Lies, Damned Lies, and Phony Science

You are reaching for the gravy this Thanksgiving. Your family is gathered around the dinner table in a warm moment. Your freshman daughter is just home from her first semester in college, the one that is costing you $40,000 a year. And she chirps up, “Daddy, I don’t know why you’re against same-sex marriage. My sociology TA says that studies show there is absolutely no difference between children raised by gay couples and straight couples.” Only a few months ago she was the apple of your faithful Catholic eye. And now? Sociology has struck.

This, of course, could happen to your wife, too. “Honey, they said on MSNBC the other day that studies show that gayness is in the genes.” Who knows, maybe this has already happened to you? Your dear ones and possibly even you have succumbed to one of the great subterfuges of what can only be called homosexual propaganda: phony science.

First of all, note that these assertions are in the very air that we breathe. How do they know? Studies show. One of the great propaganda successes of the homosexual movement is to main-street phony science. I mean absolutely everybody already knows that kids do just as well with gays as well as with straights, right? And everyone knows that homosexuality is in the genes, too. It’s been on Oprah.

You may be tempted to harrumph and bury your face in the stuffing. You may be tempted to reply, but what is your answer? Scripture? Big mistake. Scripture cuts no ice any more. Or how about encyclicals or the catechism? Bigger mistake. “Daddy, the Church is so discredited after the sex scandals.”

You may attempt the yuck factor, “Honey, do you happen to know what they do with each other.” You could read some of the poetry of Allen Ginsberg all about anal sex and excrement. No kidding. You can look it up. But you really can’t do that over the Butterball, can you?

So you don’t have Scripture. You don’t have encyclicals or the Magisterium. You can’t read them Allan Ginsberg even if you wanted to. What have you got?

What you have is: answers.

Memorize this. “No sociological study has ever been done on gay-raised children that is methodologically sound.” Sure, there are many studies out there. Your daughter’s snot-nosed TA can probably rattle off a dozen or more. But what he will not tell her is that none of them meets ALL of the usual professional criteria; sample size, random sampling, and longitudinal follow-up.

Large sample sizes are required to project accurately to the whole population. Random sampling is required so that the study is not self-selected and therefore biased. Longitudinal studies are those that follow a population over years, even decades. Otherwise all you have is a snapshot in time, which tells you very little. Every study invoked as conclusive scientific evidence by homosexual advocates fails on at least one of these criteria.

The most reliable study is the longitudinal type. There is one of those about the effects of gay parents, only one, but it measured only thirty-nine homosexual families. This is way too small a sample size to make any justifiable general claims. Yet this is precisely the kind of “science” your daughter is being fed to undermine your beliefs and the beliefs of millennia in our civilization.

On the question of the gay gene, know this: It does not exist. There was a study done on the cadavers of those thought to be homosexual and then compared to other cadavers thought to be heterosexual and they found a difference in the size of a part of the brain called the hypothalamus that is thought to cause sexual orientation. Notice all of those “thought to’s” and you can see the worth of this study, a study never repeated by the way.

There are lies, damned lies, and phony science, and the homosexual movement and its fellow travelers in the media are quite shameless in promoting them. Americans are a profoundly fair people and they want to be fair to homosexuals. And so the typical American will latch onto almost any assertion that seems broadminded especially those dressed up as science.

Finally, here is the really bad news. After their assertions of phony scientific evidence and after your new and purely scientific riposte, your interlocutor will likely say something like, “I don’t care whether the studies are true or not, it’s what I believe.” At the end of the day, with proponents of the homosexual agenda, even unwitting ones like your daughter, it comes down not to science but to the thing that is the hardest to argue with, faith. Funny, huh?

Austin Ruse is the President of the New York and Washington, D.C.-based Center for Family & Human Rights (C-Fam), a research institute that focuses exclusively on international social policy. The opinions expressed here are Mr. Ruse’s alone and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of C-Fam.


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