December 20, 2006
Posted at 11:17 am (Pacific Time)
In an interview with the Washington Post yesterday, President Bush disclosed his plans to increase the US military’s troop strength “to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists.”
In light of this proposal, it’s appropriate to ask (yet again) whether excluding sexual minorities from the US armed forces makes any sense.
The Pentagon has repeatedly predicted that the presence of openly gay and lesbian personnel would reduce the military’s morale and effectiveness and would deter heterosexuals from enlisting. As I’ve detailed in previous postings, empirical support for those claims has always been lacking. Now data from a new survey cast fresh doubts on their validity.
The survey was conducted by Zogby International for the Michael D. Palm Center (formerly the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military), located at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It measured the opinions of 545 current and former military personnel, all of whom served in Iraq or Afghanistan or in combat support roles directly related to those operations.
A detailed report of the survey results can be downloaded from the Michael D. Palm Center. Here are four key findings.
1. The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is not strongly supported by combat personnel and veterans.
Only a minority (37%) supported DADT, saying they disagree “with allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military.” The remainder agreed with allowing openly gay service members (26%), were neutral (32%), or weren’t sure (5%).
2. Many military personnel know or suspect that their unit includes gay or lesbian members.
Nearly one fourth (23%) of the respondents knew for certain that at least one member of their unit was gay or lesbian. A larger proportion (45%) suspected their unit included a gay or lesbian member. Of those who knew for certain, 55% said the presence of homosexual personnel in the unit was well known by others. Most of them (59%) had been told directly by the gay or lesbian individual.
3. Personnel who know their unit includes gay or lesbian members generally don’t perceive damage to morale.
About two thirds of those who knew for certain that their unit included one or more gay members did not believe that the latter’s presence affected either the respondent’s personal morale (66%) or the morale of the unit (64%). Only 28% believed it had a negative effect on their own morale, and 27% perceived a negative effect on their unit’s morale. By contrast, among respondents who neither knew nor suspected that a member of their unit was gay or lesbian, 58% expected that an openly gay or lesbian member would have a negative impact on their unit’s morale.
4. Allowing openly gay and lesbian personnel to serve is unlikely to reduce reenlistment or impair future recruitment.
The vast majority of respondents (78%) said their decision to join the military was based on their sense of duty and a desire to serve their country. A substantial proportion also said their decision was influenced by non-wage benefits, such as retirement or health care (62%), and by the prospect of receiving funds for college tuition (54%). Only 2% acknowledged “knowing that gays are not allowed to serve openly” as a factor in their decision. In a separate question, only 10% of respondents said they would not have joined the military if gay and lesbian personnel were allowed to serve openly.
* * * * *
In recent years, opinion polls of US civilian samples have shown strong support for allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military. The new Palm Center poll indicates that DADT isn’t strongly supported by combat personnel and doesn’t appear to play a significant role in enlistment decisions. Moreover, fears that the presence of openly gay personnel will damage morale are much greater among those who haven’t actually had any lesbians or gay men in their unit (insofar as they know) than among those who knew their unit included at least one sexual minority member.
In response to the survey, Congressman Marty Meehan (D-MA) said, “It is long past time to strike down ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and create a new policy that allows gays and lesbians to serve openly.”
Let’s hope the new Congress will consider data such as these and follow Mr. Meehan’s lead.
Copyright © 2006 by Gregory M. Herek. All rights reserved.
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December 15, 2006
Posted at 12:01 pm (Pacific Time)
The Christian Right responded predictably to the recent news of Mary Cheney’s pregnancy. As James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family, summed it up in an opinion article in this week’s Time Magazine, “Two mommies is one too many.”
Although the prospect of having a lesbian-parented grandchild in the Republican Vice-President’s family may be particularly unpalatable to antigay activists, it hasn’t led them to change their basic rhetoric. (However, the tone of Dobson’s Time article was unusually civil.)
Like most conservative arguments against sexual minority families, Dobson’s piece invoked scientific authority. And like most conservative diatribes in this arena, it misrepresented the research findings, suggesting the data show that children are damaged by having lesbian mothers or gay fathers.
However, the nature of that misrepresentation is a bit subtle and warrants comment.
In her rebuttal to Dobson, Jennifer Chrisler, Executive Director of Family Pride, assumed that Dobson’s assertions about “30 years of social science evidence” referred — albeit untruthfully — to studies of families headed by lesbian and gay parents. That is certainly a reasonable inference. When someone cites data to support a point, after all, the data usually have something to do with the argument.
Not so in this case.
When Dobson and other Christian Right activists claim that research shows “children do best on every measure of well-being when raised by their married mother and father,” they are not talking about research comparing gay versus straight parents.
Instead, they are trying to apply the findings from studies comparing children from two-parent (heterosexual) homes and children raised by a single parent, often in poverty. Many of the single-parented kids in those studies had endured divorce, the death of a parent, or other types of family disruption now known to have negative effects on children’s well-being.
Those studies show that, all else being equal, children generally do better with two parents than with one. However, they don’t address the question of whether the parents’ gender or sexual orientation makes a difference.
As I’ve discussed in previous postings, the research that has actually looked at families headed by sexual minority adults has consistently found no inherent deficits among gay parents. Moreover, their kids have proved to be as well adjusted as children with heterosexual parents.
Refreshingly, Dobson has been publicly called to task by the two researchers he cited by name in his article. As detailed on Wayne Besen’s Website, both wrote letters to Dobson criticizing his misuse of their work.
Dr. Kyle Pruett, a clinical professor at the Yale Child Study Center, accused Dobson of “cherry-picking” from his book and wrote:
“…There is nothing in my longitudinal research or any of my writings to support such conclusions [opposing lesbian and gay parenthood]. On page 134 of the book you cite in your piece, I wrote, ‘What we do know is that there is no reason for concern about the development or psychological competence of children living with gay fathers. It is love that binds relationships, not sex.’ “
Prof. Carol Gilligan, a University Professor at NYU, asked Dobson to refrain from ever quoting her again and demanded an apology for “twisting” her work. She continued:
“[T]here is nothing in my research that would lead you to draw the stated conclusions you did in the Time article. My work in no way suggests same-gender families are harmful to children or can’t raise these children to be as healthy and well adjusted as those brought up in traditional households.”
The fact that Dobson and his allies feel compelled to buttress their opposition to sexual minority families with misleading and false claims about scientific data may reveal the inherently limited appeal of their religious and political arguments. I suspect that most Americans intuitively understand the conclusion that Dr. Charlotte Patterson reached after reviewing the relevant scientific research:
“More important to youth than the gender of their parent’s partner is the quality of daily interaction and the strength of relationships with the parents they have.”
Or, as Dr. Pruett tried to explain to James Dobson, “It is love that binds relationships, not sex.”
Mary Cheney’s parents seem to get this. On December 7, the New York Times quoted a spokesperson as saying the Vice-President and his wife are “looking forward with eager anticipation” to their new grandchild’s birth.
* * * * *
Update (December 18, 2006). Wayne Besen has posted a video interview on YouTube in which Dr. Carol Gilligan discusses her reaction to Dobson’s Time article.
Copyright © 2006 by Gregory M. Herek. All rights reserved.
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December 1, 2006
Posted at 12:14 am (Pacific Time)
Since AIDS was first detected in the United States in 1981, the HIV pandemic has been shadowed by an epidemic of stigma.
In the early years, it wasn’t uncommon for people with AIDS (and those simply suspected of being sick) to lose their jobs and homes and to be shunned by their family members and former friends.
These manifestations of stigma were first directed mainly at gay men, but they soon extended to all people with HIV. Children with AIDS, like Ryan White in Kokomo (IN), were barred from school. The Ray family in Florida, whose three hemophiliac sons were infected with HIV, was burned out of its home.
Those who took care of people with AIDS and HIV — partners and spouses, family members, health care workers, volunteers — experienced what social scientists call a courtesy stigma, a kind of guilt by association.
Entire communities were subjected to stigma. In the epidemic’s early years, Haitians routinely faced HIV-related discrimination in the United States, regardless of their health status. Many gay men feared being quarantined, a concern not as outlandish as it might seem today: Whether or not to separate people with AIDS and members of so-called “risk groups” from the “general population” was a topic of public debate.
Even in 1991, ten years after the first AIDS case was documented in the United States, one third of the respondents to my national telephone survey of American adults believed that people with AIDS should be legally separated from others to protect the public health.
There was even talk of branding people with AIDS. In a 1986 New York Times OP/ED piece, William F. Buckley, Jr., proposed that “Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.”
AIDS stigma has declined in important ways since the 1980s. By 1999, my national surveys showed that only about one American in ten supported quarantine for people with AIDS.
But that same year, one fourth of the public believed that people who got AIDS through sex or drug use have gotten what they deserve. One person in five felt afraid of people with AIDS, and more than one in four felt uncomfortable at the prospect of being around someone with AIDS.
AIDS stigma remains a reality today. If we hope to eradicate it, we must understand how it operates in individuals and in society as a whole.
First, the individual level. Stereotypes and prejudices against people with HIV have two main psychological sources. One source is fear — fear of disease, of contagion, and ultimately, of death. Fear motivates many people to avoid those who have (or are suspected of having) HIV. It makes them willing to support laws and policies that would separate people with AIDS from the rest of the population. It makes them unwilling simply to be around people with HIV, to share a drinking glass with them, to hug them.
The ignorance that propels fear-based prejudice remains surprisingly widespread in the United States. In my 1999 national survey, one third of the respondents incorrectly believed they could get HIV from donating blood, 41% believed they could be infected from being coughed on or sneezed on by someone with the virus, and half believed it was possible to become infected by sharing a drinking glass with a person with AIDS. A 2006 Kaiser Family Foundation national survey found that more than one third of Americans still don’t know that HIV isn’t spread through kissing, and nearly one fourth don’t know it can’t be spread by sharing a drinking glass.
The second main source of individual prejudices surrounding HIV and AIDS is preexisting prejudice against the groups linked to AIDS in popular perceptions. AIDS-related prejudice has always been a vehicle for expressing hostility toward the members of those groups — injecting drug users, Haitians and other immigrants, and especially gay and bisexual men. These linkages remain strong. Even as the face of AIDS has changed, much of the US public still thinks of it as a gay disease, and public opinion about HIV continues to be strongly influenced by prejudice against the gay community.
The good news is we can deal with individuals’ prejudices. We can combat fear with information. In the 1980s, AIDS education programs routinely addressed misapprehensions about casual social contact by explaining how AIDS cannot be spread. There is a clear need to restore that component to our AIDS information campaigns.
Eliminating the prejudices that predate AIDS — based on sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, gender, drug use, and poverty — poses a greater challenge. But confronting those prejudices is something we can and must do.
It’s also necessary to recognize how AIDS stigma operates at the societal level.
Stigma is not simply an individual expression of prejudice. Anyone can feel prejudice against another individual or group, but that is not necessarily stigma. Stigma is the endorsement and legitimation of a particular prejudice by society as a whole. Stigma persists because it is woven into the fabric of society. It is part of society’s infrastructure.
Thus, we cannot end AIDS stigma until we exorcise prejudice and discrimination from the institutions of our culture. We must attack not only institutional antipathy and discrimination against people with AIDS, but also against gay people, African Americans, Latinos, women, the poor, and all of the other groups who are targeted by AIDS stigma.
We all look forward to the time when HIV is eradicated and World AIDS Day is simply an historical commemoration of a long-ago epidemic. But we can’t wait until then to eliminate AIDS-related stigma.
Today, on World AIDS Day 2006, we must renew our resolve to marshal our energies, our resources, and our political will to fight the stigma and discrimination associated with AIDS and the groups it most affects. We must resolve that it will soon be unnecessary for AIDS prevention campaigns to deal with stigma. We must resolve to make the epidemic of AIDS stigma just a distant memory, a phenomenon whose vanquishing offers lessons for how to respond to future epidemics with wisdom and compassion.
Copyright © 2006 by Gregory M. Herek. All rights reserved.
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November 19, 2006
Posted at 1:49 pm (Pacific Time)
The Pentagon is encountering an inconvenient obstacle in justifying its antigay policies. It’s slowly learning it can no longer get away with equating homosexuality and sickness.
The Department of Defense (DoD) recently came under public scrutiny for its 1996 Instruction on Physical Disability Evaluation. The final appendix of the 88-page memo listed “conditions and defects” that are not considered physical disabilities but nevertheless warrant separation from the armed services. Among these conditions and defects: “Certain Mental Disorders including … Homosexuality.”
In June, the Pentagon was called to task by the US mental health profession’s two major organizations — the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association. Both APAs challenged the DoD’s factual error of labeling homosexuality a mental disorder and requested that the Instruction be corrected.
The DoD subsequently released a revised Instruction in which homosexuality was moved out of the “Certain Mental Disorders” category. But it’s still listed as a “defect” along with dyslexia, motion sickness, enuresis (bed-wetting), and “repeated veneral disease infections,” among others.
As was widely reported last week, the two APAs once again sent letters to the Pentagon. They acknowledged the DoD’s correction of the mental illness error, but noted that homosexuality isn’t a defect and pointed out that labeling it as such stigmatizes sexual minorities.
What’s particularly noteworthy about this story is the historic realignment it represents in how homosexuality is regarded by the institutions of American society.
The US military didn’t maintain regulations against homosexual activity until 1917, and then the sanctions focused on conduct, not sexual orientation. It wasn’t until the years immediately prior to World War II that the military began to exclude homosexual persons from its ranks, and that policy was based on a medical-psychiatric rationale.
Thus, the mental health profession played a central role in the original policy barring homosexuals from military service.
In 1973, however, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its official list of mental illnesses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, which had included homosexuality since 1952. The American Psychological Association quickly endorsed this action and, in the years since, the two professional associations have taken a leading role in working to eradicate the stigma historically associated with homosexuality.
After it lost the support of psychiatry and psychology, the military sought other justifications for barring gay, lesbian, and bisexual personnel. Eventually, it settled on a rationale that emphasized supposed threats to unit cohesion and heterosexuals’ privacy rights. In essence, the Pentagon now argues that heterosexual personnel have so much antipathy toward gay people that they would be unable and unwilling to set aside that hostility for the good of the military mission. Moreover, the DoD portrays itself as powerless to confront this hostility in the manner it deals with, for example, racial discrimination or sexual harassment.
Of course, this argument is based on ideology rather than empirical data. US allies have successfully instituted policies that allow gay personnel to serve in their militaries. And empirical research reveals serious flaws in the Pentagon’s reasoning.
In the past, society’s major institutions spoke with one voice in condemning homosexuality. Organized religion declared it a sin. The law declared it a crime. And medicine — specifically psychiatry and psychology — declared it a sickness. The vocabularies used by these different institutions provided a quiver of rhetorical arrows for denigrating homosexuality and gay people — as immoral, criminal, sick.
The hegemony of heterosexism is crumbling, however. After the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas ruling, consenting adult homosexual conduct isn’t illegal in the civilan world. And, as every student of introductory psychology learns, homosexuality hasn’t been considered a sickness for more than three decades.
Maybe the recent interventions by the two APAs will help the Pentagon to begin to grasp this fact.
Copyright © 2006 by Gregory M. Herek. All rights reserved.
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November 14, 2006
Posted at 3:34 pm (Pacific Time)
If we could convince Rev. Louis Sheldon that being gay isn’t a choice, would he stop attacking sexual minorities?
In an interview with The Jewish Week, the Christian Right leader recently acknowledged that he’d known about Rev. Ted Haggard’s homosexual behavior months before it was publicly disclosed:
” ‘Ted and I had a discussion,’ explained Sheldon, who said Haggard gave him a telltale signal [of his sexual attraction to men] then: ‘He said homosexuality is genetic. I said, no it isn’t. But I just knew he was covering up. They need to say that.’ “
Apart from raising questions about his complicity with Rev. Haggard’s ongoing deception, Rev. Sheldon’s comments illustrate a pattern that has been well-documented in the United States: In general, antigay heterosexuals assert that homosexuality is a choice. By contrast, unprejudiced heterosexuals are likely to believe that sexual orientation is inborn or otherwise not chosen.
What, if anything, does this pattern mean for efforts to eliminate sexual prejudice?
It’s often assumed that a cause-and-effect relationship is operating here — that heterosexuals will become less prejudiced if they can be convinced that being gay isn’t a choice.
In fact, most gay people in the US don’t experience their sexual orientation as a choice. In my own empirical studies, I’ve found that the vast majority of gay men and most lesbians report having little or no choice in this regard. (I’ll discuss these data further in a future posting.)
Yet, the notion of organizing anti-prejudice campaigns around a “we-didn’t-choose-to-be-gay” theme sparks philosophical and political debate. Such arguments are outside my purview as a social scientist. Based solely on empirical research, however, this plan is problematic for several reasons.
First, many heterosexuals’ beliefs in this realm aren’t internally consistent. If someone regards homosexuality as a choice, you’d expect them also to believe gay people can change their sexual orientation. Conversely, those who think it isn’t a choice should believe that people can’t change. But the data only partly conform to these patterns.
In a 1999 national telephone survey I conducted, more than 1200 heterosexual adults were asked whether they believed being homosexual is something people choose for themselves or something over which they have no control. A bit later in the survey, they were asked their opinion about what proportion of gay people can stop being homosexual if they want to do so. Half were asked these questions about gay men, the other half were asked about lesbians.
Overall, 47% said homosexuality is something men choose for themselves, and 57% expressed this belief about female homosexuality.
As expected, most respondents who said being gay is not a choice also believed that few (if any) gay people can stop being homosexual — roughly 72% expressed this opinion about gay men, and 76% about lesbians.
But it was a different story for those who said homosexuality is a choice. Only 50% of them believed most or all gay men can become straight, and only 43% expressed this opinion about lesbians. Many believed that fewer than half of homosexuals can change (27% said this about gay men, 34% about lesbians).
I’ve asked similar questions in subsequent surveys, with the same results: Many heterosexuals who believe being gay is a choice nevertheless say most gay people can’t choose to stop being homosexual. This contradictory pattern suggests that believing homosexuality is chosen might not be about facts or logic, at least for some people.
There’s another problem with the idea that convincing heterosexuals that homosexuality isn’t chosen will reduce their sexual prejudice. Such a plan will only work if beliefs about choice are actually the basis for heterosexuals’ attitudes toward sexual minorities. However, the data about choice beliefs and sexual prejudice are largely correlational, which means they don’t necessarily reveal a causal relationship. Even if one factor does cause the other, we can’t be certain which comes first — beliefs about choice or prejudice.
The chain might actually begin with prejudice. After all, conservative Christians base their attitudes on the argument that homosexuality is sinful. To be a sin, homosexuality has to be a choice. Otherwise their antigay hostility looks less like moral rectitude and more like bigotry. So perhaps many heterosexuals with antigay attitudes say homosexuality is chosen as a way of justifying their preexisting prejudice.
Research relevant to this hypothesis has been conducted by Dr. Peter Hegarty, a Stanford-trained social psychologist who is on the faculty at the University of Surrey in England.
Dr. Hegarty observed that beliefs about choice and the immutability of sexual orientation weren’t as closely linked with public attitudes toward sexual minorities in England as in the USA. In a series of studies, he found that beliefs about choice were strongly correlated with sexual prejudice among American students, but not among English students.
In further data analyses, he divided the participants into two groups: (1) those who perceived statements that homosexuality is unchosen and unchangeable to signify tolerant attitudes toward sexual minorities, and (2) those who didn’t perceive such a connection. He found that choice beliefs were correlated with prejudice only in the first group.
Dr. Hegarty interpreted his findings as indicating that heterosexuals may construct their beliefs about choice “to fit their sexual politics rather than the reverse.” Insofar as they understand beliefs about choice to express a particular political viewpoint (no choice = progay; choice = antigay), they use them for just that purpose. Some say homosexuality is chosen to express an antigay stance while others express a progay position by saying it’s not chosen.
Yet another possibility is that the choice-prejudice linkage might result from the causal influence of some third factor, such as heterosexuals’ personal contact with sexual minority people. In another survey I conducted in the early 1990s, I found that Whites (but, interestingly, not Blacks) harbored much less sexual prejudice and were much less likely to regard homosexuality as a choice if they personally knew one or more gay people. Presumably, those relationships reduced their prejudice and gave them an opportunity to learn their friend or relative’s ideas about the origins of her or his own sexual orientation.
In summary, we don’t yet know why beliefs about choice are correlated with sexual prejudice. One may cause the other, or perhaps both result from a third factor, such as personal contact with gay people. The data we have don’t support the notion that convincing heterosexuals that homosexuality is inborn or otherwise not a choice will cause them to be less prejudiced. If anything, it appears that stating a particular belief about choice may be a way of justifying one’s preexisting antigay or progay attitudes.
This is essentially the position that Rev. Sheldon took when he dismissed Rev. Haggard’s private comments about the genetic roots of sexual orientation as something “they need to say.” What he didn’t note is that, just as much and perhaps more, he and his followers “need to say” that homosexuality is a choice.
* * * * * *
Dr. Hegarty’s article, ” ‘It’s Not a Choice, It’s the Way We’re Built’: Symbolic Beliefs About Sexual Orientation In the US and Britain,” was published in 2002 in the Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 153-166.
For further discussion of Revs. Sheldon and Haggard, see Timothy Kincaid’s posting on ExGayWatch.com
Copyright © 2006 by Gregory M. Herek. All rights reserved.
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November 3, 2006
Posted at 11:37 am (Pacific Time)
I didn’t plan my October 30 posting about parenting by same-sex couples to coincide with an article on the same topic in the Los Angeles Times.
But there it was in last Monday’s edition — the story by Kevin Sack, titled “Do Children of Gay Parents Develop Differently?“, a sidebar to his 3-part series on a gay male couple attempting to have children.
The headline’s question was answered — sort of — in the sub-headline, which read “Research suggests there’s no distinction. But the field is a young one, and studies are often colored by politics.”
The questions raised by that “but” prompted me to write this post.
To begin, it’s important to note that the Times accurately characterized current knowledge in many respects:
- It reported (correctly) that experts generally agree that no empirical basis exists for concluding the children of lesbian and gay parents fare worse or better than those raised by heterosexual parents.
- It (correctly) summarized the conclusions of sociologists Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz in their 2001 literature review published in the American Sociological Review: “Almost uniformly, they wrote, the research found no systematic differences between children reared by a mother and father and those raised by same-sex parents.”
- It quoted Dr. Charlotte Patterson, one of the leading researchers in this field (whose recent paper I summarized in Monday’s posting), as saying the children of lesbian and gay parents display “pretty positive adjustment.”
- And it noted (correctly) that major professional organizations with relevant expertise — including the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, and American Medical Association — have endorsed the conclusions summarized by Dr. Patterson.
In discussing the limitations of current research, however, the article raised three questions that may have left many readers doubting the validity of this entire area of research.
Question #1. Is the research definitive?
I’m sure everyone working in this area would agree that more research is needed on parenting and sexual orientation. In making this point, however the Times adopted what struck me as an accusatory and dismissive tone that cast undue doubt on the findings to date:
“Despite three decades of research on gay parenting, social scientists cannot conclusively determine whether children raised by homosexuals develop differently, for better or worse, than those raised by heterosexuals. Though the early consensus is that they do not, even the investigators acknowledge the field is too young, the numbers too few, the variables too many and the research too values-laden to qualify as definitive.”
The message seems to be that the lack of conclusive findings is damning. In truth, however, social scientists lack “definitive” findings on practically every topic we study. The investigators are usually the first to acknowledge this fact.
Yes, we need more research on parental sexual orientation and its effects (or lack of them) on children. Yes, that research should be conducted with bigger and better samples. But the published studies now number more than two dozen. Over time, the measurement techniques and sampling strategies used in this research have grown increasingly sophisticated. Recent studies have reported findings from a representative sample of the US population.
On the specific questions of (a) whether the children of gay parents are less well adjusted than the children of heterosexuals, and (b) whether their parents are less fit, we actually know quite a lot, especially about families headed by lesbians. The research to date has consistently found no inherent deficits among gay parents, and their kids have proved to be as well adjusted as children with heterosexual parents. The burden of proof rests with those who claim that being raised by lesbian or gay parents harms children.
As more data become available, our understanding of parental sexual orientation and child development will become even more extensive and nuanced. We’ll be better able to describe the entire population of kids with sexual minority parents. But scientists’ reflexive caution and our oft-repeated mantra that “more research is needed” hardly mean we know nothing in this area today.
Question #2. Do scholars disagree about how some of the data should be interpreted?
The Times quoted Dr. Stacey, who questioned researchers’ interpretations of some of their findings, echoing the comments she and Dr. Biblarz made in their 2001 paper.
Drs. Stacey and Biblarz agreed there are clearly no deficits in the psychological or social adjustment or intellectual abilities of children raised by sexual minority parents. However, they hypothesized that those children might differ from kids with heterosexual parents in other areas, namely, conformity to traditional gender roles and sexual attitudes and behavior. They discussed a few studies that reported such differences, and speculated that other studies might also have found significant differences if the researchers had recruited larger samples or used different statistical techniques.
I reviewed the latter studies myself and, for the record, I respectfully disagree with Drs. Stacey and Biblarz about most of them, as I noted in my 2006 American Psychologist paper. But the questions Drs. Stacey and Biblarz raised are legitimate and useful.
This is how science works. Researchers report their data in detail so other scholars can examine the results, debate them, and build on them in future studies.
However, it’s important to stress that, while Drs. Stacey and Biblarz proposed alternative interpretations of the data, they didn’t equate differences with deficits. Rather, they concluded:
“Most of the differences in the findings discussed above cannot be considered deficits from any legitimate public policy perspective. They either favor the children with lesbigay parents, are secondary effects of social prejudice, or represent ‘just a difference’ of the sort democratic societies should respect and protect.” (p. 177)
Nor did they question the researchers’ honesty or integrity. Such accusations have been the province of the Christian Right. This leads to the final question raised in the Times article.
Question #3. Do the researchers in this area lack integrity? Are they merely pursuing their own political agenda?
This charge came from Timothy J. Dailey, to whom the Times implicitly accorded the status of social scientist. Dailey, however, isn’t a scientist. He’s a representative of the Family Research Council, a Christian Right organization with an unabashedly antigay political agenda.
(Regular readers of this blog may remember that Mr. Dailey also wrote the FRC’s report claiming child molesters and pedophiles are disproportionately likely to be gay men; see my October 7 posting.)
Dailey’s allegation (quoted by the Times) is that much of the existing research on sexual minority parenting has been “compromised by methodological flaws and driven by political agendas….”
Moreover,
” ‘openly lesbian researchers’ — he named Patterson specifically — ‘sometimes conduct research with an interest in portraying homosexual parenting in a positive light….’ To do so, Dailey wrote, ignores ‘the accumulated wisdom of cultures and societies from time immemorial, which testifies that the best way for children to be raised is by a mother and a father who are married to each other.’ “
Although the Times article gave voice to Dailey’s ad hominem attack on Dr. Patterson’s work, it didn’t note that her research has been subjected to extensive peer review and published in the most highly regarded professional journals in the field. Unlike the FRC, scientific reviewers base their evaluations on the quality of the research, not the researcher’s personal characteristics or claims about “the accumulated wisdom of cultures and societies from time immemorial.”
+++++++++++++++
On balance, the Times mostly got it right. However, by granting unwarranted legitimacy to the FRC’s claims, the article probably led some readers to dismiss the research in this area as simply “colored by politics.” If so, this is unfortunate.
Empirical research can’t reconcile disputes about core values, but it is very good at addressing questions of fact. Policy debates will be impoverished if this important source of knowledge is simply dismissed as a “he said, she said” squabble.
Copyright © 2006 by Gregory M. Herek. All rights reserved.
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October 30, 2006
Posted at 12:02 am (Pacific Time)
Does a parent’s sexual orientation affect her child’s development? And if so, how?
These are the questions posed by Prof. Charlotte Patterson in her article in the newest issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a highly respected academic journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.
Papers in Current Directions are intended to be “concise reviews spanning all of scientific psychology and its applications” that are “written by leading experts in terms that are accessible outside of the realm of research subspecialties.”
Consistent with these criteria, Dr. Patterson’s article doesn’t report new data. Rather, it reviews previously published research and synthesizes the findings for other professionals.
Noting that most studies have focused on lesbian mothers rather than gay fathers, Dr. Patterson highlights two eras in contemporary research on sexual minority families.
In early studies — conducted mainly during the 1970s and 1980s — researchers examined children who were born to a married mother and father but were subsequently raised by their lesbian mother after a divorce or separation. They found few significant differences between the children with a lesbian mother and children whose divorced mothers were heterosexual.
Because these children began life in the context of a heterosexual marriage, however, the question of how their early experiences might have affected their long-term development remained open. What would be the outcome for, say, infants adopted by same-sex couples or children conceived by same-sex couples through donor insemination?
More recent research has addressed this issue by studying children raised from birth in families headed by a same-sex couple. For these studies, children and parents have been recruited through a variety of strategies. Some researchers have located participants through friendship networks and word of mouth, while others have sampled specific groups that included both heterosexual and lesbian parents (e.g., sperm bank clients). Still others have used probability samples that are representative of the entire population.
Regardless of how participants were recruited, all of the studies converge on similar conclusions. In Dr. Patterson’s words,
“Does parental sexual orientation have an important impact on child or adolescent development? Results of recent research provide no evidence that it does. In fact, the findings suggest that parental sexual orientation is less important than the qualities of family relationships. More important to youth than the gender of their parent’s partner is the quality of daily interaction and the strength of relationships with the parents they have.“
Thus, if you want to know which children are most likely to be developing in a healthy way, don’t focus on their parents’ sexual orientation. Instead, find the children who have warm and affectionate relationships with their parents.
Dr. Patterson’s article, “Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents,” appears in the October 2006 issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science.
In addition to her many scholarly publications on this topic, Dr. Patterson has also written a summary of research findings on lesbian mothers, gay fathers, and their children that is available on the website of the American Psychological Association.
Copyright © 2006 by Gregory M. Herek. All rights reserved.
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