Mar 02, 2007  |  By: ELIZABETH PERRY  | COMMENTS     

Gay rights advocacy groups hosted a teleconference with social scientists this week to denounce what they call a “disinformation campaign” by the religious right.

Jeff Lutes, executive director of Soulforce, a gay religious group, and Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, which seeks to counter the “ex-gay” movement, hosted the panel. Lutes said the most recent example of research distortion by religious conservatives came in the form of a Time magazine guest column by James Dobson, founder of anti-gay evangelical group Focus on the Family. The column, in which Dobson commented on Mary Cheney’s pregnancy, was published in December.  

“Those who oppose civil equality for gays and lesbians are actively distorting, cherry-picking and misrepresenting the social science research in their attempts to justify discrimination,” Lutes said. “The problem is the general public reads articles like Dobson’s and believes mistakenly that the research supports discrimination against same-gender parents and their children.”

Besen said groups like Focus on the Family start with a conclusion and manipulate the research to make it fit their beliefs.

“What separates this organization and others like it on the far right is the complete indifference to the evidence,” he said. “When evidence contradicts their stated conclusion at the beginning, they won’t adjust their point of view, they will adjust the research.”

Several researchers joined the gay rights activists in objecting to the way Dobson represented their findings.

Members of Monday’s panel included researcher Judith Stacey, Department of Sociology, New York University; Serena Volpp, chair of the Committee on Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Issues, American Pediatric Association; Jean Quam, dean of the School of Social Work, University of Minnesota and chair of the National Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Issues; Brian Dew, of the American Counseling Association; and Clinton Anderson, director of the Office of Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Concerns at the American Psychological Association.

In his Time guest column published Dec. 12, Dobson used Cheney’s pregnancy to take aim at same-sex parenting, stating that gay and lesbian families are incomplete without a parent of the opposite sex.

“With all due respect to Cheney and her partner, Heather Poe, the majority of more than 30 years of social-science evidence indicates that children do best on every measure of well-being when raised by their married mother and father,” Dobson wrote.

He went on to say that “gender matters,” citing information found in “Fatherneed: Why Father Care is as Essential as Mother Care for Your Child,” by Kyle Pruett of Yale Medical School.

“Pruett says dads are critically important simply because ‘fathers do not mother,’” Dobson wrote. 

Pruett wrote a letter to Dobson after the piece was published, requesting that Dobson not use his research in any of his media campaigns without Pruett’s permission. Dobson quoted the letter in a column on Focus on the Family’s web site.

“You cherry-picked a phrase to shore up highly (in my view) discriminatory purposes,” Dobson said, quoting Pruett’s letter. “On page 134 of the book you cite in your piece, I wrote, ‘What we do know is that there is no reason for concern about the development or psychological competence of children living with gay fathers. It is love that binds relationships, not sex.’”

Dobson responded to Pruett in a column posted to his group’s web site.

“Is he now changing his position and claiming that fathers are not critical to healthy child development?” Dobson wrote. “Is he saying that fathers do not create huge consequences for children, or that two lesbians can do the job just as well without them? Apparently so, but that is not what he wrote.”

Pruett said in a video response produced by Besen that Dobson didn’t respond to the letter he sent Dobson inviting dialogue. In the video, Pruett addressed Dobson directly.

“You’re quite right when you quoted from my book that fathers are vitally important because they do not mother,” Pruett said. “Children thrive when they have the input of a mother and father because they go about this in such different ways. But that’s not all I said, Dr. Dobson. I also said that it is the love that surrounds the child that prepares them to give to the world and protect themselves from its difficulties and its confusions and its dangers.”

Pruett also expressed weariness at being used as a political pawn and said he would prefer open dialogue about the issues.

“I am far more interested in progress in these matters than I am in partisanship or polarization or politicization on these incredibly intimate matters,” Pruett said in the video. He ...