Psychology and Psychiatry would say the California gay marriage decision was entirely rational.
Judge Vaughn Walker overturned California’s Proposition 8, and found as fact that parent gender was insignificant for raising children, and thereby dismissed one of the arguments made in favor of the ban. This finding relies for foundational scientific credibility on the 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to remove homosexuality as a mental disorder from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).
Removal followed a two year campaign Newsweek described as ongoing disruptive, chaotic attacks on psychiatrists and physiologists. Yet throughout these attacks, no academic papers were presented at conferences refuting research previously done.
Eventually, the onslaughts forced sufficient abstentions and apprehensive responses for a third of APA’s 17,000 plus membership to approve removal. The under-voting and submission to public pressure support an understanding that the DSM is as likely to accumulate political manifestos and marketing brochures as attempts at scientific exposition.
After this decision a task force was established to ensure perpetual sanctity for the APA action. No research papers would again arise to confirm initial therapy success rates of 30% to 60 %, substantiating that 7 of 10 homosexuals could eventually walk away from the lifestyle forever. This task force would set peer review standards mandating pre-ordained theses, acceptable flexibility in research design definitions, and acceptable human data points. Psychology and Psychiatry chose to relinquish scientific rigor for popular societal and political acclaim.
Therefore, Judge Walker could safely reference any number of derivative studies, which find any arrangement of parent sexes provide the same benefit to children, and that any contrary opinion must constitute at least cultural prejudice.
“The principal cause of child poverty in the U.S. is the absence of married fathers in the home,” Robert Rector, senior research fellow in domestic policy studies at The Heritage Foundation, writes in a new paper. “Marriage is a powerful weapon in fighting poverty. Being married has the same effect in reducing poverty as adding five to six years to a parent’s education level.”
“Research shows that a child raised in a home where Dad is married to Mom is much less likely to live in poverty, get arrested as a juvenile, be suspended or expelled from school, be treated for emotional or behavioral problems, or drop out before completing high school. Taxpayers foot the bill for more than $300 billion a year in means-tested government spending on low-income single moms - and, in relatively rare cases, single dads.”
Same Heritage Foundation article.
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1908243,00.html
6-19-09
And yet, studies of fatherlessness tell a different story. The National Center for Health Statistics has found that children living with divorced mothers are four times more likely to need professional treatment for emotional or behavioral problems, twice as likely to repeat a grade at school, and more likely to suffer chronic asthma, frequent headaches, bedwetting, stammering or speech defects, anxiety, depression or hyperactivity.
Children growing up without dads, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, are more likely to be delinquent and twice as likely to end up in prison.
“Church attendance is good for the soul, but a new study by FRC shows that it’s also good for American schools. In a special edition of Dr. Pat Fagan’s Mapping America, Drs. Nicholas Zill and Philip Fletcher found a startling discrepancy between children who live with both biological parents and attend religious services weekly and those from broken homes who worship less frequently.
With data from the National Survey of Children’s Health, Zill and Fletcher found that students from intact, churchgoing families are five times less likely to repeat a grade. Less than a quarter of these parents (21%) were contacted by their child’s school for behavior or achievement problems, compared to 53 percent whose kids were not living with both parents and not attending church services regularly. There was even a noticeable difference in the level of parents’ stress. The more frequently a family worships together, the less anxiety moms and dads report about their kids’ school performance.
Perhaps even more surprising is that these differences held even after controlling for family income and poverty, parents’ education level, race, and ethnicity. As Mapping America illustrates, church and family are the perfect prescription for many social ills. Children thrive, the family bond strengthens, school success skyrockets, and the nation reaps the reward. As Dr. Fagan says, the intact married families who worship weekly are the greatest generator of human goods in the land. We encourage policy makers to strongly consider whether their proposals support such a family structure. It is to society’s advantage that they do.”