Believe it or not, I am not without common ground with lesbian feminism, under which rubric is done sterling work against prostitution, pornography, and the cruel but lucrative falsehood of transsexualism. But, as Steve Sailer writes:
From CNN:
“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.
Funding for the research came from several lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender advocacy groups, such as the Gill Foundation and the Lesbian Health Fund from the Gay Lesbian Medical Association.
Gartrell started the study in 1986. She recruited subjects through announcements in bookstores, lesbian events and newspapers throughout metro Boston, Massachusetts; San Francisco, California, and Washington. ...
This data was compared with data from children of nonlesbian families.”
I presume that a control group wasn't recruited from heterosexuals under the same conditions, but data was just copied from, say, somebody else's nationally representative data.
Okay, so the lesbian mothers were recruited in three of the best educated, most upscale cities in the country at, among other places, bookstores. (I spend a lot of time in bookstores, and the children who come in with their moms look exceedingly well adjusted.) The biological fathers were eugenically chosen in cold blood by the mothers to produce ideal children (i.e., the fathers were less likely to be sexy bad boys than in heterosexual unions).
I'm shocked, shocked that a study like this would come up with these findings.
As, no doubt, we all are to learn that these children were so well-adjusted according to their mothers, who alone were asked, and who had political reasons for saying so.
Hello Mr. Lindsay,
ReplyDeleteI am not exactly sure what Sailer is getting it at here. He is somewhat notorious for his support of, shall we say, questionable "scientific" ideas relating to race, intelligence, class, etc. Sailer and those like him convinced me to stop reading TakiMag, which sometimes read like a white nationalist blog, only perhaps not as courageous as the ones that are explicitly so.
Is he arguing for or against lesbian eugenics? He has often come across as being at least receptive to eugenic ideas, if not supportive.
Perhaps my reading comprehension is off today, I have a rather bad headache.
Oh, I know about some of Sailer's stranger ideas.
ReplyDeleteBut he is right about this: how is it news that children of the upper middle classes are well-adjusted, as conventionally defined? Never mind the children of carefully engineered eugenic unions even among upper-middle-class people?
How is it news that a survey with such sources of funding has come to this conclusion? And, as I add, how is it news that the mothers, who alone were asked, have said this when they had such obvious political reasons to do so?
Good points. I suppose being well-adjusted has always been defined by the prevailing opinions of the affluent. The working-class has traditionally been decried for its failure to live up to these conventional norms of good behavior.
ReplyDeleteWhether this is a genetic as opposed to social, economic, or political outcome, I do not know. For my part, I don’t think affluent children are necessarily intrinsically superior to the children of poorer couples. Wealth has a way of taking care of mistakes that might doom somebody in a more precarious situation.
But in any event, I think I see the point of the article now.
At the end of the day, genetic engineering is just another example of how the whole socially libertine philosophy is ultimately anti-working-class. Thankfully, I believe that even if eugenics is possible, it would eventually break down and fail. Witness the sorry state of the pedigree dog world versus the general healthiness of mongrels.
I hate to make such analogies to animals, but the eugenicists set up that aspect of the debate themselves, as they consciously used animal breeding as a roadmap for their own eugenic projects.
On a related note, have you noticed how many commentators, including some folks on the Right, have argued that courting homosexuals is important for a locality to be economically prosperous? Why social conservatives still support neoliberalism is beyond me.