Courtesy Randi James
Not many people will argue against the necessity of having a father in one's life. We have been so ingrained to accept this as a fact that to challenge this assertion would seem absurd. Everyone from from religious persons to psychologists will tell you how important a father is in a child's development. But they have been lying. It has been a social control mechanism. Ohh, but get ready for the backlash...men don't like being told that they aren't important, and the women who support these notions, love to support these men (meaning, they, the women, will be angry, too)!
Yesterday's article on CNN entitled, Kids of lesbians have fewer behavioral problems, study suggests, is sure to have "them" screaming mad:

A nearly 25-year study concluded that children raised in lesbian households were psychologically well-adjusted and had fewer behavioral problems than their peers.
The study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, followed 78 lesbian couples who conceived through sperm donations and assessed their children's well-being through a series of questionnaires and interviews...
Children from lesbian families rated higher in social, academic and total competence. They also showed lower rates in social, rule-breaking, aggressive problem behavior.
Ouch! Kinda tramples on the male ego...at least those in the fathers' rights camps...the ones that think single mother households are such a nasty infection, feminism is evil, and welfare lets women birth unlimited babies while replacing/eliminating the man. *eye roll*
But as I said, there are women who will be upset as well:
Wendy Wright, president of the Concerned Women for America, a group that supports biblical values, questioned the legitimacy of the findings from a study funded by gay advocacy groups.
"That proves the prejudice and bias of the study," she said. "This study was clearly designed to come out with one outcome -- to attempt to sway people that children are not detrimentally affected in a homosexual household."
Wright questioned the objectivity of Gartrell's research, saying the author can "cherry pick people who are involved and the info they release."
"In essence, this study claims to purport that children do better when raised by lesbians," she said...
Studies have shown that children thrive having both a mother and a father, Wright said.
"You have to be a little suspicious of any study that says children being raised by same-sex couples do better or have superior outcomes to children raised with a mother and father," she said. "It just defies common sense and reality."
Well, Wendy, unfortunately, we'd have to pull a hell of a lot of studies off the market for bias related to funding. In fact, we should probably stop letting the government give out grant monies for all these "fatherhood demonstration" projects...and while we are at it, pull money from religious groups as well. To which studies are you referring, Wendy? What were their funding sources? And why shouldn't we be suspicious of studies regarding heterosexual, married persons? Not applying equal skepticism just defies commons sense and reality. If you really want to know about funding and bias, see the Let's Get Honest blog.
And we also have a recent article entitled, Are Fathers Necessary?, which begins by talking about Barack Obama, who we already know to have some serious psychological issues regarding fatherhood (see Obama and His Fathercentricism):
There’s only one problem: none of this is proven. In the February issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family, Judith Stacey, a professor of sociology at New York University, and Timothy Biblarz, a demographer from the University of Southern California, consolidated the available data on the role of gender in child rearing. As Stacey and Biblarz point out, our ideas of what dads do and provide are based primarily on contrasts between married-couple parents and single-female parents: an apples-to-oranges exercise that conflates gender, sexual orientation, marital status, and biogenetic relationships in ways that a true comparison of parent gender—one that compared married gay-male couples or married lesbian couples to married heterosexuals, or single fathers to single mothers—would not. Most of the data fail to distinguish between a father and the income a father provides, or between the presence of a father and the presence of a second parent, regardless of gender.
    So, the conclusion, once again, is that gender is irrelevant. Children do well when they have the emotional and financial support of whomever raises them (which still happens to be mothers, you know. I mean, this could change if men continued to increase their roles, beginning in infancy, but with women still being the ones bearing the pregnancy, and having the lactating breasts, it can be so damn hard to break this!) Damn, is this so hard to understand? How much more money must be spent covering this same shit? See Also: Say What, Michael Lamb?: Two Parents Not Required Related Posts : fatherhood myths


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