What social science says about gay parents

Posted on December 4, 2003 by Ampersand

Over on the MarriageDebate blog, Eve writes:

WHAT DO THE STUDIES SAY ABOUT SAME-SEX PARENTING?

Hey, look, you can get a nice review of literature here.

However, the link Eve provides is to an anti-gay-equality site, which – surprise, surprise – links only to papers which conclude that there’s no evidence that kids of gay parents turn out as well as kids of straight parents. Both of the papers Eve links to were commissioned by anti-gay-equality activists; neither one has been subjected to peer review. Neither link Eve cites provides any evidence that children raised by lesbian or gay parents have any negative outcomes, compared to the children of straight parents.

To balance things out, Eve might want to add the following links, which summarize the social science evidence and conclude that the children of gay parents don’t suffer any ill effects:

But what about the studies Eve links to? They make some serious points – the studies that exist in the real world do have shortcomings, such as small sample sizes. However, the conclusion that therefore all the social science data should be ignored entirely is too extreme. As social scientist Judith Stacey argues:

Q: Florida and other states have used so-called experts in social science who try to discredit the studies you cite (and the ones we summarize in this book). They claim that these studies used flawed research methods and resulted in flawed findings. What is your response?

A: The studies that have been conducted are certainly not perfect – virtually no study is. It’s almost never possible to transform complex social relationships, such as parent-child relationships, into adequate, quantifiable measures, and because many lesbians and gay men remain in the closet, we cannot know if the participants in the studies are representative of all gay people. However, the studies we reviewed are just as reliable and respected as studies in other areas of child development and psychology. So, most of those so-called experts are really leveling attacks on well-accepted social science methods. Yet they do not raise objections to studies that are even less rigorous or generalizable on such issues as the impact of divorce on children. It seems evident that the critics employ a double-standard. They attack these particular studies not because the research methods differ from or are inferior to most studies of family relationships but because these critics politically oppose equal family rights for lesbians and gay men.

The studies we discussed have been published in rigorously peer-reviewed and highly selective journals, whose standards represent expert consensus on generally accepted social scientific standards for research on child development. […]

There is not a single, respectable social scientist conducting and publishing research in this area today who claims that gay and lesbian parents harm children.

UPDATE: See also this recent study, published November 2004, which is mythologically more rigorous than most previous studies.

We drew information for our study from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, in which researchers conducted interviews with and collected information from thousands of American adolescents and their parents. The two groups we studied had several similar characteristics, including age, gender, ethnicity, level of parental education, and family income. There was an equal number of girls and boys, and an overall average age of 15.

We found that adolescents whose parents had same-sex romantic partners were developing in positive ways. We found no significant differences in their school achievement or psychological well-being when compared to their peers with male/female parents.

Adolescents whose mothers had same-sex partners were neither more nor less likely than those whose mothers had opposite-sex partners to report they were involved in a romantic relationship during the past year, or that they had ever engaged in sexual intercourse. Adolescents in both groups were generally well adjusted, with relatively high levels of self-esteem, relatively low levels of anxiety, few symptoms of depression, and good school achievement. […]

Summarized from Child Development, Vol. 75, Issue 6, “Summary of Psychosocial Adjustment, School Outcomes, and Romantic Attractions of Adolescents With Same-Sex Parents” by J.L. Wainright, S.T. Russell, and C.J. Patterson

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Posted in Same-Sex Marriage | 53 Comments

New Cartoon!

Posted on December 3, 2003 by Ampersand

singlepayer10.jpg

(Originally published in Dollars and Sense magazine)..

Posted in Cartooning & comics | 34 Comments

Angels in America on HBO

Posted on December 3, 2003 by Ampersand

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m damned excited about this. I’m definitely a Tony Kushner fan (among the quotes that no one ever reads on the right-hand bar of this blog is one from Kushner). I saw part one of Angels in America on Broadway in the mid-eighties, and at the time I found the show funny, politically on-target, human and thrilling.

I’m curious how it’ll play now. New York City in the mid-eighties, for anyone who was even remotely paying attention to the AIDs crisis in the gay community, felt genuinely apocalyptic, and that feeling is very present in the play. But of course the world didn’t end (it never does), and I wonder if the tone won’t make it seem bizarre or overstated nowadays. Still, I’m looking forward to it..

Posted in Site and Admin Stuff | 8 Comments

A very productive argument

Posted on December 3, 2003 by Ampersand

This Slate article isn’t the best I’ve ever read, but if you’re a Tolkien fan – or a C.S. Lewis fan – you might enjoy it. The author, Stephen Hart, argues that both Tolkien’s and Lewis’ careers were set in motion by an all-night argument they had in 1931..

Posted in Site and Admin Stuff | 5 Comments

Want a new parlour game? From Iraq, try Mahabis

Posted on December 3, 2003 by Ampersand

Well, you’d need to have an awfully large parlour. From an article in The Economist (and via Calpundit):

As an aid to hunting Baathist fugitives, the Pentagon devised a poker deck featuring Saddam Hussein as the ace of spades. But America’s sleuths might do better to borrow their methods from Iraq’s own favourite parlour game, which is known as mahabis (rhyming with cannabis).

It takes a rather large parlour to stage a proper mahabis match, so the game is often played outdoors, traditionally during the long nights of Ramadan. The object is to find a hidden mahbas, or signet ring. Two teams, each numbering from 50 to 250 and seated in rows, face each other, taking turns to conceal the ring. The team leader, or sheikh, starts an innings by passing in front of his own team. With a blanket covering his hands, he stops in front of each player. When the pass is done, all players remain seated with closed fists in their lap, but only one holds the ring.

The fun begins when the rival sheikh approaches to scour the faces of his opponents. The sheikh can eliminate as many players as he wants, but he has only one chance to pick the exact hand that is holding the mahbas. If he chooses wrongly, his team loses a point and the ring stays with the successfully deceitful team for another round. The first team to lose 20 points loses the whole thing. Simple as the game sounds, the sheikh’s task requires skill, cunning, a penetrating knowledge of human nature and immense powers of observation.

Before the war, the government itself ran a national mahabis tournament, with the finals beamed live on state television. Iraq’s current troubles have made it hard to arrange such a large-scale event this year, but in Baghdad, at least, rival neighbourhoods still tussle.

At a youth club in the Karada district, local boys face visitors from Dora, across the river. Fadhil Abbas, Karada’s burly captain, is all ferocity, nostrils blasting thick shafts of cigarette smoke as he stalks Dora’s ranks. “You lot, out,” he barks, sending off 20 players. A few minutes later he has dismissed all but four, and they have scarcely settled down before Mr Abbas lunges at one of them, so startling him that he cries out as his tormentor triumphantly extracts the ring.

The trick, explains Mr Abbas, is to understand that the eyes which stayed watchful, rather than relaxing, in the instant after he declared that only four players remained were the eyes of the ring-holder. Asked if his talents might be used for hunting down Saddam Hussein, he just grins and shakes his head.

I’m astounded and fascinated by this game… the skill of the sheikh at observing involutary tells must put American poker players to shame..

Posted in Site and Admin Stuff | 1 Comment

Thanksgiving report

Posted on December 3, 2003 by Ampersand

It was a fun Thanksgiving; a different crowd than usual, since Becca, John, Aaron and Dawn didn’t join us, but “new” housemate Phil was here (I put “new” in quotes because, although Phil only recently moved in with us, he was also our housemate for a period in the late 1980s, when we lived in Ohio.), as was Phil’s friend Elizabeth. Our ex-housemates Jenn and Kip were also there – their first Thanksgiving with us in some time (how I’ve missed Jenn’s astounding mushroom pie their company!). Plus Anne, and Sean, and Jake, and the “regular” Thanksgiving crowd of me and Bean and Sarah and Charles and Matt and Kim. Plus Sydney Quinn, who is new in every sense of the word.

This is also the first time we’ve had a crowd over at our new house; it’s still a work-in-progress, but we worked hard to have at least the main rooms unpacked and looking reasonably pretty by Thanksgiving.

In the end, there were thirteen at dinner (fourteen, counting Sydney Quinn, but Sydney isn’t yet eating anything that doesn’t come out of a boob). Despite how grim we all look in the photos, we actually had a lot of fun – too much food, lots of conversation, and Mao was played until the wee hours of the morning. (Since eight of the folks attending were Oberlin College Alums, we played the Oberlin rules, which are not quite the same as the rules for Mao I’ve seen described elsewhere on the net).

Fortunately, Jenn took photos! Here’s the cake I baked:

Mmmmn, chocolate!

For the rest of the pictures – including some pictures of the house, and pictures of Bean and myself – go visit Jenn’s post..

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So a Jewish Prime Minister, a Spanish Painter and a Cartoonist walk into a bar…

Posted on December 3, 2003 by Ampersand

So almost a year ago, British cartoonist Dave Brown caused a stir with a cartoon showing a King Kong sized Ariel Sharon eating Palestinian babies (the image was riffed from a Goya painting). It’s back in the news new, because the British Political Cartoon Society has just given it the cartoon of the year award.

Sheesh.

A few folks have asked me what I think. My opinion hasn’t changed since I wrote about the cartoon in January. The cartoon still strikes me as anti-Semitic; and like Trish Wilson, I make a distinction between the cartoon and the cartoonist, and suspect that the anti-Semitism was unintentional.

I also think this is a mediocre cartoon; the award is apparently given for controversy, not for quality. As Dirk Deppey writes on ‘Journalista!:

…it’s a spectacularly witless and offensive cartoon, and the fact that Brown’s fellow cartoonists voted to give this cartoon their highest honor calls the state of British political cartooning into serious doubt. This pathetic piece of shit is the best that they can do? They can’t be serious, can they?

Raznor of Raznor’s Rants (and frequently of Alas’ comments) disagrees about the quality of the cartoon, and also with charges of anti-Semitism:

I’m not sure I would have thought of it as anti-Semitism if I didn’t know about the Goya painting, but if I hadn’t I may be obliged to give in to the argument that a picture of a Jewish man eating a baby is nothing but an old anti-Semitic stereotype.

I don’t follow Raznor’s argument here; because the image is based on Goya, he is saying, it can’t also be anti-Semitic. Why not? It’s as if Raznor believes that it is impossible for a work of art to reference two things at once; the cartoon draws from Goya, therefore (Raznor concludes) it cannot also draw on the anti-Semitic blood libel myth.

My guess is that Raznor is confusing the cartoonist’s intent with the cartoon itself; if the former isn’t anti-Semitic, then the latter must not be anti-Semitic either. But I don’t think this is always how things work. As I wrote back in January:

The cartoon is a riff on a famous Goya painting of Saturn eating his children, which suggests that the cartoonist may have had something more, or something other, in mind than just blood libel. (For those of you who don’t know, the blood libel is a centuries-old anti-Semitic myth that Jews eat gentile children. It’s a good deal better-known in Europe than it is in the US).

So does that change anything? Well, it brings up the possibility that this may have been accidental anti-Semitism; perhaps the cartoonist was just tasteless, insensitive, ignorant. But I never said that the cartoonist himself (herself?) is an anti-Semite. I don’t know or care what was in the cartoonists’ heart; all I know is what was drawn in the cartoon. And what was drawn was one of the most pernicious and vicious anti-Semitic myths in history; a slander that is still current in parts of the Arab world.

(It’s on a par with an American newspaper editor printing a cartoon showing Colin Powell raping white women. It’s not just tasteless; it’s drawing on a specific, deeply-felt cultural image of bigotry. And it draws on that racist imagery regardless of intent.).

In this case, the cartoon was drawn by the cartoonist and approved by an editor. If it was by some miracle an innocent mistake, then it is still a mistake that shows a staggering tastelessness, ignorance and insensitivity. And regardless of motive, the result was the printing of an anti-Semitic cartoon.

Look, I hate Sharon; I think he’s a war criminal, a bigot, and an enemy of peace. I’ll gladly call him terrible names and draw him doing horrible things. But I will never draw him eating babies; because that’s a traditional way anti-Semites attack Jews. It’s fair game to criticize Sharon for being a warmonger or even a murderer; but bringing in “blood libel” imagery turns the cartoon into a criticism of him for being a Jewish warmonger, and that’s anti-Semitic.

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Posted in Anti-Semitism, Cartooning & comics, Palestine & Israel | 14 Comments

Some things Amp has read lately

Posted on December 1, 2003 by Ampersand
  • Post-Feminst Swill Redux, a good Susan Douglas take-down of a fairly mediocre New York Times Magazine article.
  • Harry Brighouse in Crooked Timber has a useful discussion of daycare and stay-at-home care; “useful” because he lays out some of the issues very neatly. I do disagree with some particulars, and might post more on this later.
  • Philip Rosenbloom considers the question of bias in reporting about Israel and Palestine, and concludes that no reporting could ever be seen as unbiased on all sides. More generally, this is a symptom of the way neither side seems capable of recognizing the other side’s realities.
  • A University of Virginia employee is being criticized for using the word “nigger” in a context that no one present found racist or offensive (the statement was, “I can’t believe in this day and age that there’s a sports team in our nation’s capital named the Redskins. That is as derogatory to Indians as having a team called Niggers would be to blacks.”) In response, the “Staff Union” is organizing a protest, and Julian Bond calls for the employee to be given sensitivity training.

    There is no lack of real racism to protest and fight in America today; over-the-top responses to acts of non-racism, like this one, trivialize race problems and wastes everybody’s time.

  • “Hate and Hypocrisy,” a really interesting and intelligent article from the Southern Poverty Law Center examining anti-Semitic Jews. (Real anti-Semitism, that is, not just criticizing Israel).
  • An interesting Foreign Policy article discusses the problems of women in Japan, where women’s understandable refusal to take on repressive homemaker roles – and the larger Japanese society’s refusal to make other roles available for mothers – has led to an enormous decline in the Japanese birthrate. (Via Family Scholars Blog).
    Japanese women have three choices, says Haruka: have no career and get married; abandon a career and get married; or plan a life without men. Japan, she says, has perfected the exploitation of women by combining patriarchy with the country’s odd breed of capitalism. For a career woman, emancipated by feminist thought, the only way to true happiness is to stay single—if she can learn to disregard insults from men and rebukes from other women for her status.
  • TalkLeft collects a number of links reporting on brutal police attacks on anti-FTAA protestors in Miami last week.
  • Blueheron quotes (indirectly) these stats, from the Economist, showing the ratio of take-home pay between top executives and factory workers in different countries:
    Nation.

    Posted in Link farms | 1 Comment

IWF heads down the toilet

Posted on November 28, 2003 by Ampersand

From a month-old press release from the Independent Women’s Forum website:

IWF Announces Exciting New Partnership

The Independent Women’s Forum today announced an Affiliation with “Americans for Prosperity,” an organization that replaces the Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation. The Affiliation agreement provides for staff and resource sharing between Americans for Prosperity and the Independent Women’s Forum. Nancy Pfotenhauer, president of the Independent Women’s Forum, will also be president of Americans for Prosperity.

“What made this so desirable,” Pfotenhauer said, “is that we have very similar missions. Each of us is dedicated to the spirit of free enterprise and self reliance and supports the principles of political freedom, economic liberty and personal responsibility. While IWF’s focus has been on a woman’s perspective on important issues, the partnership allows us to leverage each other’s strengths and build on each other’s successes.”

Brushing aside the happy spin of the IWF’s press release, it’s obvious this merger is bad news for nation’s leading anti-feminist think tank.

First of all, obviously the result of this will be to dilute the IWF’s message, and to leave the IWF’s management with less time for IWF-specific goals. There are only two reasons I can see for this. One, maybe the IWF management wants to “expand their portfolio” and put their fingers into more pies, which might be good for them but won’t be good for the IWF. (Kind of like the way that Joss Whedon’s decision to put more of his time into Angel and Firefly led to a noticeable decline in the quality of Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

Since IWF chief Nancy Pfotenhauer has a background in economics, an anti-tax group like CSEF will be a natural fit for her. The IWF, meanwhile, is going to be saddled with less-than-fully-engaged leadership.

Alternatively, maybe the IWF has failed to raise enough funds to keep itself going, and IWF management felt they had no choice but to economize by merging with another organization. (Similar to the way Ms Magazine had no choice but to merge with FMF). If so, that’s obviously bad news for the IWF and for anti-feminism in general.

I don’t really see a third possible reason to merge – despite what the press release claims, CSEF’s “grassroots mobilizing,” which has specialized in capturing anti-tax resentment and anger, won’t be transferable to the IWF’s mission. Even among Republicans, few Americans resent feminism nearly as much as they resent paying taxes.

So what’s in the IWF’s future? I think this is the key sentence in the press release: “While IWF’s focus has been on a woman’s perspective on important issues, the partnership allows us to leverage each other’s strengths and build on each other’s successes.” This merger locks the IWF into being about providing “a woman’s perspective on important issues.” In other words, the IWF’s job is to provide op-eds and talking heads who will explain why the policy choices Bush and the Republicans make are good for women – rather than deciding for themselves which policies they’ll support. That’s a very different animal from being an organization about women’s issues.

This “focus” effectively locks the IWF out of ever disagreeing with the libertarian/republican consensus; if the IWF’s mission (what’s left of it) ever conflicts with mainstream conservative thought, it’s the mission that will have to give way. That of intellectual independence is, I think, a real problem for a think tank. (Not that the IWF ever displayed much intellectual independence in the first place, imo).

Bad news for anti-feminism; good news for feminists. Now let’s hope the IWF lingers for a long, long time, sucking away resources and preventing a new focal point for anti-feminism from emerging..

Posted in Anti-feminists and their pals | 8 Comments

Amp's favorite new blog: Echidne of the Snakes

Posted on November 28, 2003 by Ampersand

Make sure to check out Echidne of the Snakes, which has quickly leaped onto my list of must-read blogs. Funny, feminist commentary from one of the more obscure dieties – what more could you want?

Here’s a sample, from Echidne’s post on the glass ceiling:

The corporate glass ceiling is supposed to keep women out of higher management; all they can do is to gaze at the stars. But now some say that there is no glass ceiling that would prevent women from flying straight up and getting a comet named after themselves. Instead, the reason for few women in leading positions is said to be…. Guess. If you are even one tenth as old as I am, you have heard this before.

Well, the blame belongs to the women, of course. They don’t want the brass ring hard enough to grab it. They don’t want the long hours. They want to be with their children, and to write poetry or ride a horse. They want to go to Africa to cure hunger. Women are just different.

Hmmm. Different from what? Men, of course, you thick-headed goddess.

Aah! That’s why they don’t fit into the public sector; the public sector was built to fit men’s desires. Well, this is really interesting: why doesn’t the public sector reflect the desires of both men and women? Why doesn’t the fact that children must be taken care of by somebody, that families must at least meet once and a while, that human beings might need to write poetry or ride horses or cure hunger; why don’t any of these things affect the way the jobs and the labor market are structured?

Why is a good manager one who has no life outside the job? Who thinks that managers are equally bright and energetic in their sixteenth consecutive work hour as in their first eight? Do you want important economic decisions made by people who don’t remember what their children look like, or who haven’t smelled at a flower or played a game for fun for decades?

Never mind if they are men or women, I’d shudder if humans took the division of labor to such extreme degrees.

What I see through my divine sight, are glass mountains on which people slip and slide in their glass slippers. Only those who also have glass hearts thrive.

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Posted in Site and Admin Stuff | 3 Comments