(Seeing this here really astonishes me. I don’t understand how this kind of view is possible. This is not a knotty difficult problem like global warming, or a values-based question like gay marriage where facts aren’t especially relevant, or conflicting cutting-edge scientific research, or some distant historical event from centuries ago lost in the vapors of time and shifting worldviews: this was something that happened barely 12 years ago, that was documented in pretty much every paper and magazine at extraordinarily tedious length, which was discussed in simple terms that any American could—and most did—understand; you can look up transcripts of official speeches with ease in seconds now, and watch them on YouTube if you prefer; the basic claims were simple and clear - ‘Saddam Hussein in 2001 was running multiple active and sophisticated WMD research and development programs with many concrete manifestations’ - and the failure of the predictions were widely noted within months of the invasion as the search teams came up flat dry for it, and Bush was heavily criticized for the lack of results long before Iraq became enough of a bloodbath that it became a moot point since the place was now a sunk cost. We have countless in depth books & reporting on exactly how the evidence was trumped up and manipulated and fabricated, and how the war was sold to the public, and so on and so forth. We even understand the Iraqi side of the story and, from his pre-execution interrogations, why Hussein was so desperate to pretend to be much more dangerous than he was and why he didn’t cooperate: Baathist Iraq couldn’t beat Iran in the first place, and weakened by sanctions, definitely couldn’t beat them in the ’90s-’00s, and he needed Israel-style uncertainty about his capabilities, assisted by his subordinates fearfully telling him what he wanted to hear. So given all of this is in the historical record and also personal experience of anyone who read a newspaper regularly, how is it I am reading that not just one person but quite a lot of people have managed to convince themselves that Bush was right all along?)
Presumably what you mean is whether children raised by gay couples end up less well-adjusted than they would if they weren’t raised by gay couples, right?
I mean, to pick an extreme case for clarity: if it turned out that gay couples only ever raised children who would never have been raised by straight couples even if there were no gay couples, then I don’t see how the fact you cite is relevant to gay marriage.
Whether that’s relevant depends on your values in the first place: are you a harm-based consequentialist?
As it happens, yesterday I took a survey (“Argument Evaluations”) on YourMorals.org which asked exactly that question (“how relevant is the argument that ‘children raised by gay couples may be harmed’ to the morality of gay marriage”) and you will be unsurprised to look at the results and see that people differ on what arguments are relevant to the morality of gay marriage:
(Seeing this here really astonishes me. I don’t understand how this kind of view is possible. This is not a knotty difficult problem like global warming, or a values-based question like gay marriage where facts aren’t especially relevant, or conflicting cutting-edge scientific research, or some distant historical event from centuries ago lost in the vapors of time and shifting worldviews: this was something that happened barely 12 years ago, that was documented in pretty much every paper and magazine at extraordinarily tedious length, which was discussed in simple terms that any American could—and most did—understand; you can look up transcripts of official speeches with ease in seconds now, and watch them on YouTube if you prefer; the basic claims were simple and clear - ‘Saddam Hussein in 2001 was running multiple active and sophisticated WMD research and development programs with many concrete manifestations’ - and the failure of the predictions were widely noted within months of the invasion as the search teams came up flat dry for it, and Bush was heavily criticized for the lack of results long before Iraq became enough of a bloodbath that it became a moot point since the place was now a sunk cost. We have countless in depth books & reporting on exactly how the evidence was trumped up and manipulated and fabricated, and how the war was sold to the public, and so on and so forth. We even understand the Iraqi side of the story and, from his pre-execution interrogations, why Hussein was so desperate to pretend to be much more dangerous than he was and why he didn’t cooperate: Baathist Iraq couldn’t beat Iran in the first place, and weakened by sanctions, definitely couldn’t beat them in the ’90s-’00s, and he needed Israel-style uncertainty about his capabilities, assisted by his subordinates fearfully telling him what he wanted to hear. So given all of this is in the historical record and also personal experience of anyone who read a newspaper regularly, how is it I am reading that not just one person but quite a lot of people have managed to convince themselves that Bush was right all along?)
Well, there are some relevant facts, such as whether children raised by gay couples end up less well-adjusted than those raised by straight couples.
Presumably what you mean is whether children raised by gay couples end up less well-adjusted than they would if they weren’t raised by gay couples, right?
I mean, to pick an extreme case for clarity: if it turned out that gay couples only ever raised children who would never have been raised by straight couples even if there were no gay couples, then I don’t see how the fact you cite is relevant to gay marriage.
Whether that’s relevant depends on your values in the first place: are you a harm-based consequentialist?
As it happens, yesterday I took a survey (“Argument Evaluations”) on YourMorals.org which asked exactly that question (“how relevant is the argument that ‘children raised by gay couples may be harmed’ to the morality of gay marriage”) and you will be unsurprised to look at the results and see that people differ on what arguments are relevant to the morality of gay marriage:
(Green is me.)