Logically incoherent ThemBeforeUs broader agenda against IVF, Divorce, Adoption by same-sex couples as well as same-sex marriage.
The website uses sensationalism, moral panic, and emotional propaganda to defeat logical thinking.
Subscriptions are free.
Backup locations. https://gaypartisan.com/ Another backup site. https://gayagenda.news/
This about the Them Before Us website https://thembeforeus.com/ to show their broader agenda targeting more than same-sex marriage. Also, more about their lack of logic and propaganda.
The previous post was on their campaign against Gay marriage including all their websites.
Before we get into the topic.
Evangelicals have higher than average divorce rates.
So shouldn’t Them Before Us campaign against Evangelical Christians getting married, for the children?
Moralistic judgmental people can’t have sex unless they are married get divorces. Who would have guessed?
Baylor University, Feb. 5, 2014, “Evangelicals Have Higher-than-average Divorce Rates, According to a Report Compiled by Baylor for the Council on Contemporary Families.”
The broader agenda of Them Before Us is to establish a Christian regulation of sexuality, reproduction, and social relations.
However, in attempting to impose this agenda, religious justification is avoided and it is claimed that it is about children’s welfare using non-religious arguments based on supposed psychological harms.
The arguments rely on fear mongering, sensationalism, manging the meanng of words and really lack logic. Also, there are tricks with references.
The breath of their agenda is shown in a section titled “Fast Facts.” What an ordinary person might think a fact is and what Them Before Us thinks is a fact likely varies considerably.
https://thembeforeus.com/fast-facts/
This is there About Us statement.
Them Before Us protects every child’s right to their mother and father by educating lawmakers, media influencers, and concerned citizens about the harm children suffer when those rights are violated. We center the child in every conversation about marriage and family including divorce, same-sex parenting, reproductive technologies, surrogacy, adoption, cohabitation. We take this child-centric message into the culture and courtroom and insist that all adults do hard things on behalf of children.
The lack of logic and games of Them Before Us
There is a section titled Fast Facts. These are examples of the reasoning. Though much of the writing throughout is assertions of crisis and calamity.
IVF & SURROGACY (Playing games with definitions.)
Is an embryo that is 200 microns wide a child, a baby? (a micron is a three hundred-thousandth of an inch.)
In the Fast Facts section under IVF there is a the following assertion:
IVF routinely violates children’s right to life
Under this heading, the article states that many of the embryos aren’t used. So not using a 200 micron embryo is asserted to violating a child’s right to life. You can see the exploitation of “children’s right to life,” which people support strongly and emotionaly, to be against the disposals of IVF embroys that are 200 microns or less.
In the Fast Facts section under Surrogacy there is the following section.
VIOLATING CHILDREN’S RIGHT TO LIFE
This is explained as follows:
Only 7% of lab-created children (IVF is essential to surrogacy) will be born alive. Most will perish in forgotten freezers, won’t survive “thawing,” fail to implant, be discarded for being non-viable/the wrong sex, be
aborted“selectively reduced,” or be donated to research.
Again, blastomas, 200 microns big are represented as children.
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Same Sex Parenting
In the Fun Facts section for Same Sex Parenting the website asserts that the studies showing no difference between same sex parents and heterosexual parents are flawed because the sample size is not large enough. What isn’t stated is that if you need a big sample to to see an effect, the effect is small.
So the webpage has a heading as follows:
METHODS MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE
With the following statment.
In his New Family Structures Study (NFSS), researcher Mark Regnerus concluded, “On twenty-five out of forty outcomes evaluated, there were statistically significant differences between children from intact biological families and those of the mothers in lesbian relationships in many areas that are unambiguously suboptimal, such as receiving welfare, need for therapy, infidelity, STIs, sexual victimization, educational attainment, safety of the family of origin, depression, attachments and dependencies, marijuana use, frequency of smoking, and criminal behavior
You might think the link is to Mark Regnerus’ report where he makes his claims. The link is instead to a data set.
https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/34392
So you aren’t given the study to review yourself.
The study is, Regnerus, Mark, March 12, 2012, “How different are the adult chldren of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study,” Social Science Research, 41(4) pp. 752-770.
If you know the name of the study you can track down reviews of it and its origin.
It was funded by the Witherspoon Institute to have a study to oppose Gay marriage. It is online at the conservative Baptist University Baylor. https://www.baylorisr.org/wp-content/uploads/Regnerus.pdf Of course a link to that would give the game away that Them Before Us is a Christian effort and not secular.
Salon, March 11, 2013, “Conservative group tries to sway SCOTUS on gay marriage with flawed study.”
One of the flaws with the study is that for same-sex parents it included those who had adopted with those same-sex family which resulted from a divorce.
As Michael J. Rosenfeld in "Revisiting the Data from the New Family Structure Study: Taking Family Instability into Account,” Sociological Science, Sept. 2, 2015, most of the difference is attributed to divorce or loss of custody.
This analysis revisits recent controversial findings about children of gay and lesbian parents, and shows that family instability explains most of the negative outcomes that had been attributed to gay and lesbian parents.
https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-v2-23-478/
There were confounding variables. Even an undergraduate knows to control for factors to isolate the effect of a single factor.
CBS News, June 12, 2012, “Kids of gay parents fare worse, study finds, but research draws fire from experts.”
Gary Gates, a researcher at the Williams Institute, a sexual orientation policy think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles, told LiveScience that a more fair comparison would've been of children of heterosexual or same-sex couples who were raised in similar homes, with no divorces, separations or foster care. [Boldface added.]
Basically Gates is saying that supposedly you were studying people of different types, selecting group A from a wealthy suburb group B from a bad slum, in an attempt to show the difference is between having a last name starting with “R” versus “T” would find alot of big differences, but it is likely due to one group living in the wealthy suburb and one in the bad slum.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kids-of-gay-parents-fare-worse-study-finds-but-draws-fire-from-experts/
Social Science Research, July 2015, “Measurement, methods, and divergent patterns: Reassessing the effects of same-sex parents.”
These reanalyses provide a “reality check” regarding the conclusions from the original Regnerus study. The patterns from these reanalyses offer evidence of the fragility of these conclusions—so fragile, in fact, that they are due primarily to the methodological choices made by Regnerus. Or to put it another way, when equally plausible and, in our view, preferred methodological decisions are used, a different conclusion emerges: adult children who lived with same-sex parents show comparable outcome profiles to those from other family types, including intact biological families. [Boldface added.]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X1500085X
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Marriage Matters
Government’s interest in marriage is children. As explained in the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA):
At bottom, civil society has an interest in maintaining and protecting the institution of heterosexual marriage because it has a deep and abiding interest in encouraging responsible procreation and child-rearing. With their ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court made gay marriage the law of the land, yet these truths persist.
So Gay marriage prevents procreation and child rearing? Is the idea that having Gay marriage will mean fewer men will be heterosexual and busy having sex with women? Will some men lose interest with women if there is Gay marriage.
Then:
Children are the natural product of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman.
Both a father and mother are necessary and important for children.
Marriage between one man and one woman is the best way to promote healthy families.
I don’t think anyone is arguing about where babies come from. Just for the record, the stork doesn’t bring them.
The second item is arguing by assertion that same sex parents are bad.
The third item is arguing again against same sex parenting.
The second and third items are arguing against same-sex couples adopting which is a different issue. It is attempting to confuse same-sex adopting with same-sex marriage.
Most Gay marriages don’t involve children. In cases where Gay parents adopt it is a matter of same-sex parents versus no parents at all. Does the Them Before Us campaign really think that no parents is better than same-sex parents.?
The issue of no parents versus same-sex parents is avoided by Them Before Us.
The whole section against same-sex marriage is arguing that if same sex marriage is allowed, then some of those couples might adopt, so same-sex marriage must not be allowed for all regardless of whether they plan to adopt.
A lot of sensational language is used to override the lack of logic.
For example:
Regardless of what parenthood laws may say, it’s impossible to legislate away a child’s longing for his or her mother and father.
Is anyone trying to do that? If two guys get married, how does that legislate against what a chldren might long for in regarding to anything?
If a same-sex couple adopts, it is a child who doesn’t have parents and it also don’t prohibit longing for deceased parents.
With Them Before Us a lot of sensationalist language is thrown together to incite alarm to avoid logic.
The section also argues against cohabitation.
Them Before Us is against No Fault Divorce.
Consistent with their wanting to use sensational language, divorce is called by them, “death of a family.”
In the Fast Facts section for Divorce there is the following section.
AT FAULT? SOMETIMES. NO FAULT? NEVER
There are reasons for divorce. Before the advent of no-fault divorce, the at-fault divorce laws correctly penalized the at-fault spouse for marital breakdown for reasons of abuse, addiction, or abandonment. At fault divorce incentivized marriage-sustaining behavior and penalized the vow-breaking spouse socially and financially. No-fault divorce has lead to skyrocketing rates of marital breakups. [Boldface added.]
“skyrocketing” is used instead of rising and was it rising over time to 2025? Sensationalism is the key objective here.
All sorts of lurid claims are made without sourcing.
Selected anecdotal evidence against Gay parents.
And skewed interpretations. For example this story.
One weekend, me, this woman, an old family friend a few years older than me who was visiting from the UK, and my mother went camping. By dusk all hell broke loose. My dad had arrived, and everyone was going berserk. I ran into the forest screaming in the dark. My father came to fetch me and said he was taking me home. They were shouting he couldn’t take me.
Is the trauma due to the same-sex parent or the father deciding to cause a big scene and confrontation in front of the child?
In this case it seems the father was adverse to working for a living and his wife wised up after discovering she could support herself. However, this story is employed to assert all Gays are bad parents and not that it was an ill-fated marriage.
My dad eventually quit pastoring the small church we attended, and he didn’t pursue employment anywhere else. My mom took a job at the local library.
It wasn’t long after, my mom began coming home with many “liberating” ideas and eventually left my dad to pursue a lesbian lifestyle. It was a messy divorce with 10 years of court battles and weaponizing children. All 5 of us never lived under the same roof again; we were always split in custody or who we were choosing to live with. My dad would encourage us to search through our mom’s drawers and report back, and our mom spent her time convincing us our dad was mentally ill and abusive (there was never any physical abuse in our home
The link for Obergefell goes to the Greater than Campaign (https://greaterthancampaign.com/) which was reviewed in the earlier post.
Summary
The website avoids any appeal to religion, but instead tries to represent itself as rationally based on scientific methods and for the welface of the child.