Same-sex parenting study's critics should read it first

Saturday, July 20, 2002

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation issued a ringing call to action June 18: "Denver columnist uses anti-gay book to attack same-sex parenting!" it said, pointing out that a monograph that was the subject of my June 15 column, No Basis: What the Studies Don't Tell Us About Same-Sex Parenting, was published by the Marriage Law Project, whose mission, as GLAAD correctly observes, "is to reaffirm the legal definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman."

Indeed, I should have cited the Marriage Law Project -- not because its role affected the quality of the research by Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai, who wrote No Basis, but just to forestall the reflexive jumping-to-unwarranted-conclusions of GLAAD and the handful of people who wrote apparently in response to their call.

Frankly, it didn't occur to me. I've written about Lerner and Nagai's work on several projects over a number of years. They are consulting statisticians, and I can rely on them for meticulous, dispassionate analysis. Attacking the researchers (and the columnist who wrote about their work) based on the publisher's motives is an ad hominen argument, and the significant thing about the ad hominem argument is that it is a fallacy. The conclusion might or might not be right, but the argument is invalid.

Both because I didn't have enough room and because it wasn't germane anyway, I had no reason to mention, in that earlier column, that I disagree with the mission of the Marriage Law Project. The most straightforward and practical solution to the policy question of what to do about people of the same sex who want to get married is "Let them."

It harms no one. And if there is a downside -- I don't see any -- it is insignificant compared with the disadvantages of the leading alternative, which is to grant the legal benefits of marriage to all couples, including the many more numerous heterosexual couples who are perfectly free to get married but choose not to.

None of my greatly exercised correspondents appears to have read No Basis, or they would know it does not attack same-sex parenting (let alone gay and lesbian parents, individually). The underlying statistical question is whether the children of gay and lesbian parents (or same-sex couples) differ in statistically significant ways from the children of heterosexual parents (or couples).

If I were asked to speculate on that question, I would say I expect that the children would be somewhat more likely to be gay or lesbian themselves. But that is not, in my view, a negative outcome; and more to the point, the parents are unlikely to regard it as a negative outcome.

But No Basis is not about that. Rather, it addresses the separate methodological issue of how much social scientists have learned about the underlying question, and the answer is, practically nothing -- though there are some indications, even in these very small and inadequate studies, that my speculation is correct.

My critics assumed the MLP dictated the outcome of Lerner and Nagai's work. Not so. "When I agreed to do the study for them," Lerner told me in an e-mail, "one of the conditions was that I could call the results as I saw them, and this was granted to me without question. While I have had clients who have indeed tried to influence my results (unsuccessfully), the MLP was not one of them."

Critics also accused us of ignoring "countless studies" and a "vast body of research." Wrong again. Lerner's 49 studies are essentially the same ones referred to on, for instance, the Web sites of various professional organizations.

"We took our list of studies from a combination of a library search and the bibliography from the plaintiff's briefs in the Vermont same-sex parenting case among others," Lerner said. "There is no other body of literature in existence, or else it would have been cited in the briefs referred to above."

There are other related articles, but either they aren't comparative studies or they're studies of something else. One helpful reader sent me a nine-item bibliography. It included a couple of Lerner's 49 studies, but also such things as advice to a teacher on how to respond when one of her students has two mommies. A good and useful article, no doubt, but it has no bearing on the topic of the book.

Correspondents said we'd ignored endorsements of same-sex parenting by, among others, the American Psychological Association. But everyone with experience in a large organization knows that a tiny minority of activists passionately committed to one issue can have influence far beyond their numbers. The APA's public-interest section has a prominent committee on gay, lesbian and bisexual concerns, and the organization takes an active political role in relevant legal cases. No reason why it shouldn't, but anyone who assumes these organizations are "non-biased" is simply naive.

The late philosopher Sidney Hook once wrote, "Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments." The critics of No Basis haven't even bothered to read its arguments.