Richard – Yes, you have it right.

I will reply to Robert later.

This statement is troublesome. Is Dr. Enright confusing homosexuality as an orientation (or SSA as he prefers to say) with some kind of gay “lifestyle”? A homosexual orientation does not imply any particular “lifestyle.” The word lifestyle is fuzzy too. It is a euphemism, the meaning of which varies widely. Is it behavioral, social, relational, sexual, or what? It is difficult to pretend we are being scientific when the terms are so fuzzy.

I agree with Warren. It doesn’t matter if we say 2+3 or 3+2. The order makes no difference to the answer. The only sense I can make of Dr. Enright’s semantic distinction is if he is implying a temporal distinction, in other words, that WT is saying the men were homosexually oriented (or in a supposed “SSA lifestyle”?) and then got married heterosexually while Sirota (Enright believes) is talking about heterosexually married men who then “caught” the same-sex attraction bug. That’s nonsense.

Unfortunately, it seems Dr. Enright has raised a supposed distinction that none of us can see and waved goodbye before we could ask for clarification. I don’t see what any of this adds to the discussion about Fitzgibbons misrepresenting Sirota’s research. For all our attempts to understand it, it appears to be another distraction.

The point about Fitzgibbons’ position, as I understand it, is that he was citing Sirota in order to make a point (that having two parents of the same sex is not good [whatever that means] for children) that Sirota was NOT making, because she was talking about something else – namely ‘mixed orientation’ marriages. That is why Warren is criticizing him, and I fail to see why Warren is wrong to do so. If Sirota had been talking about same-sex couples, then Fitzgibbons could, logically-speaking, have used her conclusions in the way he did.

@ Warren

Have I got my appraisal of the situation about right (in a nutshell)?

I do know one thing Dr. Enright, that if you can show Warren that he is wrong, he will admit it and make a correction. He has done this before.

So now we have two mathematical equations:

1) heterosexual marriage to SSA patterns of some kind (the Sirota study). A first, then B;

2) SSA patterns of some kind (unspecified by Dr. Throckmorton) to heterosexual marriage. B first then A.

I can make this simple. Robert, look at your summary of Fitzgibbons’ position:

There is *indirect* (not direct) evidence in the peer-reviewed scientific literature showing statistically significant (in the case of Sarantakos and Sirota) negative effects for children when at least one LGB parent is studied scientifically.

Just leave it at Fitzgibbons claims that one LGB parents is bad for children. I don’t care what order you state marriage and LGB. State LGB first or second, it doesn’t matter, Fitzgibbons and apparently you think LGB parents in a marriage is harmful to kids. You are trying to find a distinction without a difference.

Take either A or B, what is being asserted by Fitzgibbons is offensive to LGB people who marry heterosexually which is what a mixed orientation marriage is.

Now, to your assumptions that the parents involved in Sirota went into a “SSA lifestyle,” we don’t know what they did. Some did come out to their wives, some came out privately to the daughters, some never admitted it but the daughters assumed it, some were likely out to the wife and then came out to the daughter. All of these are true of evangelical and Catholic couples I have worked with. You cannot selectively generalize Sirota to the couples you want. If you are going to improperly generalize this study, you need to go all the way and generalize to both your scenarios (1 and 2 above). In truth, Sirota is so weak in sampling, that I don’t think it means much of anything, except that parental disruption causes distress in children.

Now, it seems to me that outcomes might be different in each of these scenarios. However, SIrota did not control for this or do separate analyses on each group. She has not done separate analyses on the daughters where parents divorced and where they didn’t. Even though these analyses were not done, Fitzgibbons and you persist in saying that this study is sound for the purposes you propose – and that is, that the study says something scientific about gay parenting.