Crackpot Saturday: Common Sense, Reality, and Terminal Fools

CNN has a report on a study of 78 families where lesbian parents raised children over more than 24 years, with the results being that those children's scores on a standard test of behavior and psychological health are better than the average for children in "nonlesbian families".

Wanting to offer a skeptic's view as well as that of researchers, CNN get a few quotes from Wendy Wright, whom they identify as "president of the Concerned Women for America, a group that supports biblical values" (presumably they don't pick and choose the "biblical values" they support, since that would be nothing more than using your favorite Bible quotes to support what you'd believe anyway, with or without the Bible, so they're probably similar to A.J. Jacobs, except they actually believe it all).

It's good journalism to have scientific studies commented on by crackpots.  Very fair and balanced, that.

CNN notes that "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."  Wright pounces:

"That proves the prejudice and bias of the study," she said. "This study was clearly designed to come out with one outcome -- to attempt to sway people that children are not detrimentally affected in a homosexual household."

 Well, no.  I'm all for noting where funding comes from and looking closely at research to see if it's more designed to please funders than contribute scholarship.  But funding itself does not prove prejudice or bias.  Even if we went with the worst case scenario, though, and posited that the funders deeply influenced the study, that doesn't necessarily lead to the crackpot's conclusion.  It's entirely possible that the funders of this research really did want to know whether there was evidence that children of gay parents struggle and suffer more.  After all, if you grow up in a family that is considered by many people to be an abomination against the Flying Spaghetti Monster or some other entity, well, there might be some bad psychological side-effects that go along with that and need to be dealt with.  (I don't mean to slander the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  She told me last night that she's all for lesbians and their families.)  Lots of families face various obstacles to happiness, but that's not a reason for considering those families illegitimate and evil.  The funding organizations might want to find ways to alleviate some of the specific challenges that not-entirely-hetero families face, and to do that they'd first need to identify the challenges.

Later, we hear again from the crackpot (which is not, I know, an objective term; I do not desire to use objective terms for crackpots. William S. Burroughs once said, "Do not offer sympathy to the mentally ill. Tell them firmly, 'I am not paid to listen to this drivel. You are a terminal fool.'"  I might amend that slightly to "Do not listen to crazy anti-intellectual non-scientist ideologues" rather than "Do not offer sympathy to the mentally ill," because I think Burroughs's choice of the word "sympathy" is unfortunate there, and I am happy to offer sympathy to the mentally ill; I just don't want to base my perception of the world on their judgments):

Wright questioned the objectivity of Gartrell's research, saying the author can "cherry pick people who are involved and the info they release."

"In essence, this study claims to purport that children do better when raised by lesbians," she said. 

Well, again, no.  I know that Biblical values people need to believe in essences, and they and I can probably agree to disagree on that one, but what's happening here is what often happens when people try to sum up somewhat complex and even perhaps a little bit nuanced studies into soundbites -- 78 people who were studied for 24 years is not exactly cherry picking, but it is definitely a small sample of the many lesbian parents out there.  (This does not, in and of itself, mean it's an unrepresentative sample, however.  To make that judgment would require way more research than I'm willing to do right now.)

Notice how the researchers themselves describe the "lessons" of the study:

The children "didn't arrive by accident," [Dr. Nanette Gartrell, the author of the study] said. "The mothers were older... they were waiting for an opportunity to have children and age brings maturity and better parenting."

This also could have occurred because "growing up in households with less power assertion and more parental involvement has been shown to be associated with healthier psychological adjustment," Gartrell wrote in the study.

This is rather different from "Lesbians make better parents!  Kill all men!" (I know I know I know -- the crackpot didn't portray the study as concluding, "Kill all men!", but in essence it's what she claims the study claims to purport.)

Continuing:

Studies have shown that children thrive having both a mother and a father, Wright said. 

Well, okay.   Citing some of those studies would be helpful, but I'll go with the Biblical value of having faith, and I'll even be generous and say that what Wright probably meant was children thrive having a mother and father who live together and are happily married and participate in their children's lives.  Sure.  That makes sense.  Children thriving in such a situation does not, though, mean that children in other situations cannot also thrive.  People who eat spinach and broccoli a lot also probably thrive, especially in comparison to people who live on Swedish Fish.  This does not mean people who eat apples and tofu do not thrive, especially in comparison to people who live on Swedish Fish.

The fair and balanced reporter of CNN (Madison Park, who I'm assuming is an individual, though may, with such a name, be a corporate entity, something with trees and benches and plenty of targeted advertising) ends the article by giving the crackpot the final words:

"You have to be a little suspicious of any study that says children being raised by same-sex couples do better or have superior outcomes to children raised with a mother and father," she said. "It just defies common sense and reality."

Well, no.  And, by the way, Madison Park, this is not good journalism -- this is hooey.  Endings matter.  Endings create emphasis.  They are a method of implication.  The implication here is that the research is nonsensical and unreal.

The crackpot doesn't even get the basics of the research right.  It's not a "study that says children being raised by same-sex couples do better or have superior outcomes to children raised with a mother and father" but rather a study that compares the responses to a basic measurement by the children of 78 lesbian couples over 24 years to the responses of what is probably a much larger general sample of "children of nonlesbian families".

Common sense and reality can be different things.  It is, for instance, common sense that the sun moves around the Earth.  This is not, however, reality.

The reality of the study is that the children of 78 families raised over 24 years scored, on the whole, better than the average on a basic and common measurement of psychological health and adjustment.  The reality of the study suggests that good parenting is less a matter of the parents' sex than a matter of how prepared they were to be parents and how involved they are in their children's lives.

If that's not at least somewhere in the vicinity of your common sense, then, well, you are a terminal fool.

Two Distinctions

Richard Lupoff, from a review of Science Fiction of the Thirties (ed. Damon Knight) and The Fantastic Pulps (ed. Peter Haining) in Algol, Summer 1976:

Anybody who has followed this column for a number of years must be aware that I have a great fondness for the old pulp (and even pre-pulp) stuff. Yet I despise most of the contemporary would-be heirs and imitators of the pulp writers, and among moderns strongly prefer the serious and even experimental authors. ...

Those old pulp writers, Doc Smith, David Keller, Edmond Hamilton, Murray Leinster, Seabury Quinn, Lovecraft, Otto Binder, Jack Williamson, and all the rest of that crowd -- were writing the best they knew how! Their ideas might seem elementary, their technique primitive, to us. But to themselves and their contemporaries, the ideas were fresh and startling, the technique the most advanced they were capable of (and very likely the most sophisticated their readers were capable of assimilating).

And that's exactly the case with today's avant-garde -- Delany, Disch, Malzberg, Moorcock, Aldiss, and Le Guin. They're pushing at the boundaries, working at the limits of their capabilities, and sometimes stumbling as a result but also achieving things fresh and excellent. Roger Zelazny did that for a while, and that's why some of his early triumphs are still revered while his later works are disdained and there are people annoyed (or at least disappointed) with him -- he's settled back into the easy and the comfortable.

And the people who write "neo-pulp" are doing that and worse. They're not pushing at the boundaries ... nor even standing beside them, but retreating at speed to the old limitations, the old ideas and the old ways.

I thought this was an interesting distinction to make, and one I am mostly sympathetic too, since the pulp era fascinates me. I'm not sure I'd say the old pulp writers were writing the best they knew how, or the best way that was available to them, but rather that they were doing what they could under the circumstances -- circumstances that required writers to churn out a tremendous amount of words to be able to make a living. And yet a living could be made, and an audience existed, and the interaction between what the writers and publishers were capable of producing is an interaction worth as much study, I think, as the interactions that produced various other sorts of texts at the time.

The same issue of Algol contains a letter from Brian Stableford that also brings up some ideas worth considering:

The great majority of the words which are produced and read under the label of SF are not well-written, but are nevertheless successful -- indeed, may well be more successful than SF which is well written. ... I am not applauding this fact, but I am trying to explain it. From the point of view of the aesthetic critic, of course, it is not a fact which needs explaining -- the aesthetic critic accepts that 90% of everything is worthless and henceforward is content to ignore that 90%. If the fact that large numbers of people enjoy and prefer this 90% occurs to him at all it is simply seen as confirmation of his own aesthetic superiority. Literary criticism, being an entirely artificial discipline, thrives on its self-justificatory elitism. As a sociologist of literature, however, I cannot accept such narrow perspectives. I want to know why people read what they do, and why they enjoy it. The considerations of the literary critic are, by and large, irrelevant to this enquiry simply by virtue of the fact that the literary critic dismisses 90% of readers and 90% of writers as external to his own interests. Because literary critics denounce all literature save the favoured 10% in a derisive (and often ill-mannered) fashion, some literary critics have assumed that because I am interested in the remaining 90% I must be aggressively attacking the favoured ten. Let me assure them that this is not so.

I don't share the hostility toward "literary critics" (a straw-man argument, methinks, though perhaps less so then than now) or even aesthetic criticism that Stableford shows here -- and I wouldn't be surprised if he himself would today, more than thirty years later, say things differently (a person really should not be held accountable to the views expressed thirty years ago in a letter to a fanzine!). What I like about what he says here, though, is the distinction between literary criticism and literary sociology. I don't know that they always have to be separate worlds, or that the two techiques cannot talk to each other productively, but I find it a helpful way to separate my own tendencies and desires as a reader and writer.