SIO359: How Different Are The Adult Children of Parents Who Have Same-Sex Relationships?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 359. I'm host, Thomas Smith, and look at this! This is when I want to be releasing episodes. Here, okay, so I'm pledging. I am pledging to you. I know I've made some promises before, but this month, May, the month of May, this is it, I'm going to do Wednesday nights, so, you know, Thursday super early, or for those in Europe, you you know, Thursday morning, I suppose. Wednesday nights and Sunday nights, same deal. Sunday night, you know. Monday morning for those in Europe. That's my goal. That is what I wanted to do last month. I wanted it to work toward, but you know had those setbacks, but I am doing it. I have got so much good stuff. I am telling you. I even, I have a backlog of good stuff and then as I have been developing ideas more and researching, and actually I have Lydia helping helping me do research now, it's even better.

0:01:05 Thomas: So I'm like, I'm super excited about that stuff. And so I've got like two layers of stuff to get you. I can't wait. We'll get it all to you. But I'm hoping this will be the month of the Sunday night, Wednesday night that I wanted to do. And that being said, here's today's episode. It features none other than, of course, Stormy Decisis, Dr. Alan Smerbeck, this one is taking on a story. It's an older study. It's about 10 years old. However, it's been one of the linchpins of the conservative the conservative crusade against queer people. This one is about whether or not offspring of same-sex parents have negative outcomes. This is a study that I think even members of my family pointed toward in their arguments, their conservative arguments.

0:01:50 Thomas: Look at this. The studies just say that raised in same-sex households, they just don't fare as well. And Dr. Alan Smerbeck is here to give us the storming decisive treatment on the study and tell us if it holds up to scrutiny, if it's a good science thingy. So that said, let's head on over to that. Little. By the way, Alan is still working out his audio and the beginning of this, you'll notice there's a just kind of a weird cut just because of audio issues. But so apologies for that, but it's very good and I've done everything I can within my expertise to make it sound presentable, but we're still working on that. Get We'll Alan sounding better for you because, I'm excited for that and for many more episodes ahead. So here we go. Let's check out this Regnerus study from 2012.

0:02:37 Thomas: How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? And I'd like to once again welcome Dr. Stormy Decisis. Alan, how are you doing? Nice to speak to you again.

0:02:48 Stormy: I am splendiferous.

0:02:50 Thomas: But yes, a science thingy. I believe that someone sought to prove via science, and I can't, I'm not the expert, so I won't say if it's good or bad science, that kids who were raised in anything other than this perfect straight, you know, probably white, but they didn't say that. Know, cis male, cis female family structure had bad outcomes. Is that what they tried to prove with this study?

0:03:10 Stormy: Yeah, pretty much. So this guy's name is Mark Regnerus, which sounds like a 90s video game villain. But he is a sociologist at the University of Texas, Austin. And he's written a number of papers on, generally speaking, religion as it pertains to sex, marriage, parenting, and adolescence. Um, also lists all of his committee memberships on his resume, which is tacky, so I don't like that.

0:03:39 Thomas: Like what kind, like committee, what committees?

0:03:40 Stormy: No, when, when you're a college professor, you have to be a part of committees that are just like ways to organize things yeah and that's just, like, that's not a thing you do, that's weird, that's gross

0:03:45 Thomas: Oh, so he's like, yeah, I'm in the chess club and I, you know, right. Okay. So he's stretching the, stretch in the the cv a little bit okay okay

0:03:54 Stormy: Yes and in 2012, he published a paper, um, all by himself, which is actually fairly unusual in the social sciences, called "How Different Are the Adult Children of Parents Who Have Same-Sex Relationships: Finding from the New Family Structures Study." His stated goal was to see how being raised by different family structures affects young adult outcomes. Now, he says in his opening paragraph, well, it's not about politics, but then he goes right on to say, social science data remains one of the few sources of information useful in legal debates surrounding marriage and adoption rights.

0:04:14 Thomas: Yeah sure I'm I, for one, don't think it would matter if you could somehow prove that, like, oh, children who are raised in, for example, same-sex household, if they have worse outcomes, I for one wouldn't be like, therefore, let's make it illegal to be different. You know, like, what, that, that seems like a non-sequitur to me, right?

0:04:52 Stormy: There There's a, a huge difference between not quite as good and bad, uh, just in general, you know. There's, this dinner wasn't great, and this chicken is still alive, you know. There's a huge range of things, and

0:05:11 Thomas: Not to mention how much of that could be systemic causes anyway that aren't, like, like the root cause wouldn't be Okay.

0:05:17 Stormy: Well, we're getting to that, yeah.

0:05:18 Thomas: Yeah, I'm sorry, getting ahead of us, but the root, I just finished thought, the root cause wouldn't be let's not let people be different, it would be how can we make people who are different, you know, uh, be more successful and be treated better. But probably getting ahead of ourselves, uh, carry on.

0:05:30 Stormy: So this was published in 2012, and people accused him of faking data and other misconduct, although as far as I can tell, there wasn't any evidence of that. There were concerns about the review process, so when scientific articles, other scientists have to check them to make sure they're not completely fucking stupid.

0:05:35 Thomas: Right unless It's a penis, uh, conceptual penis hoax, yeah. Is that, a wait, that's a reference, you know, right, okay.

0:05:54 Stormy: Although do, and actually one of the reviewers posted that they reviewed that article and said, "I thought it was a, a grad student, and I was trying to be nice to" them. So accused him of somehow manipulating the review process. As best I can tell, again, there wasn't clear evidence of that. And then people accused Him of setting up a really stupid study, and they were right on the fucking money.

0:06:05 Thomas: I remember that yep Right, right, that's the thing, and I'm glad, I'm glad you say that, because I do think there's a tendency that all people have, that when they see something, you know, like this, that that is going to be something they morally disagree with perhaps, that they, there's a rush to say, like, "I, ah, it must be fake." And, you know, maybe it is, but I do strongly, and I think the mission of this show, in my opinion, is to do our best to actually grapple with it and to say, all right, let's look at the evidence.

Is this a fake study? No, it's not. Okay, well, then take that on board. And if there's anything that's been kind of, I don't know, my mission statement in, in, in my career, I guess, it's dealing with that, because we can, you know, like this, this whole Ben Shapiro, "facts don't care about your feelings," actually just means he's wrong about the facts and we're mad about it. It's really what it is. So I would love to appropriately grapple with what's really wrong with this and not try to reach for, like, an easy excuse that isn't true.

0:06:23 Stormy: Yeah, so I guess I'll start out with the good things. I'm not going to say a lot of good things, So, you know, the spelling, decent, accurate. He did make the data publicly available for secondary analysis, which is a good thing. You're supposed to do that.

0:07:23 Thomas: Cool. Oh, yeah. And not everyone does, right?

0:07:33 Stormy: That is true. Not everyone does. And what's really strong about his study is the sample. So usually when you're sampling, you just like put up an ad and you're like, "Hey, you know, just if you take one of my little tokens, I will give you money if you just, you know, show up here." And it can be super sketchy, you know, you just be like, "Hey, show up in this dark room with a stranger, that's gonna be great."

0:08:00 Thomas: For money. And you're saying I shouldn't do that in general. Okay. This is news to me. But topic for another show.

0:08:04 Stormy: Mean It depends on the size of the van and a lot of things. But the issue there is the kind of people who show up for those things don't necessarily represent the whole country. Amongst other things, like if you advertise online, you don't get the kind of people who don't go online.

0:08:06 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You might not get the kind of people who, you know, want commit to a violent revolution, take over the country, for example, in your polls. That's often a challenge to capture those people appropriately.

0:08:31 Stormy: Capturing them, honestly, would be a good thing. I think the FBI should get on that shit. So what he got was something called a probability sample. And what that means is that basically everyone in the country had an equal chance of being in the sample. So instead of posting an ad and pulling people in, So they randomly identified people and reached out to them, which is really, really expensive, but really, really good.

0:09:03 Stormy: So, they ended up getting a sample that's really representative of the U.S. population on all the major demographics. They hired an outside firm to do it.

0:08:36 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. True. Mm hmm. Hmm. Mm hmm, mm Oh, wow. Okay. So, I mean, these are, okay. So you're saying these are pretty big pluses on the science thingy side.

0:09:18 Stormy: Yeah, and they pointed out correctly that some prior studies on gay parenting had recruitment methods that would tend to draw in good parents. Because if you feel confident about your parenting, then you're more likely to be like, oh, I'll join a parenting study.

0:09:29 Thomas: Right. Good point.

0:09:34 Stormy: Although one of his things was that they advertised in lesbian bookstores. I don't know what a lesbian bookstore is. Apparently, there's, yeah, so they ended up surveying 2,988 people who were 18 to 39 years old, and I personally resent them for not getting 12 more people to make the math nice, and now we've got just a little less than 3,000.

0:09:41 Thomas: Are you missing out? No, I don't know. I assume there's lesbian bookstore. I assume There's Everything bookstores, right? Wow.

0:10:01 Thomas: That's true. But if my memory serves, that's kind of a lot for a science thing, right. I mean that's, as you said, that's expensive work. So, all right. Yet another possible credit to this science thingy.

0:10:06 Stormy: Yes. Yep. No, the number is nice. And then they sorted them into eight groups based on family structure. And this is a little boring, but it's actually important. So the groups were intact biological family, lesbian mother, gay father, adopted in infancy, late divorce or joint custody, Step family, single parent, or other, which usually usually means like a parent died. All right. So he had them fill out these calendars about exactly who they lived with throughout their childhood and used that to determine which group to put them in. Then all of these, I'm going to say 3,000 people, we'll just imagine 12 of them. He measured 40 variables. He actually measured a lot more than that, but he reports on 40 of them.

And for all 40, he's going compare the to lesbian mother group and the gay father group to the intact biological family group. And they controlled for some basic demographics. Now, this is an observational study, not experimental. And so just like you said in the beginning, even if there is a difference, we don't know why. We don't know if, well, well, maybe the problem was stigma. It could be something else. So the variables, I'm not going to read them all because that's stupid. But very briefly, some of them were pertaining to things like employment and money, like where you employed, how far did you go in school, health and well-being like depression, marijuana use, um, family and childhood, did you feel safe and secure, some stuff pertaining to relationships and sex,

0:10:35 Thomas: Okay.

0:11:57 Stormy: Like where are you married, are you, um, have a good relationship, and then some weirdly judgy shit, like do you identify as heterosexual, um, how many sex partners have you had.

0:12:11 Thomas: And reminder, this isn't the parents they're asking. This is the the children.

0:12:15 Stormy: Asking the the offspring, like, so, the idea is, do certain types of parenting lead to healthier or less healthy offspring? So, again, kind of a bad place to be getting on the judgy shit.

0:12:16 Thomas: Yeah. OK. Yeah, right. I mean, that tells me right away that you're like, OK, you're going to try to say that someone is a little too promiscuous, that that's maybe like a bad outcome of this or something.

0:12:36 Stormy: You know, for, for, for example, I actually, I did get to play around with the data and found that the people who have lesbian mothers are more likely to use condoms, and they never mentioned that as a benefit. As we're going to learn, the whole thing is bullshit, but in theory, at least, yeah.

0:12:45 Thomas: Huh? Yeah. Spoilers. Okay. I haven't seen the rest of the season. Don't tell me. Come on.

0:12:55 Stormy: Okay, now, there's dragons, and They fuck everything up. Okay, so already this is a problem. One big issue is that these, there's a lot of overlap on the criteria, so like for health and well-being, he measured happiness and depression, and so if you get dinged on happiness you shouldn't also get punished, shouldn also get downgraded for depression.

0:12:58 Thomas: Yeah.

0:13:18 Thomas: Yeah. Sounds like double counting.

0:13:20 Stormy: Yeah, so that's going to be an issue.

0:13:22 Thomas: Yeah. Weirdly, I would identify as depressed but happy, possibly. Have depression, but I'm treating it. And in general, I'm pretty happy, so I feel like that's a win, right? Or but in his book that would be like a bad outcome.

0:13:35 Stormy: I guess you'd get points for happiness and not for depression or something, thing, um. But he, some of them are mutually exclusive, like employed full-time and unemployed. So to have that as two separate things is not really a great idea.

0:13:40 Thomas: Sure. Oh. And He actually scored that as two separate things, so Like, this child of a lesbian was unemployed, and furthermore, they didn't even have a job, like that doesn't sound like a good science thing in my opinion.

0:13:49 Stormy: Yeah. Yes. I I would say on the scale of one to science thingy, it is much closer to one. Um, so you take three thousand people and divide them into eight groups, except of these things, he found that in 25 out of 40 of these, the lesbian mother group scored worse than the controls, and in 11 out of 14, the gay father group scored worse than the control. And he defined these things as suboptimal, which, again, some of them are probably definitely a bad thing, like being more depressed or smoking cigarettes.

0:14:05 Thomas: Well, or ending up straight and cis, right? No, I'm just kidding.

0:14:39 Stormy: Yeah, no, I mean, and some of them were like, I don't know, maybe you just have a lot of sex and gross.

0:14:44 Thomas: Yeah, can we have this but run and by not a total square, so the cool stuff is viewed as properly cool, like, yeah, they, they have a lot of sex and they maybe, uh, you know, do some recreational drugs or something, I just want to redo it as not like some religious dweeb trying to judge people's lives.

0:15:02 Stormy: Well, they even had, like, who has masturbated and how recently. And, you know, that didn't show up in the study. I'd

0:15:07 Thomas: Again. I goodness or badness of that fact is a very, I don't know, I don't say controversial, but I think you got to do some work to properly evaluate that is all I'll say. It's contextual.

0:15:21 Stormy: Yeah. I mean, if the context is like I was going to say, like, if you're Louis C.K. and you're just being an asshole about it, then that's a problem. That won't be in the edit, I know.

0:15:23 Thomas: You're masturbating at work or something. Okay. I that might be bad. Yeah. Right. No, no, that, that'll make it. But, but if you're, yeah, but if you enjoy a good, as the British say, wank here and there, I don't see how that's bad thing. Might be a good thing.

0:15:33 Stormy: Oh, cool. Yeah, so there's already a lot of assumptions. Look at how they put people into groups, because that's one of the keys to what's so stupid about this study. So the intact biological family, which already is kind of a judgy way to say it, says that you lived with your bio mom and bio dad from ages zero to 18, and they were married the whole time. Yes.

0:16:01 Thomas: In a biodome. No.

0:16:05 Stormy: Yes. Now, that group was never asked for the calendar data. They were never asked who lived in your house and when did they come and go. And they were never asking whether their parents engaged in any same-sex behavior.

0:16:20 Thomas: Oh, interesting.

0:16:21 Stormy: So that's assuming that nobody ever had an affair, there was never a separation that didn't lead to a divorce, that

0:16:27 Thomas: Right? Know, as we, as we obviously know, like the further you go back into the past, the less the, awareness people have had of any sort of LGBT issues. And I would imagine that there could be couples in there that there could be offspring in there whose parents, maybe one was closeted gay, but they still stayed married. And you would have said they were were like in a heterosexual marriage, but I don't know, being closeted and facing that kind of, you challenge and stigma might've led to bad outcomes, but those would, you know, like we wouldn't know about that detail based on the way they've done this. Is that correct?

0:16:58 Stormy: Absolutely. And in fact, the lesbian mother and gay father, that's the label he gave those groups. We have no idea if the moms labeled themselves lesbians or the dads labeled themselves gay. The requirement is that the offspring reported that your mom had a same-sex relationship.

0:17:10 Thomas: Hmm.

0:17:19 Thomas: Oh, like, without any details as to if that was a one-time thing in college or something.

0:17:25 Stormy: That's right. It just had to be a... I believe it had to be while the kid was alive. But whether it was a one-time thing, anything didn't matter.

0:17:27 Thomas: Really? Oh, wow. Oh, Come on, you gotta be kidding me with this.

0:17:38 Stormy: Yeah. So all we know is that they had some kind of same- sex contact, or that the kid thought they did. So they weren't even necessarily gay or lesbian.

0:17:44 Thomas: Well, That's already really big strike against it, so That Means you could be a heterosexual couple and you have a kid and let's say you just, you just suck for some reason, like you're just the worst parents. And so even on the measures where we can kind of agree with this asshole that, like, oh yeah, okay, yeah, you're measuring some bad things here, or let's say you have all those bad outcomes, but one time you kissed a dude in high school or something that the kid's aware of, this is now being labeled not a child of a heterosexual nuclear family type thing, right?

0:17:48 Stormy: Yep. But Right. So if you said that your father ever had same-sex contact, you were in the gay father group. And again, if they put you in the intact bio family group, because they started by asking, did you live only with your bio mom and bio dad and they were married the whole time, then they never even asked you about same-sex behavior. So you could have lived with bio mom and bio dad while your dad had a gay partner on the side and not gotten put in the gay father group. Whereas You could've been raised by your mom who had six boyfriends and a date with a woman and been put in a lesbian mother group.

0:18:53 Thomas: Okay. Right, right. But I do want, because I do like being precise on the show, I do wanna make sure then that the statement I just made isn't wrong. So if you, what was the order of answering the question? So let's, let's say you, you answered, oh yeah, I'm, you know, with my bio parents, they were, and this, I guess this would apply to me, although I have no knowledge of like my parents, other relationships or anything, but like, let'S say it was me where, yes, I grew up in my bio parent's home who were in, who were married, who were a heterosexual couple married for the whole time I was there. Now, if I answer that, but where's the time where I answer? Like, let's say hypothetically, I knew about like a same sex relationship that one of my parents had. Now, a minute ago, I was saying they could have had that and then I would have been labeled as, know, a product of like a gay marriage type thing.

0:19:49 Thomas: But what was the order of that? Like if I had said the first thing, would there be no further questions? And therefore, no matter what, I would be in the intact bio group.

0:19:57 Stormy: So it had to do with how they recruited people. So, once you were in the study, the first question was whether you were in the intact bio group, and if you said yes, they kicked you further down. You didn't have to do all the calendar questions. But they needed to get enough people in the lesbian mother and gay father group, so they surveyed a whole bunch of people and said, do you have what they called a lesbian mother or gay father? And then they pulled in those people in.

0:20:11 Thomas: Okay.

0:20:25 Thomas: And that was the first question they asked them.

0:20:27 Stormy: So, for some people that was was the first question.

0:20:30 Thomas: Okay. So then, so then that could be true for those people. The thing I said. Gotcha. Okay. So it's a little, little mixed, but, but still important there. Cause like, yeah, like they could be in that group, but maybe as you say, it's, it's, it's a heterosexual marriage, but yeah, they had like one relationship or something.

0:20:33 Stormy: Yes. Yes. Well, Even the category of divorced later, so that's you lived with your bio family until 18, but they're not still married. I'm going to guess that category contains some people who the reason they're not still married is they came out, but the whole point of the study is measuring how you were raised.

0:20:56 Thomas: Came out. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:21:09 Stormy: So why aren't those people in the intact biological family group? Because they were raised until age 18 with married parents.

0:21:09 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. And furthermore, again, jumping ahead a little bit, but yeah, like one of the causes, look, I, I'm not the psychologist, but I would imagine that like growing, it's at least like the common intuition, and correct me if I'm wrong, that like, if you are in a household in which there's a divorce, perhaps a bitter divorce, and you're a child like that, that can't be great for your outcomes in general, like on average.

Not to say, this is not a value judgment, like we don't know what the outcomes would be if you stayed, if the couple stayed in the unhappy relationship, for example. But the only reason I say that is in a time where, as you say, maybe someone was closeted, maybe they didn't have a good understanding of what that meant, maybe their partner didn't have a good understanding of what that meant. And therefore, that, that in itself, the homophobia of society, society and maybe like their internalized homophobia, what if that's a driver of strife in the relationship, you know, what's that, what if that's a driver of divorce, and then their child has bad outcomes, are you going to blame that on them being gay? What does this study

0:22:20 Thomas: Think about that?

0:22:20 Stormy: Winner, winner, chicken dinner. So remember, the data was collected in 2011 to 2012, and the people they interviewed were ages 18 to 39, which means they were born between 1973 and in 1995. And I did that math before talking to you, because I didn't want to try to do it on the fly. And that means that almost certainly, almost all of them were conceived through heterosexual intercourse. So all of these people who were in, quote, gay parenting, they were conceived though penis and vagina sex. Because there wasn't a lot of gay adoption going There wasn't a lot of IVF in the 1970s. So very, very few of these kids were actually raised by a same-sex couple. Of the gay father group, 68% never even lived with dad while he was in the same- sex relationship. Relationship and only 2% spent three or more years with dad and his partner. Of the lesbian mother group, it's a little more, but only 23% lived with mom and partner for more than three years.

0:22:21 Thomas: Right. Right. Right. Right.

0:23:11 Thomas: Interesting. Huh.

0:23:37 Thomas: All Right, and this is the, the shitty thing of this, because if I know people, and if I know lay people, and or, and or the kinds of people who are reading this in the political lens in which it's presented, they're all going, going to think, hey, they did a study of when, like, you know, two gay people, like, kidnap a kid and raise it, you know, and they did a study and it showed like that sucks for that kid. That's what they're going to think, right? Like that's what, they, that's how they're going to interpret this data for

0:24:06 Stormy: Yeah, in fact, only four of the entire sample of the lesbian mother and gay father group, were actually raised by a same-sex couple from birth. Yes. So, no.

0:24:19 Thomas: Doesn't seem like a lot.

0:24:23 Stormy: Even Regnerus himself said that only, he guessed, maybe 20% were of planned lesbian origin, which is not a phrase I am comfortable with. I don't know what the planned lesbian origen is.

0:24:32 Thomas: I love that. I love that phrase.

0:24:39 Stormy: Sarah Sarah McLachlan or something?

0:24:40 Thomas: Planned lesbian origin. They're trying to say like a lesbian couple meant to either have a kid or adopt, I guess. Right.

0:24:43 Stormy: Yes. Yes. Yeah, that they maybe got a sperm donor or something.

0:24:51 Thomas: Right, yeah. Planned lesbian origin. Now that, contrary to your committees you're on, that is something you should put on your resume. Yes, I, one of my accomplishments is I was of planned lesbian origin, very proud of it.

0:25:02 Stormy: Am of planned lesbian origin. Yeah. Well, you know, a lot of the better research on gay marriage says that one of the reasons that gay parenting actually tends to come out quite well, even though they're under under greater stress is that gay people have a lot fewer accidental pregnancies. You're not like, oh man, I'm so, oh, we were so drunk last night. And man, we're think we, I think we filled out these adoption papers. Oh my God.

0:25:17 Thomas: Exactly yes yeah I

0:25:33 Stormy: We got out. We, you know, we like, oh we just inseminated. I don't know how this happened.

0:25:33 Thomas: Think we invited a surrogate over and convinced them to have intercourse unprotected. Yeah, that doesn't, I don't think that yeah oh you wake up with the turkey baster in your bed. Oh shit, what, what did we do? Yeah.

0:25:48 Stormy: Yeah, that's, that's really the key. Only about a third of them even lived with the parent who had the same sex relationship at all for a year or more, and that's even counting when they weren't in the relationship. So a lot of them were, I'm living with mom and dad is out there somewhere in the world and I'm pretty sure dad had a boyfriend. That's not gay parenting. Was

0:26:13 Thomas: Right So, so, so much there that you've already said, but just to kind of emphasize, I think it makes, if you are genuinely trying to study this, and you know, there's nothing wrong with, I think genuinely trying to study this. If you were doing it in good faith, um, I think, uh, feel free to disagree, but you would want to know like, okay, who is a product, like, who is somebody who is either adopted by or effectively lived the bulk of their childhood being raised by some sort of, you know, not cis straight couple, or something, you know, like some, some, you know, not hetero couple, and that might be a meaningful thing to look at if it's somebody who was, right, you know, but like, this sounds like, if you, you, let's see, you were raised by a hetero couple, and one of them, and let's say the wife turned out to be closeted, maybe, and was a lesbian, and eventually went on to have a very, like, positive and wholesome lesbian relationship, committed relationship. And let us say

0:27:11 Stormy: It of planned lesbian origin, planned

0:27:15 Thomas: Just to really run with the stereotypes, because they are probably true. True. Let's say the dude, after the divorce, or maybe even leading up to it, had like 15 mistresses and lashed out and just did all this terrible behavior that may have even, you know, been visible to the child, and might have therefore had some bad effects. That would get, like, if you had negative effects, if you're the offspring of that couple, that would go down in this guy's book as, oh yeah, there you go, another product of planned lesbian, what was the origin, gone, gone awry. Right I'm

0:27:48 Stormy: Lesbian Lesbian origin. Yes. I think that's going to be my new band name.

0:27:53 Thomas: Gonna be unplanned lesbian origin, personally, but that's just me I'll be the cover band. One of us is the cover ban. But am I right, I mean, that would go down in the study as lesbians

0:27:56 Stormy: All right. Well, Yes. Yes, that would be a lesbian.

0:28:04 Thomas: Strike again. Look how they ruined this poor kid, right.

0:28:05 Stormy: Yes exactly. In fact, of those who ever lived in the same household as a same-sex couple, the average age to first live with that was 11 years. So again only four of them were gay parenting as we would actually look at it. Gonna judge, by the way, you keep saying like cisgender, I, I promise you, having read, I read a few of this guy's papers, believe me, he does not consider the existence of transgender people anywhere, like his head would explode, like Scanners. It's not remotely.

0:28:39 Thomas: And yeah fair, okay so we're not even well and that might have interesting implications. And again, trans, I think trans visibility, and and and, you know, give me your view, but I think transmissibility and trans rights, even for just normies out there who, you know, has come a long way since 2010 or whatever. Like I think, so, I wonder how that would even be coded, you know, like would, yeah, like I guess, so it's all based on the child's perspective. So, let's say, yeah.

0:28:45 Stormy: No, no, no.

0:29:10 Thomas: Yeah, because I mean, okay, right.

0:29:10 Stormy: I did actually get my hands on the questions they asked. And they just said, like, did your mother have a relationship with a, I don't remember what it said, female or woman, but it didn't specify whether she had a uterus. It didn't, because one assumes that the offspring weren't seeing the uterus, so So, I

0:29:31 Thomas: Right, right? But now imagine That Person is Trans and since has come out, so maybe they were in a heterosexual marriage, but then because of transition, it's now viewed as like a homosexual marriage. I wonder if that could be the case. Who knows? It seems logically possible that that could be in the data is all I'm saying.

0:29:47 Stormy: Mean, hope so, but Yeah, no, I think that's very, very possible. There's a lot of things that could have been happening yeah,

0:29:58 Thomas: And and I know, we could, we could go through all these possibilities, and sorry, I tend to like to try to pick this apart, but it really sounds like there's all kinds of things where even if you were doing a good faith effort to study the impacts or whatever, like the outcomes of people raised by any like non-straight couple or whatever, even if he wanted to study that, this sounds like you just don't have that data. You just did a study, or the way you arranged it, or the way you categorized it, does not at all give you a proper view of those outcomes, right? Of

0:30:30 Stormy: No. It would be like if you wanted to determine, you know, which brand of soda tasted the best And you were like, okay, I'm going to put a drop of soda on some, sandpaper. And then you're just like, well, I'll lick each piece of sandpaper and decide which one is, you know, tastes the best, and that's how I'll decide what's the best soda. Like, no, man, that's not how that works.

0:30:42 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

0:30:53 Stormy: So in 2015, somebody went back into the state because he did make it available. And what he checked was how often the child experienced a major life transition. Because you are absolutely right that divorce can be a very good thing, but it is hard on kids. And so if there was a split, because remember, most of these kids were conceived through penis and vagina sex. So in most cases, their bio parents split. Lit.

0:31:08 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

0:31:28 Stormy: They got a new partner. There was a change in custody. And so what they did was they checked how many transitions people had in their life, each of those things. So they found that for all participants, the average was 1.87 transitions. But for the people in the the gay father lesbian mother group, it was 6.79. Well, if you think about it, if let's say your parents weren't even married, but they were living together, your bio parents, then one of them comes out as gay, they split. You're now with one, they might get a new partner. You might have,

0:31:32 Thomas: Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Huh. Wow. That's a lot that's another

0:32:10 Stormy: Say, say, a grandparent come to live with you for a while, you might change custody.

0:32:10 Thomas: One boy that's so many but even the average seems The average of 1.87 seems crazy to me because I had, well, I guess divorce rate is pretty dang high, huh? Because I've had zero transitions

0:32:24 Stormy: Well, that would include like, for example, having someone come live with your family. So, you know, when I was a teenager, my dad's sister came to live with us for a year or two. So that's a transition.

0:32:25 Thomas: Uh-huh. Okay, okay. Gotcha. So it's stuff like that, okay, yeah.

0:32:36 Stormy: Yeah, they're not always, they're not necessarily bad things, but they are stressful. And what they found was that the whole number of transitions predicted nearly all of those variables that Regnerus was looking for. And so they re-ran the Regnerus trials. They actually brought it down to 31 because they got rid of some of the judgy ones, 31 variables. Andwhat they foundwas that when you control for the number of transitions. Gay fathers only came out different from the, quote, intact biological family on only 5 out of 31, and the lesbian mothers only on 2 out of 31. And those two were that they were less likely to be straight and

0:32:36 Thomas: Yeah. Interesting.

0:33:25 Stormy: That they had more sex with women.

0:33:26 Thomas: Like even if they were men?

0:33:29 Stormy: That was more female partners for women, but they also had more female partners for men did not show up as different.

0:33:36 Thomas: Oh, okay. The way you phrased it, I thought it was like any child, no matter their gender of a lesbian relationship, just had more sex with women. I thought that would be, I mean, honestly, like that could be conceivable to me. Like if you come from a lesbian household, Maybe you have a better understanding of women or something. Thing. I don't know if

0:33:38 Stormy: No.

0:33:49 Stormy: If you were of lesbian origin, yes.

0:33:54 Thomas: A planned lesbian origin that might give you a better insight and more empathy and more other things that might lead you to be a desirable partner. But that is just me. You're saying the data doesn't say that. Thing.

0:34:05 Stormy: When you control for the number of transitions, same-sex couples having what, what, again, Regnerus called a gay father or lesbian mother, actually predicts a better adult relationship with your parents. So if you take out the fact that, yeah, they probably went through a divorce and custody changes, if you tak out that, they actually get along better with their parents than the intact bio family.

0:34:20 Thomas: Huh? Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. That makes sense to me. Because, and again, I think that's valid to do. On one hand, I could imagine a conservative saying, well, you know, but the fact that gay people get divorced, that's part of the problem or something. I don't know. But like, from my perspective, that feels like more societal bullshit. Shit like, yeah, okay, a lot of people who might have been gay or queer in any way might have been pressured into a straight relationship because that's what society wants you to do, and so therefore I don't really blame the person so much for the divorce. I would blame more our society. Don't you think? Oh.

0:35:07 Stormy: Well, it's interesting. So I went and looked at who funded this, and it's something called the Bradley Foundation, which is seems to be mainly like libertarian school choice stuff, but most of the funding came from something called the Witherspoon Institute, which I don't think so, but I do think it sounds like, you know, in those like futuristic movies where there's a building and you don't know what's inside the building, and then it turns out to be thousands of identical robots.

0:35:13 Thomas: I think I've heard of that okay if it's Reese, I'm gonna be fucking pissed.

0:35:36 Stormy: Anyways, um, like

0:35:36 Thomas: Or Are there clones? And and, uh, there's a lot of glass, like, call those tubes with like clones sitting in them, like that kind of thing.

0:35:45 Stormy: Well, I was thinking of like, like, know, eerily you not quite alive children that, yeah, that's what I'm imagining. Anyways, they, before funding this, they published something that they called Marriage and the Public Good, Ten Principles. That includes such wonderful statements as a functioning marriage culture serves to protect liberty and foster limited government. Government.

0:35:50 Thomas: Sure, I'll go with it.

0:36:11 Thomas: I mean, I love that. That is very much a straight-faced belief. Of, I would say not just libertarians, I'd say most Republicans, at least the ones that that I know, because, yeah, they're like, yeah, the is, fuck the government, it's the family. The family is the answer to everything. The family's the answer. And so, from their perspective, it's like anything that threatens the family, well, that's why, how those, all those liberals justify their big government. So, yeah. That's entirely consistent with what I know of these people's beliefs.

0:36:14 Stormy: Yes.

0:36:34 Stormy: This document goes into all of these recommendations. And one of them, I swear to God, is investigate.

0:36:41 Thomas: A low corporate tax rate.

0:36:44 Stormy: Oh no, I mean, that's just assumed.

0:36:46 Thomas: That... if that was in there it'd be so fucking funny. I would, oh man.

0:36:50 Stormy: I can look it up. I actually don't remember. But the one I stole, I swear TO GOD, this is in there. It says invest.

0:36:55 Thomas: And That's why the capital gains rate, sorry, I should stop interrupting you, go ahead, finish it.

0:37:00 Stormy: No, I can I can look it up. I would not be at all surprised, but this is what it actually says. Investigate divorce law reforms, because they don't want divorce. Permit the creation of prenuptial covenants that restrict divorce for couples who seek more extensive marriage commitments than the current law allows. The enforcement by secular courts of Orthodox Jewish marriage contracts may provide a useful model.

0:37:11 Thomas: Yeah. What?

0:37:28 Thomas: Yeah.

0:37:28 Stormy: It makes reminds me of like 50 Shades of Gray, like you have to sign a contract that says you won't be able to disagree with me anymore and you can ever leave me, well, tell you that Regnerus has written, um, it's a book or a paper, I can't remember, he's written a bunch of things about basically that, um, too, women are having too, too much freedom, which is why men can't find marriage partners. And without marriage partners, men are just, you know, fucking lost.

0:37:56 Thomas: I This reminded me, and I'm blanking on who it was, I thought it might almost be this Regnerus person, but I don't think it was, someone came on Ezra Klein, uh, when he was trying to do a bit of a series on, like, okay, what do, what do Republicans that aren't Trumpers like, let's try to talk to them and see like what they, you know, would want to do with the party or whatever, which I didn't have a ton of interest in, but whatever, and one of them, I believe, that's what I'm remembering, he questioned them about, they want a divorce to be harder. And He was like, really? You want divorce to be harder? That doesn't sound like a good idea. And it sounds exactly like this mindset. Oh, you see, the problem is women are too easily able to get out of terrible marriage. That's not what they say, but that's what the reality is. And I think this is such an insidious view. It's hard to believe someone says that in public with a straight face, but like that's such an odious view in my, my opinion. Oh.

0:38:20 Stormy: Yes.

0:38:46 Stormy: Yeah, no, he's written a bunch of articles that say things like basically the problem is that women will have sex outside of marriage. And because of that, men don't want to get married. And men need to get married because something something Jesus.

0:38:59 Thomas: My god. This is some incel shit. Wow. I

0:39:06 Stormy: Yeah, no. And so his his point is that if women would just stop enjoying sex, then men would something. I don't know.

0:39:13 Thomas: Mean. That's literally the same justification for why some cultures do FGM, right? I mean, like, this is nuts.

0:39:24 Stormy: Yeah, I want to read more of this Witherspoon document, it says, mothers are more sensitive to the cries, words, and gestures of infants, toddlers, and adolescents. Why? They skipped over middle childhood, is crazy to me, they're more sensitive to infants and toddlers, but fuck third graders, and partly as a consequence, they are better at providing physical and emotional nurture to their children. The special capacities of mothers seem to have deep biological underpinnings. During pregnancy and breastfeeding, women experience high levels of the hormone peptide oxytocin, which fosters affiliative behaviors. I mean, it kind of does, but it also makes you racist. So there's that. And also, fathers have plenty of oxytacin.

0:39:27 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

0:40:10 Thomas: So I also would want to know if you compared apples to apples here, like sure, maybe, because honestly, uh, a topic of Dear Old Dads often is, uh, you know, straight norm dad, straight men, male dads, um, have a lot of shortcomings in our society, in my opinion. And so if you're doing a survey, that's like, well, who's given more of a shit of this, about this baby? Is it the, the, the mother, or is it, you know, this fucking guy from King of Queens, or whatever?

0:40:37 Stormy: I actually think, going back to something with Dear Old Dads, you guys talked about weaponized incompetence, and, you know, to say that women are just better at nurturing children, and I'm not, I'm just not good at kissing their boo-boos, so you have to do that, and I can go play golf.

0:40:38 Thomas: Exactly. Exactly. That's right. Yeah. Here's The point I want to make, I, I would even believe, just because, obviously, you know, evolution, evolution and nature, I'm not going to deny the effect that that has on on humans, like, I would believe that maybe someone who bears a child and gives birth to a child might have more of a, like, physiological reaction to the child's crying, like, okay, fine, I'll go, but, like, are you going to evaluate apples to apples?

I would want to know, compare, compare that to, let's say, two gay dads who make the choice to adopt a child or something. And is there any meaningful difference? Because I imagine, I'm friends with plenty of people in that exact situation. I bet you they're highly attuned to the needs of the child. I bet you they are.

And if it's not like some involuntary physiological reaction, I bet they're putting a shitload of effort into making sure they're doing everything they can, all the more because they might not have, like, the exact same connection to somebody who literally gave birth to a child. Child. So I want to compare that. And I want to compare furthermore, if that even makes any fucking difference, I you just don't think that if you compared apples to apples, it's going to be the case that, oh yeah, there's these gay couples who adopt kids and then they just, they don't give a shit about the kid. They just let it cry and they don't even actually care. Like they're just doing, there is no fucking way that's true.

0:42:09 Stormy: According to the Witherspoon Institute. The greater size and strength of fathers, along with the pitch and inflection of their voice and the directive character of their speaking, give them an advantage when it comes to discipline.

0:42:23 Thomas: Well, that's interesting, because I feel like you're, they were using the first thing to say, hey, you can't have gay dad, two gay dads raise a kid, can't do it. And now this is, hey, you can't have two gay moms raise a kid, you just can't do it. But that kind of cuts against each other. Like, OK, even if we were to go with them, even though they're wrong, of like, yeah, there's this downside to only having male parents or only having female parents. Well, now you've got downsides for each, and those should offset, right? So, like, they should be really good at the one thing, and then that offsets with the thing they're not as good at. And even, even taking them at their own terms or

0:42:57 Stormy: You could just have, like, lesbians with really low-pitched voices.

0:43:01 Thomas: That, yeah, yeah.

0:43:02 Stormy: Like, apparently it's the low voice that makes dads commanding, you

0:43:06 Thomas: That's Let's Face it, that's all we have to offer, uh, that, in jars. I wouldn't be surprised if this Witherspoon Institute said, and look at all the jars that go unopened in these households.

0:43:18 Stormy: Gotta tell you, I would obey Mike Tyson if he was yelling commands at me, and he has a very high-pitched voice. Yeah.

0:43:27 Thomas: A good point. It's not a bad point. Yeah. They're, I mean, they're also, maybe something that said to be said about just the relative pitch of voice, you know, like, if you have one parent who sounds more authoritative, doesn't, doesn't really matter, like, what that is in absolute terms. It might just be relative terms. And I'll tell you, I'll be honest, my kids listen to me way more than they listen to Lydia. And it's a problem. I wish it wasn't true. I don't really know why it is. And but like, even if so.

0:43:28 Stormy: Well, there's evidence actually with adults that with lower pitched voices are judged more authoritative than women with higher pitched voices. Like Elizabeth Warren has a very high pitched voice. And it wouldn't surprise me. Me. Well, it wouldn't surprise me if when she was running for president, if she had people coaching her to lower her pitch.

0:44:00 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. But Elizabeth Holmes. Yeah.

0:44:15 Stormy: But of course, the fact that people respond to that differently has been socialized. In other words, I've lived my whole life in a world where I'm taught to have less respect for women who on average have higher pitched voices than men.

0:44:15 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. And every and every cool advertisement is in a world where, you know, like that could easily be different. Right.

0:44:36 Stormy: Exactly. So the idea that the pitch and inflection of their voice is somehow apparently changing things. I think there's reasons why I might have associated deeper voices with authority because I was socialized that way. Yeah,

0:44:53 Thomas: And even so, to to tack on like argument number eight, why this is stupid. I think it's actually true that if you're if your children feel comfortable enough to push your boundaries, that means they feel safe and they're in a healthy environment. And it is not necessarily true that having some deep voice guy speaking German that sounds really scary, that's necessary to being a good parent because your kid will be scared enough to do what you say. I don't know that that's at all necessarily better than not doing that. You know?

0:45:32 Stormy: And there's a whole lot of really interesting data on parenting styles as it relates to religious beliefs. Regnerus was an evangelical, now he's a Catholic. But in general, conservatives' attitude towards parenting is much more authoritarian, and it's much more associated with an emphasis on obedience. Disobedience.

0:45:48 Thomas: Yeah, definitely. Well, perhaps a topic for another show. Definitely could look at those studies.

0:45:55 Stormy: Yes. Here's the kicker. So I told you about that study that reanalyzed the data and said, well, wait a minute, if you take into account the fact that most of these kids have been through a divorce, right?

0:46:04 Thomas: Yeah. Wait a minute. If you do actual science here.

0:46:10 Stormy: But there's an even stupider problem. So when you you survey people, a certain percentage of them either didn't understand the question or they're just fucking with you. And we call those mischievous responders, which is a weird name. And you go through something called data cleaning and you have to find those and remove them. Here's some that I actually found. Someone said they had been arrested at eight. Four people said they were arrested at age zero. One person said that he had sex with 785 women in the past year. I think

0:46:20 Thomas: Oh, of course. Yeah, Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, Chamberlain. How did you get in? No, it was that. No, was it Will Chamberlain or was it Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? I think, actually, I think it was Will Chamberlain.

0:46:54 Stormy: Yeah, well, I think Will Chamberlain was known for fucking a lot of women, but I still don't think he fucked 785 women in 12 months.

0:46:58 Thomas: Yeah. Really funny. So Wilt maybe answered the call or maybe this is bullshit.

0:47:06 Stormy: Someone else said that he was 7 foot 8 and 88 pounds.

0:47:10 Thomas: Well, there you go. It's Wilt. I think we've cracked it. They're like, we need to delete this data. And poor Wilt Chamberlain's like, no, I swear it's true. Did.

0:47:11 Stormy: Yeah. Yeah. Other people just gave nonsense answers, like that they had always lived with their mom. Their mom had a same-sex relationship, but they never lived with mom while she had a same- sex relationship. And if you add up all of those, it comes up to about a third of the entire gay father, lesbian mother sample.

0:47:21 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, wow. That's a lot.

0:47:42 Stormy: And it turns out that a lot of those differences, even the ones that Regnerus found, so even without dealing with the transitions, they were so small that just deleting one or two of these erroneous cases made them disappear. So Chang and Powell re-ran the data, collecting blatant errors. So they didn't deal with the terrible categorization issue. They just corrected these data entry errors and things where clearly the data was wrong. And that brought it down to only six differences for lesbian mother and three for gay father.

0:47:59 Thomas: Wow. Wow, wow, wow!

0:48:26 Thomas: And as you say, hey, did anyone do both things where they got rid of the Dennis the Menaces and also recategorized the crap that this fundamentalist thought was bad?

0:48:35 Stormy: So then they, they fixed the mischievous responders and the data entry errors, and then they only included the people who lived with their lesbian mother or gay father, again, his words not mine, while they were in a same-sex relationship, and they were there for at least a year, so they're still not being raised by that parent, necessarily.

0:48:55 Thomas: And it matters when that year is, by the way, too. But even still,

0:48:58 Stormy: Yes, but at least we have that. And then the only things they found were that they were more likely to be in a same-sex relationship or identify as not straight as an adult. The family was more likely to receive welfare while growing up, which doesn't seem to be the kid's fault or the parent's fault. That's just a thing. And the one thing that is least arguably negative is that they were slightly less likely to report feeling secure in their family of origin. But I bet you can think of a really obvious reason why that might be if you were growing up with a gay parent between 1973 and 1995.

0:49:12 Thomas: Yeah. Okay, yeah, well, Right, right. Well, there's actually a lot of reasons I can think of for that. But yeah, I mean, HIV, discrimination, I mean all kinds of things. Family court discrimination.

0:49:48 Stormy: Yeah. I mean, And before any state had gay marriage. As far as I know, in no state, so if you were raised by, mother was inseminated and she had been with her lesbian partner your entire life, as far as I know, at 1995, there was no way for you to have any legal relationship with mom's lesbian partner, even if she was your mother from the day you were born. So think about the insecurity that gives you, she can't drop you, she can't be with you at the doctor's office, she can't sign your, your field trip forms. You know, if you get in a car accident, she can't, you know, sign your insurance. She's legally nothing to you. Think about how insecure that would feel, right?

0:49:57 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And of course, that is the fault of the gay parents and not of our homophobic society, of course. Because what were they wearing?

0:50:54 Stormy: Something of Planned Lesbian Origin, yeah.

0:50:58 Thomas: All right. Well, I think we've concluded this science thing sucks. And I'll tell you, I wish I had known about this earlier. You know, I wasn't, as I think people know that I, you know, used to be conservative back in day and kind of made a, made a talk about transitions, made a make a slow transition over to not being an asshole. And I remember, though, early on when I was still kind of having debates and arguments with my conservative family, I was very much on the other side of them, but, but didn't have all the information still where this was a big major claim of theirs. Like, yeah, OK, we're not. And they always do that bullshit where they're like, look, we're not against gay people. It's just that if you look at the data, you know, their kids, that the kids suffer, we can't let the kids suffer because of the, you know. And I wish I had had this breakdown handy because that's a major argument.

0:51:47 Thomas: And now I don't know if there are other studies that they try to base this on, but if it's just this study, that sounds like easily debunkable garbage, right?

0:51:56 Stormy: And that's, that's why I thought it was worth talking about, even though I mean, it's a 10 year old study, but um, I sent you a link, to Focus on the Family is still touting this study as evidence so I think it's worth people knowing about this, it is, it is by far the largest study to ever address this question, it just did a really shitty job

0:51:59 Thomas: Mm hmm. Still referencing it. Wow. Wow. Yeah.

0:52:17 Thomas: I just didn't actually do it. It's the largest study to ever pretend to address this question.

0:52:20 Stormy: An absolute exactly it's, it was a terrible waste of money. And, yeah, it's just complete horseshit.

0:52:29 Thomas: Well, thank you so much for the breakdown. So Alan, Dr. Decisis, if that is your real name, and it is, thanks so much for joining us. And thanks for the great breakdown, bad science thingy.

0:52:35 Stormy: Alright. This was a pleasure. Thank you so much.

0:52:42 Thomas: And you are exactly the kind of person who would think of a better scale for science thingies, you know, like to measure science. So let me know. Get back to me. A science thingy scale that's fun and incorporates themes of the show.

0:52:54 Stormy: Alright. We can rate things on their degree of lesbian origin.

0:52:59 Thomas: That is that is already strong. See, I knew it. I knew you. I know you would come through. So on a scale of not at all of planned lesbian origin and super detailed planned lesbian origin, this is not at All. OK, we cracked it.

0:53:02 Stormy: Alright. Alright.

0:53:14 Stormy: I would say that this is of strongly unplanned heterosexual origin.

0:53:21 Thomas: There you go. Thanks so much for coming on and look forward to talking to you again soon.

0:53:25 Stormy: It's a pleasure