Family Research Council pushes another flawed study against gay couples

One of the biggest lies pushed by the Family Research Council and other like-minded groups is that gays and lesbians are too promiscuous to worry about settling down and getting married.

FRC in particular pushes this lie through inaccurate studies, such as the one the group cited today via an email:

"Rights and benefits" are exactly what homosexual activists are aggressively pursuing in the courts. In addition, empirical evidence shows that homosexuals are less likely to commit to a partner, remain sexually faithful, or remain committed for a lifetime than heterosexuals.

It used to be that when FRC talked about "empirical evidence"  and provided links to this evidence, alarms would sound off in my head.

Now, however, the alarms have been replaced with a type of mental salivation which comes with knowing that I am going to be able to produce another blog post which demonstrates yet again how FRC lies about the gay community.

Today is no different. You see the "empirical evidence" which FRC links to a proof of so-called gay promiscuity is a study it published a while back, Comparing the Lifestyles of Homosexual Couples to Married Couples.

Comparing the Lifestyles of Homosexual Couples to Married Couples is so bad, so flawed that one wonders just what was FRC thinking in citing it. For one, the study is irrelevant because at the time it was published, gay and lesbian couples could not marry in the United States.

And that's just one of the myriad of errors.

The others include:

- A citation of the book Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women by Alan Bell and Martin Weinberg as a correct generalization of lgbt sexual habits despite the fact that it was written in 1978 and was not meant by the authors to be a correct assessment of the lgbt community in general.

A passage from 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.”

- A citation of the book The Male Couple: How Relationships Develop by David P. McWhirter and Andrew M. Mattison despite the fact that the book was written 1984 and was not meant to be a correct assessment of the lgbt community in general.


A passage from The Male Couple says:

“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.”

In addition to outdated work, the study also distorts the work of researchers Timothy Biblarz and Judith Stacey to make the case against children being raised in lgbt homes.

Claims regarding the numbers of children being raised in homosexual and lesbian households vary widely and are often unsubstantiated. According to a study on homosexual parenting in the American Sociological Review, researchers have given figures "of uncertain origin, depicting a range of...6 to 14 million children of gay or lesbian parents in the United States."

According to the study's authors, Judith Stacey and Timothy J. Biblarz, the higher estimates are based upon "classifying as a lesbigay [sic] parent anyone who reports that even the idea of homoerotic sex is appealing." Instead, the authors favor a figure of about one million, which "derives from the narrower...definition of a lesbigay parent as one who self-identifies as such." 

 
However, FRC and Dailey conveniently fails to mention that Stacey and Biblarz's study found:

. . . that lesbian and gay parents were as competent as heterosexual parents. The article did note some differences between families with gay and lesbian parents and those with heterosexual parents, but was careful to emphasize that these were differences, not deficits. Many of those opposing parenting rights for lesbian and gay people seized on these differences, using them to assert that gay and lesbian parents were not as effective as heterosexual parents. 

 
Furthermore, during an interview with the organization Soulforce, Stacey complained about the distortion of her work:

"Significant, reliable social scientific evidence indicates that lesbian and gay parents are as fit, effective, and successful as heterosexual parents. The research also shows that children of same-sex couples are as emotionally healthy and socially adjusted and at least as educationally and socially successful as children raised by heterosexual parents."

Later in the interview she commented: "There is not a single, respectable social scientist conducting and publishing research in this area today who claims that gay and lesbian parents harm children." She explained that the research does find some differences between families with gay and lesbian parents and those with heterosexual parents, but emphasized that they are differences, not deficits. For example, daughters of lesbian moms tend to be somewhat more career-oriented than other daughters. That anti-gay activists had cited these differences as evidence supporting their efforts to deny partnership and parenting rights to lesbians and gays was for Stacey "a serious misreading and abuse of our work."

The meat of the FRC study - and a perfect example of just how flawed it is - lies in the section comparing the promiscuity of gay couples to that of heterosexual married couples:

Examples for heterosexual couples:

A nationally representative survey of 884 men and 1,288 women published in the Journal of Sex Research in 1997

Another 1997 national survey appearing in the Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States.

A telephone survey conducted for Parade magazine of 1,049 adults selected to represent the demographic characteristics of the United States published in 1994.

All of the couples listed in the above examples were married.


The following are the examples used for lgbt couples:

A Dutch study of partnered gay men in the Netherlands that collected data between the years of 1984-2000 (same-sex marriage was legalized in the Netherlands in 2001)

Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women, a study of gay men in the city of San Francisco in the early 1970s.

A study of the sexual profiles of 2,583 older homosexuals published in the Journal of Sex Research published in 1997. The study included homosexual men in other countries. More than three quarters of men were born in Australia or New Zealand (78.1%), a high number of the men were from United Kingdom or elsewhere in Europe (19.5%) and a small percentage of men surveyed were from other countries (Asia, Africa, Oceania, North, Central or South America—2.3%).

A survey conducted by the gay magazine Genre. The citation is from a second hand source - a defunct anti-gay publication called the Lambda Report which was run by Peter LaBarbera - a man infamous for his homophobic bias.

Who knows why FRC thought it would get away with pushing bad work? Maybe the organization is too busy giving away awards to deadbeat dads to care.