Many paid anti-gay activists work for an organization connected back to Robert George.

This week’s Supreme Court oral arguments on marriage equality have understandably attracted media attention, but unfortunately the coverage has been peppered with blatant puff pieces that offer a free pedestal for paid operatives working against same-sex marriage. These articles claim to profile individuals who make their living off the anti-equality movement offer little context, instead invite them to share all their talking points without any rebuttal.

For example, last Friday USA Today ran a piece profiling some of the top lobbyists against marriage equality, while the New York Times profiled young conservatives working with many of the same organizations. NPR offered two puff pieces, one similarly profiling various conservatives and another just to highlight Maggie Gallagher’s views on the topic. Almost every individual in each of these stories advocates against equality as a profession. Here’s a list of who they are and how they used their free media pedestal:

• Brian Brown is executive director of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM).  He told USA Today that “The people are definitely on our side,” even though polling continuesto show the exact opposite.
• Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council (FRC), told USA Today that “there will be collateral damage to other freedoms” because of marriage equality, but offered examples of people who seek to violate nondiscrimination protections.
• Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America (CWA), told USA Today that marriage equality will “lure” people into homosexuality, just like legalizing marijuana, gambling, prostitution, abortion, “or any vice that is legalized.” The article neglected to mention that CWA is recognized as a hate group along with FRC.
• Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, chair of the Catholic Bishops’ committee for the “Defense of Marriage,” told USA Today that same-sex couples are inherently inferior, and that the LGBT movement should have a “live and let live” philosophy instead of calling equality opponents bigots.
• Rev. William Owens, head of the Coalition of African-American Pastors, which is funded by groups like NOM and FRC, claimed to USA Today that marriage equality is “another nail in the coffin for black families,” confirming his role in NOM’s race-wedging tactics.

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Washington Post columnist George Will.

The Washington Post published an opinion piece Friday by conservative pundit George Will called “The shaky science behind same-sex marriage.” Though Will has admitted there is an “emerging consensus” for same-sex marriage and predicted that the issue will prevail in the Courts, he highlights a brief from Maggie Gallagher’s Institute for Marriage and Public Policy that argues against equality by suggesting that the social science research currently available is not a sufficient rationale for that victory:

A brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the California case by conservative professors Leon Kass and Harvey Mansfield and the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy warns that “the social and behavioral sciences have a long history of being shaped and driven by politics and ideology.” And research about, for example, the stability of same-sex marriages or child-rearing by same-sex couples is “radically inconclusive” because these are recent phenomena and they provide a small sample from which to conclude that these innovations will be benign.

Unlike the physical sciences, the social sciences can rarely settle questions using “controlled and replicable experiments.” Today “there neither are nor could possibly be any scientifically valid studies from which to predict the effects of a family structure that is so new and so rare.” Hence there can be no “scientific basis for constitutionalizing same-sex marriage.”

The brief does not argue against same-sex marriage as social policy, other than by counseling caution about altering foundational social institutions when guidance from social science is as yet impossible. The brief is a preemptive refutation of inappropriate invocations of spurious social science by supporters of same-sex marriage.

Will endorses two arguments here, both of which are unsupportable. The first is that any social science that supports a liberal position shouldn’t be trusted because social science already has a liberal bias. The second is that it’s reasonable to conclude that it’s impossible to measure anything that hasn’t been legalized, even if legalizing it is the only way to test it. Together, these form a tautological argument that social science is only valid and useful if it supports keeping things the way they already are, which is not only a very narrow dismissal of the work social scientists already do, but also a philosophy that inherently prevents change.

Will then proceeds to demonstrate just how susceptible he is to conservatives’ fraudulent interpretations of what science is available:
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In his debate with Dan Savage, the National Organization for Marriage’s Brian Brown admitted that nothing, not even decades of marriage equality without consequence, could convince him to abandon his opposition to same-sex marriage. When Mark Oppenheimer, who moderated the debate, profiled Maggie Gallagher earlier this year, she similarly said that “Nothing could make me call a same-sex couple a marriage, because that’s not what I believe a marriage is.” Responding to the debate today, Gallagher qualified exactly what it might take for her to retreat from her campaign against LGBT families:

I would want to see two generations of gay marriage and some society that in that time-span was able to create a basically functioning marriage culture i.e., one in which the ideal for a child is mom and dad was upheld as a norm and supported in theory (and at least to some degree in practice).

In that case, I might personally not believe gay unions are marriage, but I would no longer believe the law’s definition had any effect on the things I care about, and so would not oppose same-sex marriage.

I would add: If really good scientific evidence disproved the idea that children benefit from their mom and dad, that would rock my world in ways that I can’t say what would happen.

Social science rarely amounts to proof. It generally counts as “evidence” that requires judgment.

In other words, there really is nothing that could convince her, but her answer is revealing. As Jeremy Hooper notes, Gallagher simply wouldn’t live to see two generations of gay marriage, but even if she did, her expectations that the ideal of heterosexuals as parents be upheld “as a norm and supported by theory” would never exist in any timeline of reality. Research already shows that a biological connection and having parents of both genders are not requirements for a child’s successful upbringing, so there’s no valid reason to uphold such a norm. None of the studies that show that children benefit from their mom and dad show any difference in how children benefit from their dads or their moms, if same-sex couples are even included in them. Of course, stigma against adoption and same-sex parenting definitely can be obstacles to child development. As long as Gallagher continues to reinforce that very antipathy, she has painted a self-defeating future that will never exist. Given her adamant investment in hetero-supremacy, she’s made it clear what “judgment” she will apply to any evidence she encounters.

Way back in August of 2011, the American Psychological Association unanimously approved a resolution in favor of marriage equality. Now, eleven months later, Maggie Gallagher’s Institute for Marriage and Public Policy (IMAPP) has released a critique, challenging all of the claims made in the resolution about gay people, their relationships, and their ability to parent. Rather than offer any compelling evidence that runs contrary to the APA resolution, IMAPP took eleven months to essentially argue that it’s merely not convinced by the evidence cited. Here are a few of the claims IMAPP simply refuses to accept:

• People who are gay are normal and healthy and can have satisfying relationships and raise well-adjusted children.
• Campaigns to deny same-sex couples rights cause them stress and negatively impact their psychological well-being.
• Same-sex couples are similar to opposite-sex couples.
• Equality improves same-sex couples’ psychological well-being.

There are two obvious flaws that make IMAPP’s critique irrelevant. First of all, IMAPP abandoned any sense of objectivity by only looking for opportunities to challenge the APA’s claims. There is plenty of additional supporting research not cited in APA’s resolution that IMAPP simply treated as non-existent, instead focusing only on weaknesses it could find in the few citations APA did provide. For example, the APA only cited three reference for its claim that anti-equality campaigns stigmatize gays and lesbians, the most recent of which was from 2006. But there is well over a decade of studies that reinforce this claim, such as the vast amount of research on this very question conducted by Dr. Glenda Russell.

Secondly, IMAPP abused what is actually good scientific rigor in the cited studies. When scientists conduct research, they take responsibility for identifying the limitations of each study, pointing out to what extent the conclusions can be fairly generalized and suggesting future areas of study. IMAPP pounced on these limitations in an attempt to demonstrate that the studies’ conclusions were somehow faulty or inapplicable, a tactic that abridges the integrity of what each study actually found. It actually raises the question of whether there is any collection of studies that could ever convince IMAPP to support marriage equality, and the answer is probably no, because IMAPP was founded upon the very bias of opposing equality. Thus, this oddly delayed and whiny rebuke should be seen only in the shallow intellectual format in which it was presented.

Just to drive home how disconnected from reality IMAPP’s positions are, consider this excerpt from its critique:

Overall the APA cites virtually no research suggesting that gay marriage provides any additional long-term benefits for gay couples in terms of their relationships, or social stigma. Nor does the APA take cognizance of the gay people who have opposed same-sex marriage, or in fact prefer civil unions. We do not know how many gay people take these views, but they appear with enough frequency in academic and popular press that a broad-brush assessment that gay people find the absence of gay marriage or the presence of civil unions uniformly stigmatizing appears hard to justify.

This, from one of many conservative groups committed to “strengthening marriage,” advocating for covenant marriage, and reducing the divorce rate. According to Gallagher and IMAPP, opposite-sex couples can benefit incredibly from having long-lasting committed marriage, but same-sex couples wouldn’t benefit at all. Clearly, IMAPP has nothing substantive to offer except a narrow-minded bias against the very lives of LGBT people.