgprgua

Interesting study. But opens up for discussion what is the best foundation for a Child to be reared in..


http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jun/10/study-suggests-risks-from-same-sex-parenting/

edellc

come on this is an american study which is one of the most anti gay places in the western world of course they are going to bad mouth same sex relationships,
as long as you love your child and teach them right from wrong and to respect themselves and each other who cares if they are same sex or not and where are the statics for two dads, or a single parent

the report is just nonsense and totally irrelevant to the Irish society so a non starter as a discussion point IMO

The Big Red Button

qrrgprgua wrote: »

Interesting study. But opens up for discussion what is the best foundation for a Child to be reared in..


http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jun/10/study-suggests-risks-from-same-sex-parenting/

I don't like some of the results that are implied to be "negative outcomes" ... for example, I would disagree that if a person is currently cohabiting, or in a same-sex romantic relationship, it should be seen as a negative outcome. Perhaps that's just a matter of opinion though. Even the result recently or currently in therapy - this could be interpreted to suggest that children of same-sex parents are more in touch with their emotional and mental health!

There's not enough information on the study given in either the table above, or in the article. The statistics above give information for young adults who "had married parents", versus "had lesbian mothers." For those in the latter category, were the mothers married to each other/in a stable long-term relationship? If the mothers in question were single lesbian mothers for all/part of the person's childhood, this could go towards explaining the difference in statistics of, for example, "family received welfare growing up."

The article also mentions that "Children appear most apt to succeed well as adults when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father, and especially when the parents remain married to the present day." Again, as above, we are not comparing like with like here - for the "had lesbian mothers" statistics, the two mothers would have not had the option to marry at the time (as far as I know), and the article does not make it clear how many of the couples in question remained together (in comparison to the offspring of married parents.) Or, indeed, whether there was a couple in the first place, or was it a single lesbian mother involved?

Anyways, my own personal opinion would be that it's perfectly possible for a single mother or a single father to raise a happy and healthy child. So, bringing another parent into the equation - i.e. having two mothers or two fathers, in a same-sex relationship - would generally be of benefit to the child (provided, obviously, that they are both caring loving parents.) I don't see same-sex parents to be inherently "better" or "worse" than heterosexual parents, it all very much depends on the individuals involved.

You also have to take into account that there won't be any "accidents" in same-sex relationships - the child will be very much planned and wanted.

username123

Very first thing Id point out is that the study is not comparing like with like. The base point is using children of 83% straight parents not on welfare compared against children of 69% gay parents on welfare.

Every stat after that could be because they grew up in a disadvantaged home with parents on welfare, not because they had gay parents.

Purely because the study is american Id be very dubious, seems to be an attempt to further alienate homosexuals.

baalthor

Do "Traditional Family Values" inlcude getting married in a football field to someone you only just met along with thousands of other couples?

Maybe the Moonie Times could enlighten us on that one ...

qrrgprgua

I am sure there are Gay Couples who are great parents.. Same as there are Hetero couples who have been terribles ones. But Nature is Nature and it is what it is.. Male and Female roles of parents play a part in the upbringing of a child. A friend was brought up by his Mother and Grandmother and always regrets he never had a father.. Male role models for boys are important.

Are we not denying basic human development needs by saying that Gay couples are the same as Heterosexual couples? No family is perfect.. many kids are raised with single parents and they turn out fine.. I am just making the point about what is the best Ideal environment for a child to be raised.

username123

qrrgprgua wrote: »

I am sure there are Gay Couples who are great parents.. Same as there are Hetero couples who have been terribles ones. But Nature is Nature and it is what it is.. Male and Female roles of parents play a part in the upbringing of a child. A friend was brought up by his Mother and Grandmother and always regrets he never had a father.. Male role models for boys are important.

Are we not denying basic human development needs by saying that Gay couples are the same as Heterosexual couples? No family is perfect.. many kids are raised with single parents and they turn out fine.. I am just making the point about what is the best Ideal environment for a child to be raised.

Totally disagree.

Children have been raised differently in different cultures and societies throughout human history - as just one example I give you the Spartans. It doesnt seem to have harmed humanity. What a westerner sees as the 'ideal family' is just a cultural construct, no more natural than the Spartan method.

A friend was brought up by his Mother and Grandmother and always regrets he never had a father.. ....so what? I could tell you a dozen ancedotal stories stating the opposite, they mean nothing.

Im not getting the Nature is Nature point, its as natural to be homosexual as it is to be heterosexual, and to suggest otherwise is offensive.

Edit - Ive just noticed that the OP primarily posts in the Christianity forum, I suggest the OP has some kind of agenda against homosexuality. I intend to report this thread for anti-gay sentiments.

Bannasidhe

qrrgprgua wrote: »

I am sure there are Gay Couples who are great parents.. Same as there are Hetero couples who have been terribles ones. But Nature is Nature and it is what it is.. Male and Female roles of parents play a part in the upbringing of a child. A friend was brought up by his Mother and Grandmother and always regrets he never had a father.. Male role models for boys are important.

Are we not denying basic human development needs by saying that Gay couples are the same as Heterosexual couples? No family is perfect.. many kids are raised with single parents and they turn out fine.. I am just making the point about what is the best Ideal environment for a child to be raised.

You are like a dog with a bone on this topic. I was going to write a lengthy response but a quick google showed there was no need. This report has already been heavily criticised.

What would make a study of how children raised by gay and lesbian parents do in life helpful? Rigor, valid comparisons, and a sense of what the words in that sentence—“raised,” “gay and lesbian,” and “parents”—might mean. None of those seem to be true of the latest work from Mark Regnerus, called the “New Family Structures Study” (a title that is itself misleading), which he writes about at Slate. It purports to show the very harmful effects of having gay and lesbian parents. This would be in contradiction to a whole series of studies in recent years that showed children in those families doing very well. Attacking the methodology of a study whose conclusions you don’t like can be a lazy default reaction. But, in this case, the way it was conducted is so breathtakingly sloppy that it is useful only as an illustration of how you can play fast and loose with statistics.

The study, of fifteen thousand adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine, turned on this question:
S7. From when you were born until age 18 (or until you left home to be on your own), did either of your parents ever have a romantic relationship with someone of the same sex?
Yes, my mother had a romantic relationship with another woman
Yes, my father had a romantic relationship with another man
No

A yes—even a single “romantic relationship”—put the person in the category of child of gay or lesbian parent, and excluded them from the category of intact biological families, regardless of their actual living situations. (And what does that yes mean? Sex once in a bar? An infatuation from a distance?) Regnerus says that he chose this question because he doesn’t want to get into sorting out who’s really gay—and that can be a complicated issue, to which he, unfortunately, has an absurd response. Because of how the study is set up, any stress to a child from living with a married man and woman, one of whom had ever had a same-sex affair of any kind, would be ascribed to having a gay or lesbian parent, and statistically erased from the analysis of “mom and pop” families. (Will Saletan and Ta-Nehisi Coates have good critiques of the study; Saletan points out that the study had conservative funders.)

It also turned out that most of the adults that the study considered products of gay or lesbian parents were not, for the most part, raised by gays or lesbians. Two hundred and fifty-three people said “yes” to question S7. A hundred and seventy-five said that their mother had had a relationship of some kind. As John Corvino notes at TNR, “Only 42 percent of respondents reported living with a ‘Gay Father’ and his partner for at least four months—and less than 2 percent reported doing so for at least three years.” Less than two per cent of those (two people, three?) said that their whole childhood was spent with their mother and her lesbian partner. On the basis of these distorted samples, Regnerus tells us that “28 percent of the adult children of women who’ve had same-sex relationships are currently unemployed” and that “the young-adult children of women in lesbian relationships reported the highest incidence of time spent in foster care (at 14 percent of total, compared to 2 percent among the rest of the sample).” Expect to see those numbers thrown around. Keep in mind what they don’t mean.

And also remember what they do mean: if this study shows anything, it’s not the effect of gay parenting, but of non-, or absentee parenting. The numbers are so clumsy that it’s hard to generalize, but one can reasonably guess that there are, buried in them, stories of parents who left or were separated from their children, or households that fell apart, because, eighteen to thirty-nine years ago, someone’s first try at an adult life involved a heterosexual relationship, even if that wasn’t sustainable. As Saletan puts it, 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.” We already know that there are benefits to stability—which is what same-sex marriage advocates have been saying all along. If your only question is how to help children, then same-sex marriage remains a solid answer. Look anywhere, even with tools as ill-designed as in this study, and you can find lonely children, and lonely parents, too. You can also find families held together by respect and love—and deserving of both.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/06/a-faulty-gay-parenting-study.html#ixzz1y3LdXK2o


Or as the Los Angeles Times put it:

The claims Mark Regnerus makes about his findings on gay parenting play into a pattern of conservative scholars and activists misinterpreting the data on LGBT families.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/13/opinion/la-oe-frank-same-sex-regnerus-family-20120613

qrrgprgua

username123 wrote: »

Totally disagree.

Children have been raised differently in different cultures and societies throughout human history - as just one example I give you the Spartans. It doesnt seem to have harmed humanity. What a westerner sees as the 'ideal family' is just a cultural construct, no more natural than the Spartan method.

A friend was brought up by his Mother and Grandmother and always regrets he never had a father.. ....so what? I could tell you a dozen ancedotal stories stating the opposite, they mean nothing.

Im not getting the Nature is Nature point, its as natural to be homosexual as it is to be heterosexual, and to suggest otherwise is offensive.

Edit - Ive just noticed that the OP primarily posts in the Christianity forum, I suggest the OP has some kind of agenda against homosexuality. I intend to report this thread for anti-gay sentiments.

Spartan method?? That didn't last long, and it was barbaric.. infanticide of any child that was not up to standard. And the young boys who were taken at 7 didn't exactly have an easy time. It was institutionalized paedophilia. Spartan society is not what we see in the 300 movie. It had its good points.. but whats heavily in favour of the strongest members.

And so because I have a Faith you jump to I am anti gay?? Typical if someone has a view on the family then they are considered anti gay.

cyning

qrrgprgua wrote: »

And so because I have a Faith you jump to I am anti gay?? Typical if someone has a view on the family then they are considered anti gay.

You posted a study that an incredibly quick google search shows the study methodology was poor to say the least: I was just coming to post what Bannasidhe said.

You are coming across as "anti-gay" with statments like nature is nature and

Are we not denying basic human development needs by saying that Gay couples are the same as Heterosexual couples?

I'm not saying you are by the way: I'm just saying that is the way your posts seem to me. It has nothing to do with your faith: it has everything to do with posting a flawed study and the statements you made afterwards.

Yes it is important for children to have male and female role models: but only positive ones: and children can get these from grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends etc.

Bannasidhe

qrrgprgua wrote: »

Spartan method?? That didn't last long, and it was barbaric.. infanticide of any child that was not up to standard. And the young boys who were taken at 7 didn't exactly have an easy time. It was institutionalized paedophilia. Spartan society is not what we see in the 300 movie. It had its good points.. but whats heavily in favour of the strongest members.

And so because I have a Faith you jump to I am anti gay?? Typical if someone has a view on the family then they are considered anti gay.

Ok you don't like the way the Spartans did things - how about the Gaelic Irish?

Marriages were political so the law allowed for sexual relations outside marriage. There was no concept of illegitimacy - all children were equal under the law.

Mother's 'named' the father of their child - this father was not necessarily their husband. Hugh O Neill - for example - was the son of Matthew. Matthew's mother was married to a blacksmith from Louth. When Matthew was 12, his mother named Con Bacach O'Neill as his father. Con made Matthew his heir - over his legitimate son Shane. No example has ever been found of a 'named' father denying the child but many examples exist of these named children continuing to live with their mother and her husband, funded by their named father, until they went to a foster family - after that they could, if they wished, go to live with the named father's clan- as a fully recognised member of that Clan.

At the age of 7 - boys,and many girls, were sent to live with Foster families to cement the ties between allies. These children then became entitled to an inheritance from their foster families equal to that of the biological children - who from the age of 7 were living with foster families of their own.

These children never returned to live with their biological parents but stayed with the foster family until reaching their adulthood - at around 15 years old - at which time they would - in the case of girls - either marry and move to their husband's clan lands or - boys and unmarried girls- set up their own household.

The existence of homosexuality was recognised and accepted. The only possible legal repercussion of being a gay man was if he was unable to sexually satisfy his wife she could divorce him. If he knew prior to the marriage that he just couldn't 'do it' with a woman - his frustrated wife was entitled to compensation.

This was not just for the aristocracy - most sections of Gaelic Irish society followed these practices. The main exceptions were #professional classes : the Brehons, Bards, Historians, Medics etc whose 'trade' was hereditary. Their children would be 'fostered' by the schools of their profession. E.G. The Egans were lawyers - so Egan children would begin their 20 year apprenticeship aged 7 with a Master who was also a member of the same family - although it could be a distant relation.

It lasted about 2,000 years. It took invasion, attempted genocide, reams of legislation, martial law, murder and conquest by the Tudors and Stuart monarchs of England to destroy it.


It's all in Fergus Kelly's Guide to Early Irish Law -a genuine work of scholarship.

iguana

qrrgprgua wrote: »

And so because I have a Faith you jump to I am anti gay?? Typical if someone has a view on the family then they are considered anti gay.

You appear to be opposed to gay parents as you have posted an utterly ludicrous excuse for a 'study' as a jumping off point to make your own points about the negatives of gay parents that didn't even have anything to do with the 'study' in question. It's nothing to do with your religious beliefs and everything to do with the subjective prejudicial statements you've made.

username123

qrrgprgua wrote: »

Spartan method?? That didn't last long, and it was barbaric.. infanticide of any child that was not up to standard. And the young boys who were taken at 7 didn't exactly have an easy time. It was institutionalized paedophilia. Spartan society is not what we see in the 300 movie. It had its good points.. but whats heavily in favour of the strongest members.

And so because I have a Faith you jump to I am anti gay?? Typical if someone has a view on the family then they are considered anti gay.

I never said I agreed with it, I was simply pointing out that the current model is simply an unnatural cultural construct - as the Spartan method was - I dont know the 300 movie?

No - I wouldnt think you are anti gay because you have a belief in an imaginary entity. Although you do state it in other posts:

qrrgprgua wrote: »

I am a Catholic and I teach my Children that Gay Marriage is wrong as it goes against our faith,

I think you are anti gay because of this thread, your comments re nature is nature and other posts such as the above.

CrazyRabbit

There isn't a proverbial hope in hell of convincing an ignorant religious zealot that homosexuality is OK. No point trying. But don't worry, their ideology is a dying one.

And to the OP...as the song says "Keep you Jesus off my penis and I'll keep my penis off your Jesus". In other words...stop trying to dictate your moral beliefs on to others. Have a little respect.

Orion

qrrgprgua: This is not a Parenting discussion and this is not a forum for soapboxing either. Keep this to Humanities or Christianity.