Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Poor study used to defend DOMA gets worse

Earlier today, I mentioned how Speaker of the House John Boehner's hired team of lawyers was using bad research to defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court.

I zeroed in on a poor study, No Difference?: An Analysis of Same-Sex Parenting. which was a part of the team's documentation. This study, written by George Dent, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, contained many errors, including citing the work of discredited researchers such as Paul Cameron and George Rekers.

I also made note that the Dent's study also cited work from the American College of Pediatricians, a group designed to pass along anti-gay junk science as fact.

In fact, I said the following about Dent's citation of ACP material:

The particular study by the ACP cited by Dent, Homosexual Parenting: Is It Time for Change?, is filled with several errors which I talked about two years ago, including:

1. Outdated work

2. Extreme distortion of studies not meant by to used to gauge the effects of same-sex parenting.

3. And researcher complaints.

In citing Homosexual Parenting: Is It Time for Change?, Dent tries to pull a double deception. Not only does he cite this poor study done by ACP, but he actually takes some of the individual bad work from the study and cites it on its own throughout his study in general.

It is here that I want to go into more detail.

As I said before, not only does Dent cite the study cited by ACP, but he also pulls out material from the study and cites it in other parts of his own study, thereby becoming guilty of the same errors committed by the ACP, including:

1. Outdated sources - Both the ACP study and Dent's study cite the following two references as proof that gay couples are more apt to be less faithful:

David P. McWhirter and Andrew M. Mattison, The Male Couple: how relationships develop (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1984)

A. P. Bell and M. S. Weinberg, Homosexualities: a study of diversity among men and women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978)

But neither study can be used to generalize about the gay community. The authors of The Male Couple said:

“We always have been very careful to explain that the very nature of our research sample, its size (156 couples), its narrow geographic location, and the natural selectiveness of the participants prevents the findings from being applicable and generalizable to the entire gay male community.”

A passage in Homosexualities clearly says:

“. . . given the variety of circumstances which discourage homosexuals from participating in research studies, it is unlikely that any investigator will ever be in a position to say that this or that is true of a given percentage of all homosexuals.”


2. Extreme distortion of studies not meant by to used to gauge the effects of same-sex parenting -  Both the ACP study and Dent's study cite the following study to claim that gay men cannot be monogamous and are not good child rearers:

Maria Xiridou et al., The Contribution of Steady and Casual Partnerships to the Incidence of HIV Infection in Amsterdam (Editor's note - Dent made an error in giving the name of this study in his paper. He called it Maria Xiridou et al., The Contribution of Steady and Casual Partnerships to the Incidence of HIV Infection in America. This is inaccurate because the study took place in Amsterdam. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here.)

From this study, both ACP and Dent claimed - men in these partnerships had an average of eight casual partners per year.

But the Xiridou study only looked at casual relationships between gay men. It had nothing to do with the lesbian population and certainly nothing to do with children in lgbt households. Xiridou's study was designed to "access the relative contribution of steady and casual partnerships to the incidence of HIV infection among homosexual men in Amsterdam and to determine the effect of increasing sexually risky behaviours among both types of partnerships in the era of highly active antiretroviral therapy."
 
For this study, Dr. Xiridou received her information from the Amsterdam Cohort Study of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and AIDS Among Homosexual Men.

Xiridou's study cannot even be used gauge an effect of marriage equality because the researchers conducting the Amsterdam Cohort Study of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and AIDS Among Homosexual Men studied 1,800 gay men between the years of 1984- 2001.

Same-sex marriage was legalized in the Netherlands in 2001.  Wouldn't that make her study useless for defending DOMA?

3. Researcher complaints - Both the ACP study and Dent's study cites the work of Dr. Judith Stacey and Dr. Kyle Pruett. On several occasions, both Stacey and Pruett have complained about how their work has been distorted by the religious right to demonize the gay community.

Keeping all of this in mind, I have a question:

How much are we (the taxpayers) paying for this mess?



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Boehner's DOMA defense contains junk science, bad sources

Government's defense of DOMA contains references to the work of Paul Cameron and George Rekers

Yesterday, it was discovered that one of the experts,  Professor Lisa Diamond, cited by Speaker of the House John Boehner's legal team in their defense of DOMA complained that her work was being distorted.

Boehner's team is defending DOMA against Edie Windsor, an 81-year-old woman suing the federal government for not recognizing her union with her late partner.

The portion having to do with Lisa Diamond's work is in documentation provided by the lawyer chosen to defend DOMA, Paul Clement (see the documentation here.) Clement is using this documentation as an attempt to get the case dismissed and for the judge to deny Windsor's motion for summary judgment.

Diamond's complaint is detrimental to this pursuit.  But I think I have found another potentially huge problem.

There is a portion of Clement's documentation which bears much scrutiny. It is the section called "Plaintiff Misstates the Science on Same-Sex Parenting" and it is a huge mess.

Part of this section (pg. 24) cites George W. Dent, Jr., No Difference?: An Analysis of Same-Sex Parenting.

Dent is a law professor at Case Western Reserve University who has written many negative papers on marriage equality and homosexuality in general. In the paper cited by Boehner's legal team, he pulls out all of the stops to make the case that same-sex parenting is inferior to heterosexual parenting, even the citing of  folklore:

Every child with homosexual guardians has lost at least one biological parent. Loss of a parent is universally regarded as a great misfortune. If the child has one biological parent, the other adult is a step-parent. In fables step-parents are typically hostile to their step-children.

If you pardon me for being so bold, anyone who takes Dent's paper as credible is dealing in folklore themselves. There are several problems with it including:

On page four, Dent cites both Paul Cameron and George Rekers, both discredited researchers. Cameron has been censured or rebuked by several organizations for his bad methodology in his studies and Rekers lost a lot of credibility for last year's scandal when he was caught coming from a European vacation with a "rentboy."

On page two, Dent cites the work of Walter Schumm's study Children of Homosexuals More Apt To Be Homosexuals? A Reply to Morrison and to Cameron Based on an Examination of Multiple Sources of Data.

Schumm's study was criticized for using the same false methodology as Cameron's work. i.e. citing sources "from general-audience books about LGBT parenting and families, most of which are available on Amazon.com"

Furthermore, in 2008, Rekers and Schumm testified for Florida's gay adoption ban. The judge overseeing the case, Cindy Lederman, criticized both of them. She said about Rekers:

"(His) testimony was far from a neutral and unbiased recitation of the relevant scientific evidence. Dr. Rekers' beliefs are motivated by his strong ideological and theological convictions that are not consistent with science. Based on his testimony and demeanor at trial, the court cannot consider his testimony to be credible nor worthy of forming the basis of public policy."

And about Schumm, she said:

" (He) integrates his religious and ideological beliefs into his research," citing several of his writings, including one with Rekers, in which a theological argument against homosexuality is offered."

Regarding Cameron, Dent's paper not only cites him directly, but also indirectly.

On page 13, Dent cites a book called Straight & Narrow by Thomas E. Schmidt to make criticisms about gay health. However, Schmidt is not a credible researcher in the field of gay health. He is a professor of New Testament Greek at Westmont College in Santa Barbara and according to Rev. Mel White of the group Soulforce, Schmidt cited Cameron's discredited studies many times in Straight & Narrow (5th letter to Jerry Falwell.)

Another huge problem with Dent's paper is on page 16 when it cites a paper by the American College of Pediatricians (Homosexual Parenting: Is It Time for Change?).

The American College of Pediatricians is not a credible organization, but an organization created to give credibility to junk science about the gay community. Last year, over 14,000 school district superintendents in the country were sent a letter by ACP inviting them to peruse and use information from a new site, Facts About Youth. The site claimed to present "facts" supposedly not tainted by "political correctness."  Of course these were not facts, but ugly distortions about the gay community, including:

Some gay men sexualize human waste, including the medically dangerous practice of coprophilia, which means sexual contact with highly infectious fecal wastes

The particular study by the ACP cited by Dent, Homosexual Parenting: Is It Time for Change?, is filled with several errors which I talked about two years ago, including:

1. Outdated work

2. Extreme distortion of studies not meant by to used to gauge the effects of same-sex parenting.

3. And researcher complaints.

In citing Homosexual Parenting: Is It Time for Change?, Dent tries to pull a double deception. Not only does he cite this poor study done by ACP, but he actually takes some of the individual bad work from the study and cites it on its own throughout his study in general.

One has to wonder what other "surprises" Boehner's defense of DOMA contains. They may not be accurate but they are certainly entertaining.

Related post: 

Why is Boehner using distorted work to defend DOMA?




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