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Are gay parents more likely to raise gay children?

Are gay parents more likely to raise gay children?


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All children are gay-ish at one point. It's the latency period where strong bonds are formed with your own gender and the other gender has 'cooties'. It's an important and necessary stage of human development. The sex drive hasn't yet formed pre-puberty, so that's why latency is gay-ish.

That period never seems to end in some Arab communities.

But beside that point, I do wonder if there is credence that homosexuality is a developmental delay. When I was working on my undergrad, there were psychoanalytic minded professors who were quite certain that homosexuality was simply arrested sexual development. And to be honest, I do feel that way sometimes. I identify much easier with men and I'm not particularly fond of women. It makes me wonder if I never grew out of the "girls have cooties" stage. Weirder still is I had girlfriends when I was in elementary school but my desire to hang around girls sharply declined around the time I entered puberty. In fact, I would like to see studies on gay men and women's attitudes towards the opposite sex to see if there is a correlation.

Freud seemed to feel that homosexuality had to be examined on a case by case basis because some individuals demonstrated higher biological predispositions than others. I like that he viewed humans as innately bisexual and that we develop into heterosexuals and homosexuals based on a mixture of socialization and biological influences. But if Freud could see homosexuality as just a normal variation of sexual function, then I certainly can't complain.
 
It doesn't look good for the research posted by the OP.

An Oct. 17 Box Turtle Bulletin story about Schumm’s new paper said that it "picks up where" Cameron’s earlier study "left off." "Cameron’s paper, also published in JBS, was just another example of the shoddy "scholarship" and deliberate distortion of other publications that we’ve come to expect from him. Schumm’s paper seeks to replicate Cameron’s work while acknowledging some of the criticisms of Cameron’s 2006 paper. It’s important to emphasize however that Schumm only acknowledges some of the criticisms. The most important criticism - the completely non-random nature of the so-called "dataset" that Cameron used - Schumm not only ignores, but he repeats that same flaw and embellishes it in a grandly enlarged form."

The article then goes into a more detailed critique of Schumm’s methodology and conclusions, including what the article says is a habit of "picking out a small paragraph of other researchers’ work while ignoring that researcher’s primary findings in the hope that nobody would notice." The Box Turtle Bulletin article dismisses Schumm’s paper, saying, "Schumm comes off appearing more ’sciencey’ than Cameron, but his methodology is exactly the same. And when you use the same methodology, you end up with the same result: junk science."

That is a reasonable criticism of his research. But that is nothing compared to this...

But Schumm’s “meta-analysis” (and Cameron’s before him) doesn’t even have the benefit of being built off of random convenience samples. There were no convenience samples in any of the ten prior works that Schumm used for his meta-analysis. In fact, they weren’t even professional studies. They were popular books!

That’s right, each of the ten sources that Schumm used to construct his “meta-analysis” were from general-audience books about LGBT parenting and families, most of which are available on Amazon.com. Schumm read the books, took notes on each parent and child described in the book, examined their histories, and counted up who was gay and who was straight among the kids. The ten books were:

That is on par with Cameron's use of newspaper articles and obituaries for "scientific" study. I'm pretty confident we can put the study in the OP under "junk science".

http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/tag/walter-r-schumm

If you go on to read the article, at least one of the books Schumm used was deliberately not representative. The author chose stories in order to provide a balanced perspective.
 
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Unless homosexuality is hardwired at birth...the answer would have to be "yes". If environment plays any part then being raised by gays would at the very least make "becoming" gay easier and more acceptable.
 
Unless homosexuality is hardwired at birth...the answer would have to be "yes".

This is a strange dichotomiization of neurology. The brain does not work in that fashion. Our behaviors become more "hardwired" the older we get. We go through two periods of massive neural "death" in our lives, one that occurs in childhood and another that occurs in early adulthood. As such, young children are massively more flexible in their thinking than adults. While we have periods of development that could be considered "hardwired", such as the period in which we begin learning language, I'm not sure that science has yet identified periods of sexual development. I do know that after the second period of neural "death" is when the symptoms of schizophrenia begin to appear for many people and that generally occurs in a person's early 20s, so certain behaviors are becoming "hardwired" in us that late in our lives.

If environment plays any part then being raised by gays would at the very least make "becoming" gay easier and more acceptable.

Becoming or expressing? Sexual orientation and identity are important distinctions to make. Some studies have found that the most homophobic people tend to become very sexually aroused at the sight of homoerotic imagery, which leads me to believe that people learn one of two ways of expressing same sex attractions. They either become gay or they become homophobic.
 
I guess it depends if you're one of those people who tries to be like their parents or one of those people who makes an effort not to be like their parents.
 
It's not bigoted. I believe that homosexuality is a combination of nature and nurture. We don't know of any gay gene, but we do know hormones can influence behavior. We know there are psychological links within homosexuality too. Science doesn't completely understand everything about it. People who believe it is purely "rubbed off" aren't bigoted, they just have a different view of unproven and disputed science.

Can you explain to us what the straight gene is?
 
Just ask those who claim that homosexuality is a "defect" to describe how sexual orientation... ANY sexual orientation is formed. Then sit back and watch their heads explode.

It's a scary thought when people think there would actually be a gene responsible for homosexuality. Notice the singularity of 'a gene'. The scariest part is that people ask for evidence of 'a gay gene' knowing full well that even the simplest questions involving human genetics involve various genes. It's kind of like asking for the one rock that is keeping the pyramids standing.
 
Of course kids raised by gay parents will more likely be gay. The people you spend tons of time with rub off on you, and your parents have a huge influence on you. If your parents smoked weed around you, you're more likely to smoke weed. If your parents have sex in front of you, you're probably more likely to be sexually active earlier. If your dad is Burt Gummer from Tremors, you're more likely to be a gun owner. This is pretty simple logic, don't you think?
 
Of course kids raised by gay parents will more likely be gay. The people you spend tons of time with rub off on you, and your parents have a huge influence on you. If your parents smoked weed around you, you're more likely to smoke weed. If your parents have sex in front of you, you're probably more likely to be sexually active earlier. If your dad is Burt Gummer from Tremors, you're more likely to be a gun owner. This is pretty simple logic, don't you think?

Not necessarily logical in the least and proven false by research.
 
I went and did some more research on this issue. I'm questioning Dr. Schumm's objectivity. He was a witness for the plaintiffs in the recent Appeals court case in Florida on their gay adoption ban, which was overturned. He argued that gay parents should be determined by the courts on a case by case basis. His research methods also sound suspect. The fact that he keeps standing up for Paul Cameron is also troubling. Paul Cameron is one of the most virulently anti gay people in the country by any measure, and only the Westboro Baptist Church takes any of his unpublished research seriously.

I will have to wait until Schumm's research has been published and is subject to peer review, but I'm skeptical of his statistical methods and agenda.



That gut Schumm is a hack. He's another one of those people, in my opinion, that is looking way too hard for something that isn't there, regarding gay people.

I wonder if Schumm thinks kids raised by gay foster parents or those who are adopted by gay people are more likely to be gay? He probably does. It makes just as much sense as his other opinions.
 
Being homosexual is pure nature. Suppressing or embracing those feelings is nurture.

Children of homosexual couples are less likely to suppress homosexual curiosity but just having homosexual parents won't make someone sexually attracted to the similar sex. My parents both being white and brunette has no weight on me dating a white brunette person vs an Asian red head.
 
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