Anti-LGBT Rhetoric in Politics

Repeat after me:  Correlation is not causation. 

This is a fact the people who do not understand how to interpret research and statistics often ignore as they attempt to legitimize their bigotry, prejudice, and hate by citing intelligent sounding and reasonably conducted research.

And I’m tired of it.

Here’s the classic example in the LGBT community.  I’ve talked about this before.  It’s no secret that the prevalence of depression and rates of suicide and suicidal ideation is higher in the LGBT community than the non-LGBT community.  Law makers and religious leaders are quick to draw attention to this.  They capitalize on this correlation (relationship or connection between two or more things) and make the heinously inaccurate statement that this means that depression and suicide are caused by an LGBT identity.  Legitimate research (that is, research that does not enter into a study with a preconceived notion of what the outcome will be based on things like religious convictions) has found that the majority of incidents of depression/suicide within the LGBT community are not due to the LGBT identity.  These feelings and tragedies are environmentally based due to fear of rejection or reprisal by people in the environment as well as fear of judgment by divine forces and family members.  What this legitimate research tells us is that, upon coming out (or transitioning in the case of trans individuals), and the establishment of a solid support system based on authentic ownership of the individual’s identity, suicide and depression rate plummet dramatically.

But, of course, politicians and religious leaders don’t go into all of that.  They simply pull out numbers from studies and run with them in order to frighten people or to appear educated.  I mean, look at what’s going on in North Carolina, Mississippi, and Tennessee.   Look at Minnesota’s Glenn Gruenhagen who continues to introduce hate-based legislation by pretending he’s actually informed and compassionate. 

And it’s not just in the United States.  Conservatives the world over play this game—a game in which they win political standing and the truth loses relevance. 

Today I learned of a German politician by the name of Katrin Ebner-Steiner who is a member of one of Germany’s conservative political parties.  Ms Ebner-Steiner believes that children with same-sex parents are more likely to be criminals and that teaching children about LGBT rights will set Germany back 60 years.  She states:

“The traditional family image offers children the most protection against ideological confusion, against drugs and criminality,…Only the traditional family image guarantees healthy interpersonal bonds, is meaningful and encourages entrenchment with the home land….Only the traditional family image can reunite our partially splintered society.”

Despite the fact that this is a German politician promoting her vision of German politics, the announcement of her beliefs made me very angry.  This article may be about Germany but politicians in the United States do the exact same thing every day. 

Would you like to know the truth behind the statistics?  They are troubling.  The problem is that because marriage equality is a new thing and same-sex couples with children tended to cover their relationship in fear of potential consequences, particularly in more conservative regions of the country, a lot of data are not available on the subject.  Heck, it wasn’t until this past month that same-sex couples were finally able to adopt in all fifty states.

So, without significant research at hand, this is what I can share with you and then I will draw some pretty solid conclusions based on the data.

A 2010 study done at Queen Mary University in London, using data from Sweden, found that, in their data, there was no predictive relationship between the criminality of adoptive parents and adopted children.  The children of parents demonstrated a criminal tendency that could not be recognized or grounded in the adoptive family.  What this means is that the adoptive parents had no criminal records, were often middle to upper class professionals, and yet their adoptive children developed anti-social tendencies that led them to criminal activity.

What’s the alternative to same-sex parenting of adopted children?  The foster care system.  It’s not like non-LGBT couples are stepping up to take in these kids. 

This article from the online journal STIR draws attention to the following statistics:

·        200,000 children are currently in stranger (non-relative) foster homes

·        On average a foster child will spend 23 months in foster care.

·        During that 23 months, 20% of children will experience 10 or more placements, dramatically affecting their ability to attach to caregivers and trust adults.

·        In 2012, nearly 36,000 foster children had been waiting more than three years to return home or to be adopted, and 24,000 had been waiting more than five years.

·        Kids in foster care are 12% more likely to be prescribed psychotropic meds (This number surprises me and deserves further investigation at another time—it’s easier to medicate a child than help the child work through the trust and anger issues the system has produced in the child.)

·        Foster children experience PTSD at twice the rate as Iraq War Veterans.

·        As the children age out of foster care

o   Despite an increased need for health services, particularly mental health services, 33% of adults out of the foster system lacked insurance

o   By the age of 25, 81 percent of all male foster care alumni had been arrested once, and 35 percent had been incarcerated.

And from the same study, here’s some of the most shocking information.  Adults who had been in foster care as children suffered worse prognoses than their peers in almost all domains (foster care/general population):

·        PTSD: 25% / 4.5%

·        Depression: 24.3% / 10.6%

·        Anxiety: 43% / 5.1%

·        Addiction/alcoholism: 11.1% / 2.5%

·        Males convicted of a crime: 60% / 10%

·        Homeless for more than one day: 22% / 2%.

Every expert agrees that the foster care system in the United States is in crisis.  This recent study offered by the ACLU observes:

Right now there is a critical shortage of adoptive and foster parents in the United States. As a result, many children have no permanent homes, while others are forced to survive in an endless series of substandard foster homes. It is estimated that there are 500,000 children in foster care nationally, and 100,000 need to be adopted.  But last year there were qualified adoptive parents available for only 20,000 of these children. Many of these children have historically been viewed as "unadoptable" because they are not healthy white infants. Instead, they are often minority children and/or adolescents, many with significant health problems.

But here’s the thing.  Adoption doesn’t magically make these issues disappear.  Grief, anger, trauma, multiple placements, multiple schools, trust issues….all of these things combine in even the youngest of adoptive children and continue to build during certain periods of development, particularly the teenage years when identity is such a crucial area of exploration for children.  Common sense tells us that if you start with a shaky foundation, no matter what you build, it’s not going to be solid.   With late-placed adoptions, of which same-sex couple adoptions count as highest in available data, these early experiences, both in the birth home and in the system, continue to be worked out in the adoptive family.  The adoptive family mitigates some of the earlier damage but trauma doesn’t just go away with love and hugs.  It often takes a lifetime to recover. 

By the way, that ACLU study offers some very good facts about same-sex adoptive parents.

Doctor Benjamin Siegel, a school of pediatrics professor, co-authored a report in the American Academy of Pediatrics, in which he:

·        Argues convincingly against the notion that children/adoptive children of same-sex couples are disadvantaged

·        Cites a national longitudinal study of Lesbian led families (a longitudinal study being a study that is done over an extended period of time).  This study began in 1986.  When researches recently “checked in” with the families they found: 

their children indicated that they had high levels of social, school/academic, and total competence and fewer social problems, rule-breaking, and aggressive and externalizing behavior compared with their age-matched counterparts,…The self-reported quality of life of the adolescents in this sample was similar to that reported by a comparable sample of adolescents with heterosexual parents.

·        Soundly confronts the work of sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas, of whom I’ve previously written.  Dr. Siegel easily discredits Regnerus’ findings.  Regnerus is often cited as an authority by conservative activist groups like the Family Research Council, which is famously anti-LGBT.

So, here’s the bottomline.  We don’t have conclusive research.  If certain politicians and religious leaders would stop frightening the LGBT community with their attempts at legalizing discrimination and systematic oppression of LGBT people, perhaps we could engage in more detailed research without adding to the fear and anxiety of the same-sex couples we need to interview.  People aren’t going to volunteer for studies like this and be honest in their self-reporting if they’re constantly afraid of undue scrutiny and retribution. 

But what this data does tell us?  The system is failing.  So, politicians and religious leaders who want to take away a child’s opportunity to be loved in a stable environment?  If you really want to make a difference, do it before the child experiences trauma and disruption.  I’m talking about addressing things like poverty, health care, mental healthcare, and addiction before a child can be affected by these things and victimized by a system that claims it cares for their welfare but clearly didn’t care enough to give their hurting parents what they needed.  There is no scapegoating this out to the LGBT community, politicians.  This is on you.  If you weren’t so busy defunding programs and attacking the poor and the victimized, study after study (some of which I’ve cited here) tell us that children would never have to be taken from their homes in the first place.

The other thing we know?  The thing that anyone who has ever taken a class in psychology or sociology can tell  you?  There are far too many variables involved in these studies for anyone to ever make a statement about correlation and causation.  

Stop treating people like they’re too stupid to know what you’re doing with your numbers. 

Stop pretending we don’t know how you’re twisting (if not simply inventing) facts.

Are you listening Glenn Gruenhagen? 

How about you Governor McCrory?

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