The Case for Traditional Marriage/Program 5

Introduction

Ankerberg: Welcome to our program. Let me ask you a real simple question. Do you think that children really need a mother and a father? Come on, tell me the truth. Well, there’s been quite a bit of dust kicked up lately about whether boys and girls really need mothers and fathers. We’ve got the silly Annette Benning and Julianne Moore movie about two quirky lesbians trying to raise two emerging adults. We’ve got Judge Walker in California’s Proposition 8 pronouncing with absolute confidence, he says, “Studies show conclusively that having parents of differing genders” – you can have two mothers, you could have two fathers – “is irrelevant to child outcome.” Did you know that? Was that in the news? Further, on the big screen Jennifer Aniston tells women that you don’t have to fiddle with a man to have a child. Hey, come on. But what does the latest social science research tell us about children? Do they really need a mother and a father? And we’re going to look at the child development research, we’re going to look at the brain research, we’re going to look at the anthropological studies.

We’ve got three guests here that are terrific at this. Tony Perkins is President of the Family Research Council in Washington, DC; Former member of the Louisiana State Legislature where he served for eight years. Dr. Jim Garlow, one of the leaders who successfully led the campaign which passed Proposition 8 in California in which seven million Californians voted for traditional marriage for being the law of the state. He’s Chairman of Renewing American Leadership of Washington, DC. He’s also Senior Pastor of Skyline Wesleyan Church in San Diego. And then Craig Parshall, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for the National Religious Broadcasters.

Alright, let’s look at this question. Is it really true, Jim, that mothers and fathers are optional and children could do without either their mother or their father?

Garlow: Well, based on social science, on brain and child development and anthropological research, nothing could be further from the truth. Lesbian parenting studies ignore the larger body of research. The research on kids being raised in same-sex homes centers on lesbian headed homes, and is plagued by serious methodological problems. And none of the lesbian studies published to date makes any reference to the immense body of research conducted over the last three decades on how family change and formation affects the vast array of child outcomes.

Ankerberg: Yeah. Now, let’s document this, Craig, okay. The fact is when the leading and non partisan child advocacy organization Child Trends, okay, examined the question of how family structures affect child wellbeing, what did they print? What did they conclude?

Parshall: Well, the author was Kristin Anderson Moore. She had other researchers in that paper, but they published a study called “Marriages from a Child’s Perspective: How Does Family Structure Affect Children and What Can We Do about It?” It was a Child Trends Research Brief. She said there was an extensive body of research that tells us children do best when they grow up with both biological parents in a low conflict marriage. And here’s what she said in an exact quote. “It is not simply the presence of two parents as some have assumed, but the presence of two biological parents that seem to support child development.” Here’s what significant. And that is Judge Vaughn Walker, the San Francisco judge who struck down Proposition 8, discounted one of the pro-family, pro-traditional marriage experts because he relied on this kind of research.

Ankerberg: Yeah. And the reason we’re going to this and making it kind of intellectual here, guys, please, you in the audience stick with us on this thing, because I remember the night that Proposition 8 was brought out, or was passed by the judge here in terms of his decision, that, I mean, all the anchors hammered on this thing of the judge keeps saying there was no evidence, there’s no evidence in showing these lesbian studies, okay. And it was a smokescreen, as far as I’m concerned. And what we’re doing is giving you the research that shows it was wrong, alright? And let’s go on. What did the Center for Law and Social Policy – this is a group that’s more center left – find when they examined the research concerning the same question on family status and child wellbeing, including, and here’s the key word, including same-sex households? Tony?

Perkins: They report, over the last 20 years, a body of research has developed on how changes in the pattern of family structure affects the children. Most researchers now agree that together these studies support the notion that, on average, children do better when they’re raised by two married, biological parents who have low conflict relationships. And what’s so outrageous about Judge Walker’s decision that Craig mentioned, is that in his finding of fact he says it’s “beyond debate,” that this doesn’t exist, when in fact we’ve got 30-40 years now, Barbara Defoe Whitehead, you have David Popenoe, you have all of these out here that have been doing the research on the effects of the breakdown of the family and how that affects society.

Ankerberg: Yeah. Key words in what you just read, the last 20 years of research, okay. And we’re talking about family structure. You need a father and a mother. That’s what we’re talking about.

Garlow: Both are critical.

Ankerberg: Both are critical. Now, what folks don’t realize is there’s a whole group of scholars from the Universities of Texas, Virginia, Minnesota, Chicago, Maryland, Washington, California at Berkeley and Rutgers that reviewed the literature that Judge Vaughn [Walker]’s been talking about, and what they concluded about children who live with their mothers and fathers was what, Jim?

Garlow: John, the research is overwhelming. It’s absolutely remarkable. They said that they live longer, lead healthier lives both physically and mentally, do better in school, are more likely to attend college and to graduate. Not only that, they’re less likely to live in poverty, to be in trouble with the law, to drink or do drugs, to be violent or sexually active or be victims of sexual or physical abuse. These children are also more likely to have successful marriages compared to children who don’t live with their mother and father.

Ankerberg: Unbelievable.

Perkins: You know, the things that Jim just pointed out, the positive outcomes of a strong family with a mom and a dad, is the very reason why we should be concerned about it from a public policy standpoint. When I authored the nation’s first covenant marriage law, it was those very same statistics that I used, because as policy makers we’re constantly looking for more money to try to mitigate the social consequences of the breakdown of the family. And so there’s an abundance of evidence out there that says, hey, marriage between a man and a woman as the cornerstone of society and the foundation for marriage and family is essential. But now when you juxtapose that body of study with the evidence or so-called evidence that Judge Walker relied upon to say, “No, that’s not true, lesbian relationships or homosexual relationships are the same,” it’s ludicrous, because the evidence is not there.

Ankerberg: Yeah. When I read the whole case that Judge Walker actually put out, you would think there were mountains of information over here that we were looking at, okay. We’ve been talking about, in terms of traditional marriage, there’s 40 years and thousands of case studies, okay, that say we recommend it, okay. How many are over here? Let’s look at that. Craig, you’ve got William Meezan and Jonathan Rauch who talk about the ones that they would recommend as being methodologically rigorous, the stuff about lesbians raising children. Talk about that.

Parshall: You know, when you listen to the gay rights movement you’d think there’s an ocean of scholarly research that supports their position. Here is Meezan and Rauch saying, “Look, we’ve taken a look at this in our own scholarly study,” and by the way it was published jointly by Princeton University and the Brookings Institute, and they could only recommend not an ocean, not even a stream, four same-sex parenting studies. That’s it. And here’s their conclusion, even after studying those four, they said, “Virtually no empirical evidence exists on how same-sex parents’ marriage might affect their children.” You go into family court in any state in the country about family custody issues, what’s the word that you hear? The phrase is “best interests of the child.” That’s the standard. We can’t afford to experiment with the best interests of the children with an unproven model based on junk science.

Ankerberg: Alright, now folks, I want you to hear this again. The Princeton University and the Brookings Institute said there’s, you know, no empirical evidence but there’s four studies we’ve got to look at. But about those four studies, they have some methodological flaws. And, Jim, what were they?

Garlow: They found that nearly all the research on same-sex child rearing was conducted on white, middle class moms in larger urban areas. Lesbian mothers who had volunteered in these studies, or who were contacted through the use of sperm banks.

Ankerberg: Now, why is that so tough? Why is that wrong?

Garlow: It’s not a random sampling at all. It’s highly selective, getting people you want to say what you want to hear.

Ankerberg: Yeah. And they are there saying what they want you to print.

Garlow: Exactly.

Ankerberg: In other words, if they’re lesbian moms and you’re doing a study on lesbian moms, they’re going to say, yeah, we did a great job. Okay. When we come back we’re going to look at some of these studies a little bit more minutely, and then we’re going to jump to the social science evidence that tells us that fathers are very important to children, you can’t have just two mothers. And a mother is very important, you need a mother and a father, and you are missing something big time if you don’t have those. And we’re not talking Bible verses here, we’re talking the social science research. Stick with us, we’ll be right back.

Ankerberg: Alright. Two of those respectable studies we want to look at, one is by Timothy Biblarz and Judith Stacey which was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family. And here’s what it claimed. Now listen to this. They said, “Contrary to popular belief, at this point no research supports the widely held conviction that the gender of parents matters for child wellbeing.” It doesn’t matter if we’ve got a mother and a father. You could have two moms, two dad, everything’s dandy. What’s the problem with that?

Well, this pretends to be science, John, and science really is dependent on a rigorous methodology. If the methodology is wrong the science is junk. In this case, first of all, it took all of the literature dealing with the children raised by same-sex parents on one side, reviewed that literature. Now then you’d think for equality’s sake they would review all of the competent literature dealing with those children raised by a mother and a father. They didn’t. They selectively picked a small fraction of that literature and compared the two. It’s like apples and oranges. But second of all, they picked a large, what you might call a stronger methodological sample, for the national representative sample for the heterosexual home, sort of a broad based one, national in origin. Then on the lesbian parenting, what did they do? They didn’t go national, they didn’t go widespread sample, what they did is they used what they call snowball samples, which unfortunately means people who volunteer to be interviewed, people who are selected because you know their conclusions, or their statements will be exactly what you’re looking for to prove a point. And it’s been pointed out that, you know, this is fine for an undergraduate to use snowball samples to kind of get used to what sociology is all about, but no professional sociologist ought to use, or will use, snowball samples.

Ankerberg: Jim, there’s another thing that came out in this Biblarz/Stacey study in the Journal of Marriage and Family, and it said that, You know what, two mothers provide a double dose of caretaking, communication and intimacy, so they’re actually better than a mother and a father family.

Garlow: And contrary to that, in reality they had to admit that “a double dose of mother care can be toxic to the relationship, causing these homes to break up at disturbingly high rates. A double dose of maternal investments sometimes fostered jealously and competition between co-mothers which the asymmetry of the women’s genetic, reproductive and breastfeeding ties to their infant could exacerbate.” In other words, we weren’t made as kids to have two mommies. We weren’t made to have two daddies. We need a mommy and a daddy, because mommy and daddy function differently in a role in the life of that child.

Ankerberg: Alright. Let’s look at a second study. It’s called the Gartrell/Bos study, which appeared in June 2010 in the Journal of Pediatrics. It was published by the American Academy of Pediatrics. And unbelievably, they said that these lesbian moms had such a profound good effect on the kids that when the moms broke up the researchers found no effect from the divorce of the two mothers on the children. Now, you’ve got Teflon kids here, Tony. What do you think about this?

Perkins: I find it unbelievable. When you look at the evidence that’s out there. In fact, Mavis Hetherington, in her book For Better or For Worse: Divorce Reconsidered, along with Judith Wallerstein, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study, this is what they concluded. Really what is a dramatic contrast to what you just laid out there, that when mothers and fathers end their relationship, they said there’s a mountain of research that shows that when that happens, the negative impact upon the children is significant in both degree and duration. And Judith Wallerstein has actually followed many of these kids for up to 40 years to see the implications of this. And this is significant when you consider what’s happening in these lesbian relationships. In fact, going to another study in Norway and Sweden, they found that lesbian homes break up at twice the rate of male same-sex homes, and both have a dramatically higher likelihood of breakup compared to heterosexual marriages. So what we’re saying is by moving down this path of same-sex marriage, we are creating more environments in which children will be emotionally, physically and psychologically handicapped in this process.

Ankerberg: Yeah. There’s methodological flaws in this, too. The data was collected for these studies on only 78 children through the mother’s self-reporting on the wellbeing of the kids. Now, here’s the problem I have with this, Craig, and that is the fact is that when we’re applying this to public policy, the law is saying we’re supposed to make decision on what is best for our whole society, okay. So what’s wrong with applying these kinds of studies to this broad social policy for the whole country?

Parshall: Well, first of all, even in cases where you’re not talking about something that will affect the entire culture, let’s say just custody between a father and a mother, the scientific studies and psychological studies that are done have to be methodologically valid just for that little microcosm of a case. Now, if you broaden this to something that’s going to affect our entire culture, affect families from coast to coast, the methodology on these kind of studies has to be absolutely pristine. And what you’re finding is that it’s much less than pristine. It’s highly debatable. And yet this is the kind of substance that was accepted by Judge Walker, San Francisco judge who shot down Proposition 8. In fact, unfortunately, a trial judge has great power to disqualify experts or to qualify them. And once he qualifies them, he is pretty well forced to accept the conclusions of those experts and the research they base it on even if it’s junk science. Judge Walker discredited any of the experts that really had much to say about the value of traditional marriage, and then accepted the most radical ideas of the experts who wanted to say same-sex marriage ought to prevail.

Ankerberg: Yeah. This Gartrell/Bos study had methodological problems big time. They recruited mothers who volunteered for this study at lesbian events, women’s bookstores and lesbian newspapers throughout the metropolitan areas of Boston, Washington, DC, and San Francisco. These are not random samples, and only on 78 children. So the fact is, this is not good science. And yet the news media outlets pick up this kind of thing and it’s across the world before anybody even gets a chance to look at the data.

Parshall: Yeah. Contrary to what Judge Walker said, that this is beyond debate, it should be beyond debate that there is not enough evidence to suggest that we should move down this path, that is social experimentation. I mean, when you look at the length of time, we have a very short period of time where we’ve had these type of relationship. The evidence that is out there, the studies out there, as we’ve just talked about, are flawed in their methodology. So we should move very, very slowly down this path from a policy standpoint. And certainly this is not the type of decision that should be made by judges.

Ankerberg: Alright, what we’ve got is we’ve got lesbian studies that are being touted to show, hey, we only need two women to raise children. We don’t need a father, okay, so the fathers are worthless at this spot. But we’ve got on the other side of that, we’ve got a mountain of research that’s coming out that fathers are really crucial to the development of their children. And talk about that, Tony.

Perkins: John, this is nothing new. When you go back to the feminist movement there was, you know, this idea that men were not an essential back then. Women could have children without men, they didn’t need …, you know, they didn’t need them around. They were unnecessary accessories. And the science, the social sciences debunked that idea. And it’s shown very, very specifically that fathers are critical to the development of their children. Robert Veneziano, in an analysis of over 100 studies on parent child relationships, found that having a loving and a nurturing father was as important for a child’s happiness and wellbeing. He said, “The influence of a father’s love on offspring development is as great as, or occasionally greater, than the influence of mother love.” I mean, that’s pretty profound. And he’s not alone in finding that.

Ankerberg: Craig, what are some of the important contributions that researchers are finding that fathers make to the development of their children? Take Natasha J. Cabrera’s book, Fatherhood in the 21 ^st Century. What did she say?

Parshall: Well, the contribution of men is essential and really very unique. She said that, as an example, fathers encourage their children to become more confident, to be safer risk takers, more empathetic and better problem solvers.

Furthermore, Cabrera concludes, and I quote, “Absence from their families will have dire consequences for their children’s development.”

Ankerberg: Yeah. That’s not preachers saying that. These are the social researchers that are saying this. Now, let’s wrap this up. There’s a ton more. I think we’ve given the audience a migraine headache in listening to this. And what we want to show is that, if you actually get into it, the studies that are being touted for homosexual and lesbian relationships, in terms of raising children, just does not stand scrutiny. It’s not true. And we can’t base public policy on this. You guys have seen this through the years in the feminist movement and other things. Tony, talk to that.

Perkins: Well, again as you look back over history this is not new. We’ve dealt with this, there is this idea that the family was not essential. Of course we’ve seen the byproduct of the 60s sexual revolution and the feminist movement throwing off the norm. And that’s why we have a prison overpopulation. You look at 70 percent of the men in prison today have had little or no interaction with their father growing up. You look at teenage pregnancy among girls, the strongest indicator for whether a girl is going to end up with a premarital encounter and pregnancy is the relationship she had with her father. This is profound. And pretty much it’s commonsense. I mean, I know in our family we have kind of unusual conversations around the dinner table. We talk about stem cell research, we talk about same-sex marriage. And my little ones, you know, I’ve got them ranging from age 18 to 2 ½, and they look at it and they, “Dad, why are people even talking about this? We all need moms and dads. A family is a mom and a dad and kids.” And so when you take it from a commonsense standpoint, it’s clear. But when you look at the social science data, it’s overwhelming.

Ankerberg: Jim, you flew in from California. You got in almost midnight last night; you were on the set first thing in the morning. You’ve got to catch the plane in five minutes to get out of here. And you got into this thing. Here you are a preacher, okay. And yet you led, you were one of the leaders in Proposition 8 out there being passed. Why did you get into this?

Garlow: The issue is truth. What we’ve just gone through in these studies, and what we’ve discovered every time we come to a topic like this, is the other side builds their case on flaws and deceit. It’s no different than the abortion, the whole abortion movement was started on a lie. I used to live in Dallas-Fort Worth. Roe v. Wade came from there and was all built on a lie. And when you do not have truth, you have to use fraud to try to make your case. And that’s what we’re dealing with here. The reason I got involved is very simple: the truth is as stake. And when the truth is denied, people are wounded and hurt. I’m a pastor. I care about people. I want the truth to them because it can set them free.

Ankerberg: Craig, where do we need to, as a group of Christians and concerned people about traditional marriage, what do we need to do?

Parshall: First of all, we have to take our election privilege and obligation very seriously. Remember that a president nominates judges, all federal judges, not just the Supreme Court judges. Furthermore, the Senate is the one that approves those. So you look at the presidency, but then you look at the Senate. Every state has two Senators. Every citizen has two Senators that they can vote for. You need to know where they stand on judging. Judge Walker’s example is an example of a legal travesty. He departed from legal principles. He has a worldview that says you look to consequences and you do social engineering rather than follow legal principles. You need to find out what the legal worldview is of the judges and of those that are going to be nominating them in the Senate.

Ankerberg: Folks, I hope that you listen carefully to this information, you take it to heart. We’re going to continue next week. Jim won’t be with us, we’re going to continue with the other two and we’re going to look at this sixth program of is traditional marriage good for adults? For women? For men? Is traditional marriage good for them? And we’re going to talk about it next week. I hope you’ll join us.