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I’ve Been Wanting To Write About Seven Brides For Seven Brothers For a While

A little over a month ago, AOL News posted an article by Walter Schumm entitled “Study: Gay parents more likely to have gay kids.” Schumm, a Family Studies professor from Kansas has conducted a “meta-analysis” (just make peace with the amount of sarcastic quotations I need to use to even talk about this inane shit) that seems to point to queer families producing more queer children. For those who aren’t familiar with the technique, meta-analysis is the compilation of several different studies or experiments in order to draw conclusions about the aggregate of their research. The studies you choose or don’t choose absolutely determine your results. Years and years of research showing gay parents aren’t more likely to raise gay children were apparently glossed over, and the result is going to be a windfall to groups that wish to outlaw gay adoption.

[Not to mention the fucking unscientific conclusions that will be drawn from this study. I imagine gay parents probably don’t raise as many life long closet cases, or have as many of their kids kill themselves because of parental rejection over their sexuality. Voilà! You now have more reported queer children.]

Part of the article was devoted to Schumm lamenting how hostile “The Academic Community” is to research that suggests that gay parents are bad parents.

“Schumm says it shouldn’t have taken until 2010 to do the meta-analysis. Too often his colleagues impose ‘liberal or progressive political interpretations’ on their studies, which inhibit further inquiry. ‘It’s kind of sad,’ he tells AOL News.”

SEE! THIS IS THE SHIT I’VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT. I’ve been rambling on about the “Interlocutor/Inquisitor” on my Tumblr recently, trying to figure out what drives people to wedge themselves into conversations and start declaring everyone in it is wrong for not listening to them. And one of the ways they waste our time and try our patience is by treating everything, absolutely everything as up for debate. The idea of privilege. The idea of misogyny being a real thing. No matter how many times we prove that something exists, it will never be proven. Years of research into the consequences of gay parenting, which seem to be, well, more “empathetic” kids – and to them it is still an open question. It can still be an open question to them, no matter how much evidence is piled at their feet. And one of the ways they do this is by creating a Culture of Faux Inquiry, by making it seem like the question is never settled by attacking the evidence settling it as biased and inconclusive. They do this by making it seem as if both sides have equally credible arguments, implementing shitty science and complicity with that shitty science.

I was pissed off that AOL News was posting such trash, and I knew, I just knew that I would see this again. Sure enough, a few weeks later I saw it on the web sites of several anti-gay advocacy groups, cited in an “article”  on “World” “Net” “Daily,” and brought up on right wing boards and comment threads. So here we have flawed science based on a technique that can be easily rendered useless by selection bias. And it is being given a signal boost by a somewhat reputable (????) news organization and achieving metastasis through the conservative mindset. This nonsense is the sort of thing people include as evidence in trial proceedings, and makes the question of gay adoption seem like a fairly contested issue – especially if you don’t understand the methodology.

When a large organization lends its voice and its authority to ideas that are toxic, they aren’t just sparking a debate or raising questions. They are providing fodder for the other people who take that toxic shit to heart. Especially if those toxic ideas are on the blog most likely to be trawled by its detractors.

And that’s why I came here to talk to you about Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, aka Stockholm Syndrome: The Musical!

If you’ve never seen it, the movie centers around Adam, a backwoods mountain man who tricks a woman into marrying him and then convinces his six brothers to kidnap a group of women from town. They cause an avalanche getting away, meaning the girls are stuck there all winter. But alls well that ends well, the girls fall in love with the men who have kidnapped them and they’re all forced into shotgun weddings!  It’s like the end of “As You Like It” when the God Hymen descends from on high to stamp out any silly gender bending or queer attraction and marries everyone off. But with barn raising! And dance fights! Happy ending, right?

Maybe not to me or you, but to some people. Some people earnestly believe that woman are happiest when they allow themselves to be conquered by men. They collect every scrap of evidence they can of this, from Evolutionary Psychology to Bible Scripture to articles on Feminist websites that call for a rethinking of consent. They will not read the 50 articles before and after on how pervasive rape culture is and how society treats women’s bodies as public property. No. They will sail past all of that, read this bullshit, and e-mail it to each other with Subject Lines like “Oh, it seems like they’re finally getting it!” and rejoice that finally women might learn their place as disinterested wombs. And then literally every ill that has ever befell mankind can be crammed back into Pandora’s box, along with anything else we want because hey! If it belongs to a woman it belongs to everyone.

That may seem hyperbolic, but this isn’t: I have never once heard any of my female friends lament they have too much autonomy over their own bodies. That their day would be much better if strangers were constantly touching and groping them, which they were expected to fend off with European “decisiveness.” But there are a lot of men for whom this shit sounds like paradise. They are constantly looking for evidence that they are actually the keepers of a sacred truth about gender roles and the happiness of women, feel entitled to control women and imagine they are doing all of this because they love women and want to protect them. And when they read this smug horseshit, and see the source, see that it is The! Lady! Site! For! Ladies!, they will feel validated by it.

And there is no getting around that.

39 Comments

  1. dillene wrote:

    PREACH IT!

    (Although I have to admit, that barn-raising dance sequence is phenomenal.)

    Friday, November 26, 2010 at 8:22 pm | Permalink
  2. The Fatling wrote:

    And he thought those women were sobbin’ before…

    Friday, November 26, 2010 at 9:00 pm | Permalink
  3. Ali wrote:

    WHY HAVE I NOT BEEN HERE INSTEAD OF WASTING MY TIME AT JEZ?

    Ahem. Sorry. Was excited.

    Friday, November 26, 2010 at 9:30 pm | Permalink
  4. Oh hells yeah. Thank you. This is perfect.

    Again. Thank you.

    Friday, November 26, 2010 at 11:07 pm | Permalink
  5. Laurie Brown wrote:

    That movie always did creep me right the fuck out. I’m glad I’m not the only one who reacted like that!

    Friday, November 26, 2010 at 11:11 pm | Permalink
  6. Bethany wrote:

    Feminism has ruined so many of the old musicals that I grew up on.

    Friday, November 26, 2010 at 11:43 pm | Permalink
  7. Bethany wrote:

    AND BY THAT I MEAN: I am a feminist! It is just strange/sad to go back and watch these movies that I used to love and think about how weird and misogynist they are.

    Friday, November 26, 2010 at 11:44 pm | Permalink
  8. SA wrote:

    OK, can we slow down for a moment?

    1) There is no reason to put Family Studies in sarcasm quotes. Family Studies, aka Child and Family Studies, is a fairly long-standing academic discipline housed in a lot of first-class Reasearch 1 universities. If my school hadn’t given Marriage and Family Therapy status as its own degree while I was a student, I’d have my MA and PhD in Child and Family Studies. CFS as a discipline has produced a lot of research that’s been very important in terms of policy-making for children and families, and while there are plenty of conservatives in the field, there are also a lot of progressives who are totally down with the “let’s talk about family in a way that is meaningful to 2010, not 1810.”

    2) KState’s CFS department is nationally-known and well-regarded as a producer of research.

    3) We all know that mainstream science journalism is 99% crap, largely based off of press releases and pre-packaged soundbites. Any story that says a meta-analysis published in a peer-reviewed journal was based on “10 books” is a story I can put straight into the round file, because a meta-analysis as broad as the one being described here would require far more synthesis of research, including the long-term research studies of Charlotte Patterson and Robert-Jay Green which show quite the opposite. So AOL’s description of the study is wrong, or the description of the methods is wrong, or both. (For comparison, I was the lead author on a meta-analysis about alternative methods of proving therapeutic efficacy almost 10 years ago, and I think our bibliography covered nearly 200 articles… and that was limiting ourselves to only 7 top MFT/CFS journals.)

    4) I don’t know the Journal of Biosocial Science from a hole in the ground. Bio-science not being my area, this could be the leading journal in the field, or it could be one of the jillion 4th or 5th tier journals that hang around on the fringes of every field, mostly surviving by selling subscriptions to libraries which no one ever reads unless they’re doing a comprehensive lit research for their dissertaions (or meta-analyses).

    5) The abstract suggests the article is pretty crap. “Ten narrative studies” seems to me to most likely refer to ten individual case studies. (“Narrative studies” isn’t a commonly accepted term for a type of research in social science that I’m aware of.) If my guess is right, that means he’s extrapolating his conclusion from a pool of 10 families. Which isn’t a proper meta-analysis at all, and in fact the abstract doesn’t use the term anywhere. So the insertion of that term is more crappy science journalism – either a writer applying a term they don’t understand to a study they didn’t read, or a writer accepting a press release at face value, again without reading the study.

    6) If he’s really doing a “study” of 10 families, any attempt to generalize statistical information from that small of a group is utterly useless and I can’t believe an editorial board actually published it. The journal’s webpage has a self-congratulatory note about its “debate” section, which this article obviously belongs to as it’s an “answer” to a previous article; if the journal accepted something this weak in the name of “debate” I look forward to future issues in which the absurd flaws in this paper are utterly demolished by other “debaters.”

    7) The quotes attributed to the author of the paper in the article you linked make him sound like a total tool. Looking at his page on the KState website, he’s a full professor meaning he’s tenured, meaning he can hare off on any damn fool topic and phone in some crap paper because he isn’t under the gun any more. Looking at his vitae, he’s far from outstanding – he got a research award in 1990 and one in 1997, but since then he’s gotten nothing worth noting, other than becoming a fellow of NCFR which is basically a “yay you’ve been around a long time and probably done some service for us” honorific. I mean, this guy lists his inclusion in various “Who’s Who” directories on his vitae, which any scholar of any gravity knows are total vanity listings that are awarded to anybody with a pulse because the publisher hopes you’ll buy their expensive books. His grant and publication track record suggests he’s a stats nerd who got some good mentoring in how to submit to marginal publication and gin up a whole bunch of lines on his resume.

    So my point is, be outraged at AOL because their article really should read “Irrelevant, Over-the-Hill Prof Tries to Impact National Discourse with Biased, Poorly-Designed Study Supporting Notorious Homophobe’s Life Work.” Be outraged at the Journal of Biosocial Science for publishing something this weak (caveat – I want to actually see the article to see if my hypothesis about its contents bear out, but I’ve read a lot of abstracts.) Write a letter to KState’s College of Human Ecology decrying their professor’s ignorant and homophobic remarks – the one about how lesbians have a “hatred of men that’s intense” is a real knee-slapper straight out of a psychology text written in 1970, so he’s got no business teaching classes and representing their school if he hasn’t managed to enter even the latter quarter of the 20th century, never mind the 21st. But this crap is always going to be out there in the discourse. It’s just that with every month that passes, there’s more and more evidence out there to tip the dregs like this where they belong, onto the garbage heap of history.

    Friday, November 26, 2010 at 11:48 pm | Permalink
  9. Alien Tea wrote:

    I think the worst part about those studies about whether or not gay parents have more gay kids (whatever the outcome of the study) is the assumption that having gay kids is somehow an undesirable outcome.
    So what if they do have more gay kids? SO WHAT!?

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 12:07 am | Permalink
  10. Copcher wrote:

    I don’t know why I never read a lot of Jezebel stuff (just what other blogs linked to) and now I’m pretty sure I never will. Also, that last paragraph is 100% amazing.

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 12:10 am | Permalink
  11. Mazarine wrote:

    So I had a meeting last week with this guy who wrote a pamphlet entitled
    “Women Obey Your Husbands, The Bible Says So”

    And then he tried to explain it to me like “Well, women should only obey their husbands if their husband is manifesting his will like Jesus!”

    “Otherwise, they can disobey him?” I said incredulously.

    “Yes!” He said.

    The background. Dude is a guy who wants me to speak at his conference. Promise-Keeper.

    If it were not for promise of money, I would have been so out of there. Right now, I still feel icky. ARGH.

    Hard to believe so many people feel this way, but yes, I have met one of them in the flesh. And been repelled.

    M

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 12:33 am | Permalink
  12. Erik wrote:

    Can’t say no vows to a herd of cows!

    Man, I loved this musical when I was a kid. The barn dance/fight, the long underwear. But I have to agree with BETHANY that feminism (aka treating everyone as their own autonomous beings deserving of rights) tends to render most of these old-timey things pretty horrifying.

    Still have to say that I wish they would find actors for modern musicals that had fucking bad-ass VOICES like the used to. Like with great timbre and depth, you know?

    Oh, and great point, Garland. I agree 100%.

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 12:46 am | Permalink
  13. Elayne Riggs wrote:

    Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a toughie for me. Like Erik, I have fond feelings for the musical, but yeah, it’s all kinds of creepy sometimes. On the one hand, Adam’s sense of entitlement and dishonesty with Milly are cringeworthy; on the other, Milly agrees to be his wife pretty darn fast, and takes the six brothers revelation pretty much in stride. On the one hand, the constant thickly-laid-on parallels to the Rape of the Sabine Women are horrifying and tiresome; on the other hand, it’s made pretty clear the other women are entranced during the barn-raising dance and have taken a liking to the six brothers before they’re carried off. On the one hand, yeah, they’re abducted; on the other, I think their growing admiration and curiosity about the men are played as genuinely as the actors (including a lovely Julie Newmar) can make it, and I’m not sure how much you can blame people for not being ahead of their time. And yeah, what Erik said re Howard Keel’s amazing voice.

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 3:38 am | Permalink
  14. Garland Grey wrote:

    @SA: That is one of the best comments I’ve ever gotten. Thank you for doing to research for that, I feel like I have a much better handle on where this guy came from.

    And I removed the scare quotes around Family Studies, because it was stupid to put them there in the first place.

    Re: Howard Keel’s voice: The thing that really pisses me off about “Bless Your Beautiful Hide” being so sexist is how badass I sound singing it. It is perfect for my range.

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 6:35 am | Permalink
  15. Alf wrote:

    SA, that was a fantastic comment. Your name didn’t link to a website, which was disappointing.

    I’ve never seen “Seven Brides…” and don’t plan to!

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 7:16 am | Permalink
  16. ExMo wrote:

    @SA: I’ve never commented here before but your comment is so awesome it makes me want to bake you a pie. And then perhaps mow your lawn, provided you have a lawn mower, because I don’t.

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 9:40 am | Permalink
  17. Brett K wrote:

    I had completely forgotten about Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I saw it approximately one million years ago when I was in the hospital with appendicitis. I was seven years old and drugged out of my mind, and I STILL thought it was wicked creepy. Glad to see I’m not the only one.

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 12:30 pm | Permalink
  18. Alicia wrote:

    Someone in a Latin class of mine in college mentioned the Sobbin’ Women song to our professor, who had never seen it. He found it at the library, and the very next class day he used it to demonstrate more fully the way Ovid was portraying Romulus as being slippery and unethical. So that was fun.

    At times I think that Millie’s role gets a little subversive at times — there’s a way to read it where she conquers Howard Keel instead of the other way around — but then I remember she conquers Howard Keel by being the perfect wife and woman and having his baby. Sigh.

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 12:51 pm | Permalink
  19. k not k wrote:

    SA, thanks for the incredibly informative comment! I wanted to say something about “hey I think meta-analysis is like a pretty legit thing, my boyfriend is doing one for his senior thesis and stuff” but I honestly don’t know enough about the subject to say much about it. You provided so many awesome details!

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 1:02 pm | Permalink
  20. Psyche wrote:

    So I’m confused. On the one hand, the reference to his Florida testimony about the topic of gay adoption suggests that these are adoptive children to which he’s referring. But on the other, nowhere in the abstract is there a reference to limiting the study to adoptive or nonbiological parents.

    This is significant, because if homosexual orientation has a genetic component (and twin studies seem to point to some genetic component being likely, though certainly not the determinative factor), then of course gay biological parents will have more gay children, and would have more gay children even if any offspring were taken from them at birth and raised by 100% certified straight families.

    Is this research really that asinine and mendacious, or am I missing something?

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 1:10 pm | Permalink
  21. Moneypenny wrote:

    I had this exact feeling when I was watching “Bus Stop” the other day. That, “Man, feminism has fucked this up for me.” feeling. Woe is me.

    Also, kid of a queer couple here, I’m pretty sure the whole queer parents=more queer kids thing is due to not having that fear of being thrown away by your family if you come out, but whatever. I guess it’s better to grow up repressed and either (A) Kill yourself. (B) Kill other people. or (C) Try to live that BS lie about nuclear families, have the kids, THEN come out and make the other people in your life suffer the consequences of you not being brave enough to self actualize before 45.

    Right?

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 3:18 pm | Permalink
  22. Minty wrote:

    From what I read here: http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2010/10/17/27400

    The main problem is that the sources he used for his meta-analysis are not scientific studies, and are not random samples of children of LGBT people. In one of them the children-of-gay-couples that the author interviewed are about 50% gay and 50% straight, because the author deliberately selected them that way so there’d be a balance of points of view. What’s wrong with Schumm’s analysis is he’s claiming that the straight/LGBT ratio among children of LGBT people who are offered the chance to tell their stories in general-audience books, is the same as it is among all children of LGBT people. Which, as the authors of those books keep trying to tell him, isn’t true at all.

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 3:33 pm | Permalink
  23. emjaybee wrote:

    Yes, Howard Keel..also in the movie version of “Kiss Me Kate”! So basically the go-to guy for woman-oppressing musicals.

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 4:34 pm | Permalink
  24. DK wrote:

    Wow. Thanks to SA for the fabulous comment and to Minty for that extremely informative link. The whole thing is even worse than I thought, like how-can-it-even-pretend-to-be-scientific bad. The study was based on a collection of popular books! At least one of which deliberately included equal numbers of gay and straight children! It’s completely ludicrous, and I’m offended as a scientist and as a human being.

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 6:00 pm | Permalink
  25. Other Becky wrote:

    Psyche: No, you’re not missing anything; it really is that asinine and mendacious.

    SA: I love your comment and want to do your taxes for free.

    Bethany and everybody else who has commented on their adoration of classic musicals being somewhat soured upon rewatching them after discovering feminism: I am SO with you on that. I will always love Gigi, but it’s… pretty icky, actually. Some Gene Kelly movies hold up, though; when your male lead is somewhat on the small side, you at least can’t pull the Seven Brides-style physical bullshit.

    Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 10:11 pm | Permalink
  26. S.A. Small wrote:

    I am honored to have my initials all of a sudden.

    Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 5:03 am | Permalink
  27. Moneypenny wrote:

    Feminism Ruins Everything.

    Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 2:30 pm | Permalink
  28. SA wrote:

    Thanks for the repsonses, all. I put a link to my LinkedIn site in this one. Apparently I am now the proud recipient of pie, lawn mowing, and tax help! The Internet is a great place.

    I am definitely writing a letter to KState’s Human Ecology school about the homophobic remarks from their prof. And Minty, thanks for the further info – the incredible weakness of the argument based on biased selection of source material doesn’t shock me, but the fact that it got accepted for publication certainly does. Any first-year master’s student should be able to read the methods section of an article that bad and spot the problems with it right off.

    I’m really hoping to get a workshop accepted at a major conference in my field this year where I get to play field hockey with the assorted “science” conducted in the name of “understanding homosexuality,” since nearly all of it is an attempt to find some kind of cause… which implies what? that there is some kind of remedy, prevention, or cure, basically. All the brain studies, twin studies, middle finger length measuring, hormone studies, etc. are attempts to find some reason for people’s differences in sexual orientation (and they’re doing it to trans folk too.) Until science acknowledges it is not a neutral instrument and comes heavily-laden with an agenda even in the most “neutral” empirical studies (never mind bottom-feeding crap like what this tool is spooning out), it’s going to keep reinforcing some values-laden idea of “normal” at the expense of everyone else.

    Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 4:30 pm | Permalink
  29. Susan wrote:

    A kid in a class I once had BS’d his way through a presentation about the Rape of the Sabine Women by playing a clip from this movie. He chortled happily the whole way through. He also smirked every time he said “rape”. Hilarious.

    Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 7:03 pm | Permalink
  30. Kate wrote:

    I’m on the Feminism Ruins Everything bandwagon with this one. In a good way. I mean, yay feminism! But oh, Howard Keel and your lovely laugh… I miss you!

    I am too scared to rewatch seven brides, which was once one of my most loved movies. The dancing! The bass singing! The way she tips the table over in a fiesty rage! Thing is, of course it is flawed and icky like all old musicals but I could ignore that a bit and focus ont eh way that the women were making choices in an often choiceless society – limited, shitty choices, but at least they chose. But did they have to include a song about the sabine women, LITERALLY endorsing abduction and rape?

    Yes, I guess they did.

    Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 8:04 pm | Permalink
  31. brigidkeely wrote:

    The thing that bugs me most about the movie is that the young women hadn’t been there for 9 months yet and, in fact, hadn’t even met the dudes or been out of their parents’ sights 9 months ago, yet all claimed mothership to the crying child. Hello! They’d only been up there a short time! THEY WOULD HAVE HAD LARGE PREGNANT BELLIES! Also, yeah, the Stockholm Syndrome and abduction and “man as animals needing taming” and all the rest. But the lack of logic has bothered me since I was a kid.

    Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 9:52 pm | Permalink
  32. Brennan wrote:

    @ Mazarine,

    A Promise Keeper invited you to speak at a Promise Keepers’ conference? I highly reccommend running in the opposite direction. Seriously, there is not enough money in the world to justify legitimizing them with your presence.

    Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 11:05 pm | Permalink
  33. Emma wrote:

    “Schumm next went macro, poring over an anthropological study of various cultures’ acceptance of homosexuality. He found that when communities welcome gays and lesbians, “89 percent feature higher rates of homosexual behavior.””

    Gosh, more people openly engage in “homosexual behavior” in communities that are accepting of queerness? Clearly that’s because acceptance forced them to be That Way. I see no other possible explanation.

    Really, while I’m neither surprised nor really that angry (anymore) that jerks like this guy exist, I am pretty angry that a mainstream (i.e. not The Conservative News for People Who Hate the Gays) would report so uncritically on a study that’s got flaws that are obvious even to my English-major eyes.

    Monday, November 29, 2010 at 6:31 am | Permalink
  34. N'Awlins Contrarian wrote:

    Two things:

    Psyche is right–standing by itself (I have not read the article!), an assertion that gay parents have a higher proportion of gay children would tend to offer some evidence for a biological (maybe genetic) component to sexual orientation. On the other hand, IMOPO, the causes of an individual’s sexual orientation can be many and varied–to say that one particular thing or another substantially determines any particular individual’s orientation strikes me as way too simplistic.

    Second, there is nothing wrong with using a meta-analysis, but sometimes it is more appropriate than others. If there are, say, 10 or 20 reasonably reputable studies looking at similar, tightly-focused issues, a meta-analysis may provide insight that the individual studies lack the statistical power to provide. On the other hand, if there are, say, 100 studies of widely varied methodology and intellectual honesty/bias, looking at different questions, then cherry-picking 10 or 20 of them for a meta-analysis is probably junk science. Remember: figures don’t lie, but liars figure (and I say that despite being a strong believer in the value of numerical and statistical analysis).

    Monday, November 29, 2010 at 11:32 am | Permalink
  35. Alyssa wrote:

    Is it bad of me to actually love this movie? I mean, of course I know there are ridiculously sexist parts… but damn Frank is just so adorable and Millie is so badass…. And I actually watched this movie yesterday. What a crazy random happenstance!

    I agree though. To me this is an extremely old fashioned way of thinking and when people pull stuff like that my first reaction is “what is this? the 20’s? Women have the right to vote, right? yeah? then get off my back.”and I feel the same way about homosexual/transgendered people and their rights not to mention the continued racism within America. this is no longer the time when we can use ignorance as an excuse for this… The more I grow up, the more disheartened I become. This is not good.

    Monday, November 29, 2010 at 4:55 pm | Permalink
  36. KMS wrote:

    Anyone else think that Beardy McTassle’s singing sounded a bit like the Trololo guy? Eh? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUlw4NT08Ds&NR=1

    Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 3:12 pm | Permalink
  37. PaleFenix wrote:

    Thank you to SA for the informative comments and further info. This really helped with my understanding of Garland’s article. I’m outraged such drivel can be put out there as scientific fact.

    Also, thank you to ALIEN TEA for pointing out the obvious, so what? There is nothing wrong with being gay.

    Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 4:58 pm | Permalink
  38. Bethany G. wrote:

    I haven’t read the study so I can’t comment on what it says. But just for the sake of argument, perhaps it’s not that same-gender parents have more gay children. Maybe more of those children who are gay come out, since they don’t face the same worry that children of opposite gender parents would about the question of acceptance.

    Just a thought. And as someone else said, even if same gender parents do have more gay kids: so what??

    Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 8:38 am | Permalink
  39. Zes wrote:

    When I reached 6 or so, I was watching “Seven Brides” as I often had before, and at the end of the barn dance sequence, I turned off the TV. I said to my parents that the rest of the movie was silly and boring and did not watch past that point again. I only liked the bit where Millie takes control, and hated the rapey Stockholm Syndrome second act. Even aged 6 I just COULD NOT BUY women falling in love with men who had treated them that way. I didn’t have the words to express it, I only knew it was absurd and wrong. I don’t think I even knew the word feminism yet.

    Friday, December 3, 2010 at 11:38 pm | Permalink