March 27, 2015|10:22 am
Ken Blackwell is the Senior Fellow for Family Empowerment at the Family Research Council, and the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow for Public Policy at the Buckeye Institute in Columbus, Ohio
The American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Sociological Association (ASA) submitted friend of the Court briefs in the Windsor case. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled portions of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional. If the Windsor Court majority relied on those briefs, it was reliant on snake oil, not science.
The APA and the ASA should be the guardians of good science. Instead, they have joined the ranks of the pink panzers of political correctness. Most studies we have seen that claim that children raised by same-sex parents suffer no disadvantages are so seriously flawed that in any other context, the ASA and APA would be the first to point out those methodological flaws
Some of the studies cited in amicus briefs to the Supreme Court in support of same-sex parenting have serious methodological flaws, which are not small but so basic they violate "Stats 101". The most notable of these is the use of something called an opportunity sample. That error would be committed, for example, if you went to the magazine American Rifleman to ask questions about proposed gun control legislation. American Rifleman is a publication of the National Rifle Association. The results of a reader survey would suffer from volunteer bias. Another flaw is what we call the snowball sample. That would occur if NRA members were invited to enlist friends and family members to be part of the sample and respond to a questionnaire. That only compounds the methodological problem.
Read the entire story at: http://www.christianpost.com/news/psychological-association-delivers-snake-oil-sociology-in-latest-brief-on-marriage-136479/
