Wednesday, March 20, 2013

More commentators now calling ABC commentator George Will's attack on gay parents homophobic

AKSARBENT posted part of Zack Ford's takedown of ABC commentator George Will's anti-gay parenting article the other day.
     Now others are weighing in and directly calling Will homophobic.
     Said Nathaniel Frank, in Slate: "It’s intellectually dishonest, scientifically ignorant, and — I’ll say it — anti-gay."

Absent actual evidence, the religious right has routinely used studies of single-parent and divorced households to allege that any family lacking a father—that is, even if it has two loving moms—is bad for kids. They cite research showing that two parents are better than one, and since all that research has focused on opposite-sex parents, they conflate number with gender and rally around the talking point that kids need “a mother and a father.” Appallingly, George Will has now stooped to this level, citing the allegation of conservative scholars that “research concluded that growing up without fathers had significant negative effects on boys,” even though that research never included households with two gay parents—and this after complaining about “inappropriate invocations of spurious social science” by liberals.

Carter Eskew, who has a Washington Post blog, ripped Will's flawed logic:

What I find slightly ridiculous is Will's failure to acknowledge the social data that is in. While it may be true that years of closeted behavior has made it difficult for social scientists to have enough information to determine the likelihood of gay marriages to succeed and to gauge the parenting skills of gay couples or single gay parents, there is more than enough on their heterosexual brothers and sisters. Divorce remains rampant, child neglect, abuse and abandonment are on the rise, and increasing numbers of heterosexual women are choosing to raise children alone.

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