You’re right, that’s so true on both sides. We all need to be more thorough in social research. To me, it’s one more indicator that many of these issues are not questions best left to science.

For more information about what we believe regarding marriage and family, and why we believe it, you may find this helpful:

http://www.lds.org/library/display/0,4945,161-1-11-1,00.html

We believe that the men who wrote this document are spokesmen for God today.

Thanks for commenting, we appreciate it. We’d love to hear more of your thoughts on future posts as well! I also enjoyed reading your blog.

But I also believe that Heavenly Father’s commandments make sense and are designed to make us all happy, even if we don’t always immediately see the reasons why. So I expect that investigation eventually renders reasonable his commandments, especially if we’re searching in the right way. It often takes time, though.

One way that I think gay adoption isn’t right is that it inherently deprives a child of either a father or a mother. Children are entitled to both a father and a mother; its a natural right. Gay adoption denies them that right by design, not by incidence (as would be the case when, for example, a husband dies before his wife gives birth).

By the way, VitaminBook, I’ve perused your blog. You have a great writing style, and you seem pretty level-headed and thoughtful. I appreciate you talking things over like this.

I’m hesitant to place too much faith in anything put out by NARTH (they have something of a ‘dubious’ history when it comes to this stuff) but I’ll certainly read what you sent me. What worries me is that people who do studies like this tend to come out with the result that they want to see – in other words, a researcher working for NARTH is almost inevitably going to find one thing while a secular, pro-homosexuality researcher is inevitably going to find the opposite. I’m not suggesting that anyone is faking the results, just agreeing that this stuff isn’t easy to track scientifically.

I’m not religious, so I obviously don’t lend any weight to religious arguments, but I can see where religious people are coming from – the Bible (or your sacred text of choice) is pretty clear on homosexuality. But I’m wondering, would you vote for or against a law enabling gay couples to become parents (we’ll say through adoption rather than something like IVF)?

But that’s not really the question. The question is whether science can judge how well children are being raised. That is not a scientific question; it’s a moral one. In any of the studies mentioned, the criteria for “better” involves non-moral criteria such as health of children, academic achievement, or odds of accepting and exploring homosexuality themselves. Scientific studies could, for example, detect that children raised by two lesbian partners are more likely to accept and explore homosexuality (they have). But whether that is good is a moral judgment.

Since when did any scientific study justify a moral claim? Science can never say that one thing is “better” than another; it can only detect differences, and it is up to us, as moral agents, to determine whether those differences are good or bad. And if your criteria for good or bad has only to do with health, academic achievement, or social life (being accepting of people who are different is often a psychological criteria for a healthy social life, so of course children of same-sex parents score higher by that standard), then it will be easy to demonstrate “scientifically” that children of same-sex parents are just as well off, if not better off.

We do not need to justify moral claims with scientific studies. I believe it is morally better to have two parents of the opposite gender, and morally indigent to have a same-sex couple as parents. That is because doing so would contradict Heavenly Father’s plan for his children, and any time we ignore his affirmations of right and wrong, we sin and set ourselves up for misery and unnecessary pain.

How many scientific studies back this up?