The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

Yet another researcher is lodging a complaint that an anti-gay group has distorted her work on LGBT people. This time Seton Hall professor Theodora Sirota is calling the National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) to the carpet for blatantly lying about her research.

Sirota studied the effect of gay dads raising girls while in heterosexual marriages. NARTH's Rick Fitzgibbons, however, published an article using Sirota's research to claim that children of same-sex parents don't fare as well as children raised "in stable homes with a mother and a father."

Fitzgibbons claims, "Researchers interviewed 68 women with gay or bisexual fathers and 68 women with heterosexual fathers. The women (average age 29 in both groups) with gay or bisexual fathers had difficulty with adult attachment issues in three areas: they were less comfortable with closeness and intimacy; they were less able to trust and depend on others; and they experienced more anxiety in relationships compared to the women raised by heterosexual fathers."

Sirota counters with this crazy thing called the truth. "[N]o conclusions about gay or lesbian fitness to adopt children or quality of active gay parenting can be drawn from the findings of my research. No conclusions about the well-being of children who are or were actively raised by gay or lesbian parents can be drawn from the findings of my research."

After all, the women studied were raised "with a mother and father" and those fathers are living the lie NARTH wants them to - they were in the closet and pretending to be straight. Same-sex couples aren't mentioned in the study at all.

NARTH and other anti-gay hate groups have a history of distorting research about LGBT people to try and prove specious arguments that our community is dangerous, unhealthy, and cause damage to children. Unfortunately, this thing called science says the exact opposite, so these religious frauds have to stoop to misrepresenting the research.

Alvin McEwan provides a fantastic rundown of the Sirota affair and a list of the top twelve researchers who have publicly condemned these anti-gay groups for lying about their studies. I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that the list will only continue to grow as the anti-gay forces get more and more desperate.