KY Farm Bureau protesters "Big on Intolerance," says family group

Today's press release from the Family Foundation:

LEXINGTON, KY--The Family Foundation today called on the Kentucky Farm Bureau to stick to in principles in the face of calls by protesters and liberal politicians to abandon their pro-family positions on marriage and domestic partner benefits. "The Farm Bureau needs to stand with its conservative rural constituency and not give in to the ideological demands of liberal protesters," said Martin Cothran.

Protesters from the Fairness Alliance and Congressman John Yarmuth had gathered outside the Farm Bureau's Ham Breakfast yesterday demanding that the group drop its position in favor of the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman and providing benefits to "domestic partners" of employees. 

"The Fairness Alliance and its allies are Big on Intolerance" said Cothran. "They talk about diversity, but somehow manage to find the time to oppose it whenever they see it."

"The Farm Bureau needs to stand up for conservative rural values and ignore calls from intolerant groups in our society to abandon the views of people they represent."

###

My comments in the Washington Post today on the Paul/Gray KY Senate Race

Lexington, KY Mayor Jim Gray

I was quoted in the Washington Post today about the Rand Paul/Jim Gray Senate race. The story centers on the fact that Gray is a gay candidate, one of a record number of gay candidates running for state and local offices.

The narrative is basically that the number of gay candidates running for office is an indication of greater acceptance of gays in our society. That's true as far as it goes, but my point was that Gray is not a "gay candidate" in the sense that he runs on the issue:

“He’s never run as a gay candidate,” said Martin Cothran, spokesman for The Family Foundation of Kentucky, a socially conservative group. “It’s not something he’s ever worn on his sleeve … For that reason, he’s not identified with gay issues.”

I also pointed out to the reporter that what social conservatives care about is where the candidate stands on the issues, not what their sexual preference is. That being said, I also pointed out that wearing the gay label on your sleeve probably wouldn't help a statewide candidate in Kentucky, largely because they would take that as an indication of where they stood on the issues.

Read more here.

So WHO's politicizing the transgender issue?

The Atlantic posted an article today by Ron Fourier, a supporter of "transgender rights" about how much he laments the fact that the issue of transgender use of bathrooms has become politicized. And of course he talks as if the blame can be evenly distributed between the two sides.

Um, no. Sorry. Won't work.

He points the finger at North Carolina, saying that their law requiring people of a particular biological sex to use the bathroom appropriate for that sex politicizes the issue. Actually North Carolina passed the law in response to the politicization of the issue by the Gender Deniers.

Think about it. Why is this an issue at all? If someone is a man who identifies as a woman, why do we even have to know about it? They could go into the restroom of their choice right now and with a slight bit of discretion (and maybe not even that) no one would ever know about it. I've never seen someone who claims to be transgender with a sign saying he or she (or whatever) is transgender. 

But the movement pushing all of this doesn't want you to just acknowledge that someone you know is really a man is a woman. They want you to acknowledge that the person who now claims to be a woman was once a man and so is now, in addition to being a woman, a transgender woman.

Say it, fool: TRANS-GEN-DER. And speak up, so we can hear you (It's just no fun to be a cultural revolutionary if you can't bully other people into saying things they don't believe).

If all the so-called transgender rights movement really wanted was for transgender people to be able to use the bathroom that corresponded with whatever sex they decided to be, that's easy. Just do it. No more need be said.

But they don't just want to be left alone. And they just don't want to leave you alone. They want to force you to explicitly repudiate any moral or religious delusions you may have that interfere with legitimacy of their ideology. We are all supposed to consent to be herded into the public square to chant their slogans and participate in their Two-Minutes Hate against the evil people who believe in conventional morality, traditional religion, and, by the way, science.

Oh, and you'd better do it with a smile on your face or we'll pull your federal funding.

Instead of just going on peaceably with our lives and being polite and respectful, we all have to bow down before the cultural agenda of the LBGTQRSTUVWXYZ movement and be required to publicly pledge allegiance to their increasingly absurd view of sex and acknowledge every new gender identity they came up with last week. This is the way thoughtcrime must be dealt with.

We're not asked to live and let live: We're required to acquiesce to having our noses rubbed in it by having to offer a public confession of the bad traditional thoughts we once had about gender and to promise that we will voluntarily check in to the nearest Ministry of Love extension office so our minds can be cleansed of these impure thoughts.

You will learn to admit the gender equivalent truth that two plus two equals five. And you will learn to love it.

Matt Bevin's response to the Obama Gender Dictate for schools

Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin's response to Obama's new dictate that the nation's schools must allow students to use the bathroom that they say corresponds with their "gender identity":

“It is difficult to imagine a more absurd federal overreach into a local issue.  Under the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the federal government has no authority to interfere in local school districts' bathroom policies. The President is not promoting unity. In fact, he is doing quite the opposite. He is intentionally dividing America by threatening to sue or withhold funding from our cash-strapped public schools if they do not agree with his personal opinion on policies that remain squarely in their jurisdiction. They should not feel compelled to bow to such intimidation. My administration is researching the options available for ensuring that this local issue is decided by Kentuckians, not by bureaucrats in Washington."

Read more here.

Gay rights groups hurt their cause by supporting anti-religious bullying

Today's press release from the Family Foundation:

LEXINGTON, KY--A spokesman for The Family Foundation said today that he thought that it would hurt the gay rights movement to continue to support anti-religious bullying. "If groups like the Fairness Alliance continue support the aggressive bullying of religious people who are just trying to mind their own business and live out their religious beliefs, they're going to lose some of the sympathy they've been able to gain in recent years," said Martin Cothran, senior policy analyst for the group.

"To use the LGBT label to mask a malicious vendetta against religious people is not going to help you win friends and influence people. These groups need to start practicing the tolerance and diversity they are always preaching."

"The live and let live philosophy they espouse does not go well with their search and destroy tactics when it comes to dealing with religious people who disagree with them," said Cothran. "To threaten people's livelihood and even send them to jail when they can't force them to deny their religious beliefs is just not a good PR strategy for their movement."

The comments came after an aggressive campaign by The Fairness Alliance and the ACLU to oppose Senate Bill 180, which would ensure that businesses owned by religious individuals are not forced to provide a service that would directly involve them in an activity that violates their religious convictions.

Cothran said the Fairness Alliance had blatantly misrepresented the bill in its public statements, say the bill. "The leaders of these groups need to look at themselves in the mirror and ask whether it's really worth distorting the truth to prevent the passage of a bill that protects just a small handful of businesses that just trying to do the right thing."

"We need to stop anti-religious bullying," he said. "SB 180 will do that."

###

Surprise, Surprise: Herald-Leader story on SB 180 repeats Fairness Alliance propaganda.

Most of the news stories on Senate Bill 180 were pretty good, but the Herald-Leader story by John Cheves could have been written by the Fairness Allliance, whose commitment to truth and accuracy on its pet issues is, shall we say, tenuous:

A Senate committee approved two “religious liberty” bills Thursday, one to legally protect businesses that don’t want to serve gay, lesbian or transgender customers because of the owners’ religious objections, and the other to protect religious expression in public schools.

The first measure, Senate Bill 180, would prohibit the government from compelling services or actions from anyone if doing so conflicts with their sincerely held religious beliefs. The bill expands the state’s 2013 Religious Freedom Restoration Act to clarify that businesses could not be punished in such cases for violating local ordinances that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Um, hold on there, Pardner.

 

Under this description, a reader could infer that someone coming into a restaurant could be denied service by a waiter because he was gay. This is, of course, part of the Fairness Alliance's propaganda. The problem is that it isn't true.

The bill only those cases in which, because of the nature of the service, the service provider is essentially being asked to participate or endorse the activity for which the service is being requested. It does not apply to the vast majority of business situations. We're talking only about those cases like the Oregon baker and the New Mexico photographer who are essentially being asked to participate in an event to which they have religious objections. Not the waiter at Shoney's or the cashier at Wal-Mart.

A Jewish restaurant owner should be required to serve everyone, but he shouldn't be required to serve pork.

The fact that the Herald-Leader is willing to serve as the mouthpiece for the Fairness Alliance isn't all that surprising, of course. It sold its soul long ago. The problem is that newspapers that sell their souls start selling fewer papers, which is one reason why few people are crying many tears about the demise of liberal big city newspapers like the Herald-Leader.

 

Cheves, incidentally, is the same reporter who wrote about a couple of people at the rally for the Marriage Amendment in 2004 holding signs saying "God Hates Fags" and conveniently forgot to mention that the crowd shouted them down.

Family Foundation calls proposed law, "Religious Discrimination Act of 2016"

Below is today's press release from The Family Foundation on HB 155:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FEBRUARY 14, 20165

LEXINGTON, KY—The Family Foundation today announced its opposition to House Bill 155, a gay rights bill which the group says will worsen the problem of discrimination against people of faith in the Commonwealth. The group called HB 155 the "Religious Discrimination Act of 2016."

"This bill will be used as a club to punish Christian business owners whose religious beliefs prevent them from towing the liberal party line on gender issues," said Martin Cothran, spokesman for the group. "This bill will sacrifice Christian-owned businesses on the altar of Political Correctness."

Under the guise of civil rights, the bill would force Christian-owned businesses to violate their religious principles when in hiring employees and could force some Christian-owned businesses out of business altogether, said Cothran.

He said that similar local laws in Kentucky have already been used to force Christian business owners to participate in events that violate their religious beliefs. He pointed to a Lexington T-shirt company that a local human rights commission prosecuted when the Christian business owner refused to take part in the promotion of a gay rights event. "The Religious Discrimination Act of 2016 will further worsen the targeting of Christians who just want to mind their own mind their own business and go about their lives without being persecuted for their religious beliefs."

HB 155 has been posted for passage in the House Judiciary Committee.

###

From the Great Liberal Ideas Department: Segregated schools for #LGBT youth

The Pride School in Atlanta, Georgia is now accepting applications exclusively for "LGBT youth" in order to meet their "special needs." Students will no longer feel bullied or not accepted, as they are in traditional schools. Segregating them in this way would help them bet the support they need for "being different."

Of course, even if this school is successful, there will still be many "LGBT youth" remaining in public schools. What new progressive policies can we implement for them? Separate drinking fountains? Separate eating places in the cafeteria? How about saving the seats at the back of public buses just for them!

Pretty soon, they'll have LGBT youths pickin' cotton.

You gotta love liberals.

Scientists claiming to be able to predict male homosexuality get roughed up by ... other scientists

What has come over the scientific community? Do they not understand that, when it comes to homosexuality, they are supposed to look the other way when questionable scientific claims are made that favor the exotic conclusions of modern gender theory? Isn't there some protocol somewhere that dictates this?

For years now, we have been told, for one thing, that psychologically speaking, homosexuality is perfectly normal. As proof we are given evidence such as that the American Psychological Association no longer considers homosexuality a pathology because science had shown that it isn't. Never mind that the APA changed its position purely on the basis of political activism within and outside the organization. This was admitted both by liberal members of these organizations who protested the change at the time and the radicals who pressured the APA, through political pressure, including the disruption of APA meetings.

Whether it is a pathology or not, it's hard to justify the process by which the question was answered, which was almost exclusively political.

Just imagine the response if social conservatives ever interfered in the workings of a supposedly scientific organization the way gays have.

But we all must look the other way, think scientific thoughts, and pretend it had something to do with, I don't know, like, evidence or something. Bad science is no problem with research that supports pro-gay orthodoxies, unlike research that questions the Approved Opinions, like that of Mark Regnerus, which are held to the highest scientific standards.

If your conclusions follow the party line, you're celebrated no matter what. But violate the current orthodoxies, and a witch hunt ensues, as it did with Regnerus.

One of the most important claims of gay orthodoxy is that "sexual orientation" is immutable. This is politically important on gay issues because, in order to be considered a "suspect class"—one that cannot be discriminated against--one of the four criteria (all of which need to be met) is that the class of person be defined according to immutable characteristics.

Not only do gay rights groups make this claim—and cite studies that purportedly demonstrate it, but courts now regularly accept these claims with almost no critical inquiry into whether they are, in fact, true. When these claims are questioned in judicial proceedings, the defense you get is not exactly compelling. This was the case in the Prop 8 case when, Gregory Herek, a social psychologist at UC Davis, testified that "eighty-seven per cent of the gay men and seventy per cent of the lesbians he questioned said they felt they had little or no choice in their sexual orientation."

That's right: A survey of gays themselves was supposed to settle the question of whether homosexuality was immutable. This methodology would laughed out of court, literally and figuratively, on any other issue, but when it comes to gay issues, no scientific method is so bad that it can't do in a pinch. But it should be noted that Herek had to backtrack with opposing attorneys presented a whole binder full of evidence (the actual, scientific kind) to the contrary.

In reality, no study has proven that homosexuality is immutable. It is not a scientific belief: It a creedal belief in the religion of Political Correctness that is automatically accepted in order to further what is now a popular political agenda. In fact, gays themselves deny it when they talk about "gender fluidity," which they do about as much as they talk about it not being a matter of choice.

So it wasn't a surprise when, at the end of last week, headlines blared that a team from UCLA announced at a meeting of the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics announce that they had creation "An algorithm using epigenetic information from just nine regions of the human genome can predict the sexual orientation of males with up to 70 percent accuracy."

Just as we have come to expect, the uncritical headlines followed:

"Homosexuality can be predicted by a gene scan with 70 percent accuracy, study reveals," Latinos Health
"Study: DNA test can reveal male sexual orientation," San Diego Union Tribune
"Epigenetic algorithm accurately predicts male sexual orientation," Medical Press
"Real-Life ‘Gaydar’: Gene Scan Predicts Who’s Gay with 70 Percent Accuracy," Healthline News
"Epigentic ‘gaydar’ proven to be 70 percent accurate," Examiner.com

And on and on. You get the idea.

Now first of all, you wonder what all the fuss is about concerning a study finding something we already know. If we all know now that homosexuality is immutable, then why would the results of this study be hailed so widely?

Scientific American summarized the study soon after the announcement:

It followed 37 pairs of identical male twins in which one was homosexual and one heterosexual, and 10 sets of twins in which both males were homosexual. The study found that the presence of specific epigenetic marks in nine areas of the human genome could predict homosexual preference with up to 70% accuracy.

But something went wrong. Someone didn't get the memo that bad science is perfectly permissible when it comes to gay issues. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, comes this chorus of scientific voices casting doubt on this study's results. Scientific American was one of the first:

... genetics experts warned that the research has important limitations and will not provide definitive answers to a potential biological basis for sexual preference.

Two days later, there came a fairly devastating article in the Atlantic, where, after reiterating the excited headlines, author Ed Yong said:

Meanwhile, the mood at the conference has been decidedly less complimentary, with several geneticists criticizing the methods presented in the talk, the validity of the results, and the coverage in the press.

It went on to explain how the study was done, and then this:

...The problems begin with the size of the study, which is tiny. The field of epigenetics is littered with the corpses of statistically underpowered studies like these, which simply lack the numbers to produce reliable, reproducible results. 

Unfortunately, the problems don’t end there. The team split their group into two: a “training set” whose data they used to build their algorithm, and a “testing set”, whose data they used to verify it. That’s standard and good practice—exactly what they should have done. But splitting the sample means that the study goes from underpowered to really underpowered. 

There’s also another, larger issue. As far as could be judged from the unpublished results presented in the talk, the team used their training set to build several models for classifying their twins, and eventually chose the one with the greatest accuracy when applied to the testing set. That’s a problem because in research like this, there has to be a strict firewall between the training and testing sets; the team broke that firewall by essentially using the testing set to optimise their algorithms. 

If you use this strategy, chances are you will find a positive result through random chance alone. Chances are some combination of methylation marks out of the original 6,000 will be significantly linked to sexual orientation, whether they genuinely affect sexual orientation or not. This is a well-known statistical problem that can be at least partly countered by running what’s called a correction for multiple testing. The team didn’t do that. (In an email to The Atlantic, Ngun denies that such a correction was necessary.)

He goes went on to point out problems with potential confusions between cause and effect. Yong concludes by calling the study an "underpowered fishing expedition."

What happened to all the credulity?! Where did all of this actual critical analysis come from? And what are we going to do now that countless courts have treated the immutability of sexual orientation as a settled issue, partly depending on it to justify their conclusions about gay marriage?

Just move along folks.

Is the Urge to Pathologize "#Homophobia" a Psychological Disorder?

More junk science from the gay lobby.

There are apparently people who believe that "homophobia" should be considered a psychological disease. These people should have their heads examined.

In fact, more study should be done on whether the urge to assign pathological status to people who politically with you is itself a pathology.

The term "homophobia" originally came into use by psychologists to refer to people who were in denial about their own homosexuality. Only in recent years has it come into use as a punitive political bullying term wielded against people who simply disagree, on religious or other grounds, with the condition or practice of homosexuality.

But the political and psychological use of the term together provide a nice little way for LGBT advocates to bully their opponents. How nice it is if you could just label people whose political or social positions you dislike as diseased.

This goes back to the Soviet era in which the Russian government many times deemed opposition to Communism as a psychological malady, and filling its psychiatric hospitals with political prisoners.

This is also the essence of what the Southern Poverty Law Center does with its label of any socially conservative group as a "hate group."

But don't wait for the people who are always complaining about the "politicization of science" to complain about this. That's because the people who complain about the politicization of science are themselves politicized.

Rainbow Doritos inspiring other changes in food industry

Frito-Lay recently unveiled its Rainbow Doritos, a move intended to support gay and transgender lifestyles. The product has unleashed an entire revolution in the food industry.

The chips were made available only to those who donated to the It Gets Better Project, which helps fight hatred and intolerance of gays which everyone knows is rampant because of all the negative things we hear about gays from all sides every day all the time from everywhere, never hearing anything good about it. Ever.

Dairy producers, perhaps inspired by the Doritos move or the gender theory behind it, are gearing up to begin milking bulls as well as cows, and the poultry industry is looking into the possibility of collecting eggs from roosters.

The move by Frito-Lay is also influencing, not only in what Americans eat, but in the way they eat.

Nutrition experts are now advising that dinner be served in the morning and breakfast at night, and that desserts be served before dinner, and appetizers afterward. They are also now recommending that you should shop for the ingredients of meals you plan on having after you serve them rather than before, and that you preheat the oven only after you have baked something. In addition, lifestyle advisers are recommending that dishes be washed prior to meals.

In another development ...

Oh, wait, hang on ... You know what? I think this may just be a nightmare I had last night. Yeah, I think it is. I mean, everything except the Doritos part.

Never mind.

My "Kentucky Tonight" appearance on marriage and religious freedom Monday night

Our debate last week on KET's "Kentucky Tonight" on same-sex marriage and "LGBT rights."

My op-ed in the Lexington Herald-Leader: "Introducing Our New Ruling Elite"

My newest op-ed in the Lexington Herald-Leader:

In his dissent in last week's Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision prohibiting states from defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman, Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out that every member of the Supreme Court was a graduate of Yale or Harvard law schools. This is, he said, "hardly a cross-section of America" ...

Read more here.

Scalia: "No social transformation without representation"

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, from his dissent in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision striking down marriage laws in all 50 states, on just how unrepresentative of America the elite judges who now rule our country are:

Judges are selected precisely for their skill as lawyers; whether they reflect the policy views of a particular con­stituency is not (or should not be) relevant. Not surpris­ingly then, the Federal Judiciary is hardly a cross-section of America. Take, for example, this Court, which consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School. Four of the nine are natives of New York City. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single South-westerner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count). Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination. The strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval would be irrelevant if they were functioning as judges, answering the legal question whether the American people had ever ratified a constitutional provision that was understood to proscribe the traditional definition of marriage. But of course the Justices in today’s majority are not voting on that basis; they say they are not. And to allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.

Read the rest here.

All Together Now: Let's all pretend that the whole Bruce Jenner affair makes perfect sense

I have a longer post going up in the next day or two about the whole Bruce Jenner affair, but what has been so surprising about the whole surreal moral meltdown it represents is how so-called "conservatives," having laid aside whatever critical faculties they had (and, let's face it, it does vary), have surrendered to the mindless nonsense of postmodern gender ideology.

When Jenner came out and announced that he was morphing into a woman, I expected the Anderson Coopers and Rachel Maddows of the world to sing their hosannahs, but last night on Fox News, it was a veritable love-fest in response to the Vanity Fair cover showing Jenner, newly-dubbed "Kaitlyn," in a corset.

First off there was Meghan Kelly, who, having just finished bragging about how firmly she was going to deal with the Duggars because, you know, that's just the way she is with everyone, couldn't contain her admiration for Jenner.

Then, just about 30 minutes later, Kelly appeared on Bill O'Reilly's show, where Bill asked her what she thought about Jenner's supposed gender change. But the patented Meghan Kelly tough girl act she likes to brag about was nowhere to be seen. "I give him a lot of credit," said Kelly. "I think he's courageous."

Whut?

I'm trying to imagine all the suffering and embarrassment that must be involved in being featured in a glowing cover story in a major pop culture magazine and having virtually everyone in the media, whatever their politics, fawning, if not outright salivating, all over you.

Courageous? Really?

Of course, there are some of us out there (called "males," a term used for humans with XY chromosomes before this system of gender determination became politically unpopular) who actually would be embarrassed to appear in a corset--on a magazine cover or anywhere else. But we are hard to find now, except at Nascar tracks and bowling alleys.

At what point is this absurd "courage" meme going to be seen for what it is? When will we acknowledge that when gays or people who claim to be transgender "come out," it isn't to angry crowds, but to a sycophantic popular media?

How long do we have to keep pretending that gays are really persecuted?

But O'Reilly's response to Kelly's silly remarks was even more interesting. I mean, surely Bill, the impresario of the "No Spin Zone," would press Kelly on such a blitheringly nonsensical statement. Even O'Reilly--Bill the tough guy--caved without a fight. "Well, people can do what they want," he said. "This is America and nobody should comment on it."

In other words, don't dare question the fact that a person can change his gender through the power of sheer emotion with a little assistance from a cosmetic surgeon. Don't even think about it.

Thank you Fox News, for the advice. You just go on pretending this all makes sense while a few of the rest of us who think feelings can't change the nature of reality practice a little common sense.

In fact, surprisingly, the most sensible coverage of the issue came on some CNN show (the one on late that features the male and female co-anchors with the British accents), who interviewed a transgender man critical of the whole Jenner affair, who pointed out (and you can only say this if you are transgender) that you can't change your gender.

But back on Fox News is was all postmodern fluff.

Sheez.

Black-shirted gay students disrupt meeting at UCSB

In case you thought the gay rights movement was just wanting a place at the table, you might want to check out another instance of gay rights groups upsetting everyone else's tables.


Check out this video of a meeting of the Anscombe Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara (my alma mater), where black-shirted and pink balloon festooned gay students try to disrupt the meeting.

So let me get this straight: giving gays their rights requires inhibiting the rights of those with which they disagree?

Sure would have been nice to know this before they hijacked the culture.

Just imagine the national condemnation which would have greeted a band of black-shirted socially conservative students disrupting a meeting of gays students.

Adventures in Tolerance: Feelin' the luv from the LGBT Hate Lobby

Just in case you thought that the champions of Tolerance and Diversity were in favor of, oh, I don't know, tolerance and diversity, here is one of the comments on PBS' website about the segment yesterday that I was in:

Wow. This Cothran guy is the consummate bigot! Must be great to be the Klan, without all the robes n physical murder. Murder of freedom to be one's self is so much more fun for these ghouls. Thugs like Cothran n his ilk in the Bubba Belt really need to have their brand of deviance, which is far less legitimate than gay marriage, set straight. I doubt this thug ridden Supreme Kangaroo Court is up to the task, but there's always hope. And I am a straight guy, not that it should matter.

Read the rest here.

My appearance on last night's PBS Nightly News

Is the research in support of same-sex marriage junk science?

On the big screen behind the balls of fire is the face of the big man telling you in a scary voice that scientific research supports the idea that children do just as well in same-sex marriages as in families with a biological mother and father. But Todo has pulled the curtain back and it turns out that all the pyrotechnics hide an uncomfortable truth: It's not true.

Like so many other claims that are "research-based," the claims of same-sex marriage advocates that science shows that children raised by "married" gay parents are just as well-served as children in families headed by the child's natural parents turn out to be based on questionable evidence.

Here is Gene Schaerr in the Daily Signal, commenting on the evidence offered by the politically compromised American Psychological Association and the American College of Pediatricians:

... [D]ozens of studies cited to support the so-called “scientific consensus” that the American Psychological Association claims, only eight meet scientific standards for population inference. The rest tell us nothing. 

Of these eight, the four older ones found no disadvantages for children raised by same-sex couples compared to other family structures. But as the recent American College of Pediatricians amicus brief shows, all four studies suffer an incurable flaw:  about half (40-60 percent) of the children they report as being raised with same-sex parents are actually children with opposite-sex parents, either because of coding errors, or problems with the census data on which the studies relied.

In the end, this “dirty data” problem either invalidates their findings, or makes relying on them extremely problematic.

This leaves only four studies that are methodologically sound. And as the American College of Pediatricians brief shows, all four—the four most recent—find that children do not fare as well when raised by same-sex couples as when raised by married, biological parents.

To the contrary, such children often experience significantly higher levels of events or conditions such as being arrested, using marijuana, being depressed, having a learning disability or other psychological or developmental problem—and are less likely to graduate from high school.  As adults, they are more likely to be unemployed, receive public assistance and to have an extramarital affair.

The fake evidence hides an ideology (a belief system impervious to evidence). Read more here.

Stan Cave's Greatest Hits: Can you have SSM without polygamy?

There is no legal net with holes small enough to prevent polygamy from getting through and yet large enough to allow for the free passage of same-sex marriage. You're stuck with both or neither. In this excerpt from Stan Cave's Supreme Court amicus brief, he points this out:

In Windsor it was the definition of marriage in the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 (DOMA) which was at issue. Windsor, 133 S.Ct. at p. 2683. In a larger sense, under a love and commitment standard advocated by the claimants, if the definition of marriage is federalized, States will also be required to recognize polygamous or polyamorous marriages among adults who claim to be in loving and committed relationships.