Andrew Ferguson unpacks the brief (pdf) filed by Harvey Mansfield and Leon Kass, which dismisses the idea that proponents of marriage equality can back their arguments with data:
It is the aim of Kass and Mansfield to wave the Supreme Court away from “scientific findings” that are produced by culture warriors, as the findings in the field of “gay studies” nearly always are. “The social and behavioral sciences,” they write, “have a long history of being shaped and driven by politics and ideology.” They note pointedly that two generations ago, the “scientific consensus,” as represented by the American Psychiatric Association, was that homosexuality was a “mental disorder.” The consensus was publicly reversed in 1973, and science, to paraphrase Mae West, had nothing to do with it: Both positions, before and after, were determined by political and cultural considerations.
Now, of course, the American Psychological Association, which waited until 1975 to “depathologize” homosexuality, tries to lend its shaky intellectual credibility to the cause of gay marriage in general and gay parenting in particular. In 2005, it issued a bull declaring the “no difference” finding a matter of settled science. Kass and Mansfield point to a recent paper by Loren Marks of LSU, who had the temerity (and professional death wish) to go back and actually read the 59 studies the APA cited in its decree. They were shot through with conceptual and methodological flaws: small, nonrandom “convenience” samples, a recurring lack of control groups, shifting and poorly defined outcomes, and a steady pattern of comparing apples to oranges—for example, placing the children of intact, well-to-do lesbian households up against children reared by single heterosexual parents.
The argument that the currently available social science data are not dispositive at this point seems to me inarguable. How could they be dispositive when marriage equality has only existed in one state for nine years? In reporting on the studies in my anthology, I insisted and still insist we do not have sufficient long-term data to judge the social impact of this reform.
But we do have lots of data on child-rearing and same-sex relationships, and those arguing for detrimental effects have been able to find nothing. That Mansfield and Kass cite the widely debunked Regnerus study does not change this fact. No respectable, academic studies of any kind have proven any harm to children or adults from integrating gay people into their own families. I think the co-authors are correct that the judicial decision should not rely on inconclusive social science as the basis for a ruling. But the weight of the gathering evidence is clearly on the side of it doing no harm whatever. Just ask the families of Massachusetts, with divorce rates declining as gay marriages increase in number. And just meet the kids of gay parents. They will tell you more about this than any study, however flawed.
I wonder: have Harvey and Leon ever met some children of gay couples? Or talked with them?
The Dish 