Anti-Climacus

I more or less agree with this on the same-sex parenting study. It's worth pointing out the asymmetry between critiques of the study and responses to those critiques. The critiques tend to focus on social-scientific issues of study construction: the study can't be a good one because it stacks the deck by a. including any reported level of known same-sex parental interaction as functionally equivalent to being raised for life by same-sex parents and therefore b. moves over into the category of 'same-sex parents' a number of dysfunctional heterosexual relationships, thereby biasing the results. The responses to the critiques tend to focus on the political and social agendas of the people who are critiquing, e.g.

This is one of those instances where the CCOA's skepticism about social science doesn't serve him well: time spent with statistics and giving some thought to how to construct studies will, I think, make it evident that the critiques identify problems with the study that would exist regardless of what conclusion it came to. It would be interesting, though, to get hands on the raw data and attempt to re-run the study with a more neutral classification scheme. My guess would be that the highest level of dysfunction would correspond with people in a middle group--raised by putatively heterosexual parents except that one (or both) had unexpressed same-sex attraction, which contributed to tension within the marriage, or the end of the marriage. But the social and political implications of that would be much more complicated for all sides.