Since humanity began, children have been raised by mothers and fathers.  Whether that is due to evolutionary pressures or God is irrelevant to the conclusion that children must benefit from having two parents of different genders.

Recently the MSM has been trumpeting a study that supposedly says that children of gay couples are better off than children who have a father and a mother.

To anyone who has been a parent, or a child in a family with two parents of different genders, that sounds like gays protesting too much.  Experience, and common sense, tells us that women and men bring unique things to their children.  No matter how much a man loves his children, he can’t be a mother, and a mother cannot be a father.  Men and women are simply not interchangeable – that’s why organizations like Big Brothers and Big Sisters are so important for children with just one parent.

Not surprisingly, it turns out that as with modern climate “science,” the reality is that this study from Australia is mostly propaganda, with little if any science.

The first problem is that the gay families used in the study were self-selecting.  That is, instead of randomly picking gay couples, the study had gay couples contact the studies' authors.  Even worse, the gays knew that the intent of the study was to assess the impact of gay parents on children. 

If the study showed that children raised in gay families had more problems than average children, it would be a major setback for gay attempts to portray their lifestyle as normal.  Hence, the gays participating in the study had every reason to want to ensure that the study showed that gays are great parents.

Now, if someone proposed a study where the objective was to show that children raised in Christian families did better than children raised in families where the parents did not practice any faith and asked Christian couples to volunteer, does anyone doubt that many Christians would volunteer just to help prove that they were better parents?  In addition, wouldn’t Christian families with troubled kids tend to avoid being in the study?

Given the continual push by gays to be accepted as normal, the temptation for any gay couple to join a study with the intent of showing that they are great parents, or to avoid the study since they aren’t great parents, would be rather severe.  But that sort of selection bias – recruiting only those who have a need to ensure that the survey comes up with a specific result – destroys any credibility the study might have.

That reason alone would mean that the Australian study is useless.  It doesn’t prove that children raised in gay families have more problems than do children who are raised in the evolutionarily normal families – for that, see this study – but it can’t tell us anything about how the average child in a gay family compares to the average child in an evolutionarily normal family.

Note too that the assessment of the “average” child in a heterosexual family is based on random sampling of families; there is no self-selection bias, as is the case with the children in gay families.

But amazingly, the selection bias is not the real problem with this study.  The real problem is that the children were not the source of the children’s assessments.  Rather, the gay parents assessed their own children.

Anyone who has kids or who knows anyone who knows kids knows that few if any parents are objective observers of their children.  Parents almost uniformly overestimate the quality of their children and minimize the level of problems their children endure.  Even when they don’t, they are going to be very reluctant to share with strangers, even scientists, that their children are a mess.

It’s hardly shocking that gay parents – who know that it’s critical for their cause of becoming considered normal by society that the children they are raising must appear to be just as well off as, or even better off than, children raised by heterosexual parents – would not be objective reporters.  The reality is that they would tend to either intentionally or unintentionally overestimate the quality of their children’s lives.

There are other problems with the survey – a good critical review is linked above – but these two are sufficient to totally disqualify the study as a source of any conclusions about the impact of same-sex parents on children.

With the deck as fully stacked as it could be, it’s not surprising that this “scientific” study concludes that either evolution or God got it wrong and children are better off being raised by either two mommies or two daddies.

This is just the latest in a long string of examples of liberals distorting science to advance their agenda.  Just as Sagan’s nuclear winter theory melted under the light of actual analysis, it’s clear that any objective review of this study will show it to be useless.

But the liberal noise machine doesn’t care about truth; it cares only about advancing its agenda.

That’s why this story will flash across the landscape and be invoked without questioning, while studies that follow standard scientific protocols to avoid bias and that show the opposite are either ignored or condemned.

But now that you know “the rest of the story,” you can correct your well-meaning friends who haven’t learned that science as reported by the MSM is whatever liberals want it to be.

You can read more of Tom’s rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter.