{"id":1808,"date":"2013-03-30T08:53:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-30T13:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/?p=1808"},"modified":"2013-03-30T11:18:16","modified_gmt":"2013-03-30T16:18:16","slug":"scalia-takes-it-from-bad-to-really-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/2013\/03\/30\/scalia-takes-it-from-bad-to-really-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"Scalia Takes it from “Bad” to “Really Bad”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Screen<\/a>Remember how I said it was the worst spring break ever? Well, I’m usually not one to dwell on the dismal, but sometimes circumstances dictate the mood. I\u2019m speaking, of course, of Justice Antonin Scalia\u2019s comment in the Supreme Court hearings on the U.S. law defining marriage that \u201cthere\u2019s considerable disagreement among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not.\u201d<\/header>\n
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(Truth be told, my surly disposition may also have something to do with the fact that my disappointing spring break turned into a nasty stomach flu this week, thus causing me to miss all of the annual Midwest\u00a0sociology meetings in Chicago—one of my favorite associations in one of my favorite cities. But that\u2019s making the personal a bit more public than may be appropriate.)<\/header>\n
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Back to Scalia. There are several disturbing aspects about Scalia\u2019s assertion. First and most basic, sociologists aren\u2019t<\/em> actually divided on this matter. Here\u2019s the official American Sociological Association<\/a>‘s statement:<\/header>\n
\n

The claim that same-sex parents produce\u00a0less positive child outcomes than opposite-sex\u00a0parents—either because such families lack both a male\u00a0and female parent or because both parents are not the\u00a0biological parents of their children—contradicts\u00a0abundant social science research. Decades of\u00a0methodologically sound social science research,\u00a0especially multiple nationally representative studies\u00a0and the expert evidence introduced in the district\u00a0courts below, confirm that positive child wellbeing is\u00a0the product of stability in the relationship between the\u00a0two parents, stability in the relationship between the\u00a0parents and child, and greater parental socioeconomic\u00a0resources. Whether a child is raised by same-sex or\u00a0opposite-sex parents has no bearing on a child\u2019s\u00a0wellbeing. The clear and consistent consensus in the social\u00a0science profession is that across a wide range of\u00a0indicators, children fare just as well when they are\u00a0raised by same-sex parents when compared to children\u00a0raised by opposite-sex parents.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pretty clear, huh? No disagreement. No division or dispute. The research shows that children do just as well when raised by same-sex parents as they do when raised by two parents of the opposite sex.<\/p>\n

How did Scalia miss that? Good question. Especially because it turns out that this paragraph summarizing the state of social scientific research and knowledge on the topic wasn\u2019t published in an academic journal or buried in press release or anything like that. It\u2019s from the\u00a0amicus curiae<\/i>\u00a0brief\u00a0<\/a>that the ASA filed in the very case Scalia was commenting on.\u00a0In other words, as Ezra Klein<\/a>\u00a0put on March 29:<\/p>\n

[T]he official organization representing American sociologists went out of their way to provide the Supreme Court with their \u201cconsensus\u201d opinion on the effect of same-sex parents on children. And yet, when struggling for a \u201cconcrete\u201d harm that could come from gay marriage, Scalia went with \u201cconsiderable disagreement among sociologists.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So this is the second disturbing dimension of Scalia’s comment.\u00a0Klein explains further what is so troubling:<\/p>\n

So we\u2019ve gone from a weak claim— \u201cconsiderable disagreement\u201d over harm is not the same thing as actual harm—to an explicitly wrong claim. Scalia offered no details or evidence of this considerable disagreement among sociologists, and it\u2019s hard to believe he\u2019s a better judge of the profession than the ASA, whose brief he notably declined to mention.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s all unfortunate enough. But what really has me thinking and brought me down into the depths is the larger, cynical message about social science that is being sent. For Scalia and his ilk, there is no real knowledge in the social sciences, no authority. Not even any real data or useful information. Just a lot of disagreement and differences of opinion. This disturbing message and implication compounds the frustrations and concerns about (lack of) public understanding of the significance, importance, and value of the social sciences I expressed last week in my little commentary on the Congressional attacks on NSF funding for political science. \u00a0More to say here, obviously, much more, though I’m not sure I’ve got stomach for it right now.<\/p>\n

(If you skipped the link above, here it is again: The ASA’s\u00a0amicus curiae\u00a0<\/em>brief<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<\/header>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember how I said it was the worst spring break ever? Well, I’m usually not one to dwell on the dismal, but sometimes circumstances dictate the mood. I\u2019m speaking, of course, of Justice Antonin Scalia\u2019s comment in the Supreme Court hearings on the U.S. law defining marriage that \u201cthere\u2019s considerable disagreement among sociologists as to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1815,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/files\/2013\/03\/Screen-shot-2013-03-30-at-8.50.51-AM-e1364651530372.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1808"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1819,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808\/revisions\/1819"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}