NEWS FLASH: Experts don’t like tradition

The social construction of reality, chapter whatever: American Psychiatric Association issues statement endorsing right of gay and lesbian couples to adopt. According to the APA, “research over the past 30 years has consistently demonstrated that children raised by gay or lesbian parents exhibit the same level of emotional, cognitive, social and sexual functioning as children raised by heterosexual parents.” That’s demonstrated, not just “indicated,” “suggested,” or “been consistent with,” and the demonstrations have been repetitive and unopposed over a 30-year period. So the experts say they know that homosexual “parents” are just as good, and that makes it an indisputable truth upon which rational public policy must be based. Which is exactly the point of the statement.

If you’ve ever looked into the actual social science evidence used to support policy positions, or the ways social scientists have dealt with sex, you’ll be more than skeptical. All respectable authorities have been assuring us, for example, that the problem of predatory homosexual priests has nothing whatever to do with homosexual priests. Does that inspire confidence?

The problem isn’t just homosexual activists or the desire of professional organizations in an age without honor to adopt all positions thought respectable. It’s the social sciences as such. Social scientists are committed to rationalizing social life. They downplay, and if possible make irrelevant, the aspects that can’t be measured, analyzed, and manipulated by professionals. The family is largely opaque to outsiders and resistant to manipulation. It follows that social scientists, by the nature of their calling and professional interests, stand in opposition to it, and to the traditions and moral commitments that support it. They would rather convert the family into a rationalized branch of the administrative state, and sex into a collection of personal impulses rather than the basis of something so recalcitrant. That is exactly the effect of the view of sexual morality they have been pushing for decades. It’s no surprise they have been pushing it.
Posted by Jim Kalb at December 14, 2002 08:36 AM | Send