For Easter, ABC News’ “This Week” hosted three top evangelical Christian leaders who spent a good portion of the segment obsessing over homosexuality, bashing gay people, and bearing false witness about same-sex couples raising children. The triumvirate at the table were Franklin Graham (image), the son of the 95-year old Rev. Billy Graham; Ralph Reed, the disgraced grifter, campaign finance law breaker, and Pat Robertson‘s former executive director of the Christian Coalition; and Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission who replaced the disgraced Richard Land in that role.
Host Martha Radditz invited Graham to “stand by” his recent infamous comments that gay people adopt children in order to sexually abuse them and to “recruit” them into homosexuality, and that Vladimir Putin signing his archaic anti-gay laws “was probably a pretty smart thing to do” in “protecting his nation’s children.” After watching video of himself making those comments, Graham was only too happy to stand by them. Graham trumpeted that President Putin thinks “taking advantage of children, exploiting children is wrong,” suggesting that gays are “taking advantage of children, exploiting children,” and that Barack Obama does not. He also added, “We used to have a president in this country who did what’s right for this country but we don’t seem to have that right now.”
Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart this morning called Graham “beneath contempt” and his comments “offensive” and “detestable.”
Moore pushed back only slightly, professing, “I agree that every child deserves both a mom and a dad.”
And then Ralph Reed pushed his way in, tossing to the table — and the millions of viewers watching across America — lies from the thoroughly-discredited Regnerus study. “And by the way, Martha, the social science on this is clear. This isn’t about Vladimir Putin, this is about what’s best for children here in the United States and the social science is irrefutable. And it is a child who grows up in a home without the mother and father present — and they both play very unique, procreative, nurturing, and socializing role — they’re nine times more likely to end up dropping out of high school, they’re five times more likely to end up in poverty, and they’re three times more likely to end up addicted to drugs and alcohol.”
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Of course, most of America doesn’t know that just last month a federal judge who presided over a case on same-sex marriage in Michigan sat listening to the state’s lead witness, Mark Regnerus, and concluded that the “Court finds Regnerus’s testimony entirely unbelievable and not worthy of serious consideration, and that Regnerus “certainly cannot purport to have undertaken a scholarly research effort to compare the outcomes of children raised by same-sex couples with those of children raised by heterosexual couples.”
But Ralph Reed chose to tell falsehoods about gay people by couching them in the phrase, “a child who grows up in a home without the mother and father present,” while talking about same-sex couples raising children.
Cokie Roberts stepped in and took Reed to task.
“But the social science is also irrefutable that a child raised in an orphanage is in much worse shape than a child raised in a home,” the ABC News anchor told Reed. “And the fact that people are willing to take these children and raise them, and raise them in a loving way is clearly better for these children.”
His response?
“I think the social science is just simply not in yet on same-sex couples and I think the law has every right to set an ideal. And the ideal is a mother and a father.”
Reed of course is lying out of both sides of his mouth.
From one side, he spouts Regnerus “facts,” which have nothing to do with gay parents, and from the other, “the social science is just simply not in yet on same-sex couples.” Which is it?
Meanwhile, the social science is in on same-sex couples.
Every major medical association has stated that children raised by same-sex parents turn out no different than their peers raised by different-sex parents.
“Decades of social science research also confirms that children of same-sex parents have similar levels of psychological adjustment and are no more likely than their peers raised by heterosexual parents to report behavioral issues. All of the leading national child welfare and social service organizations agree that children raised by lesbian, gay, and bisexual parents are just as happy, healthy, and well-adjusted as children raised by different-sex parents. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association, Child Welfare League of America, and National Association of Social Workers all have published organizational statements confirming that lesbian, gay, and bisexual people make excellent parents who raise developmentally healthy children.”
— March 4, 2014, Amici Curiae Brief Of Family Equality Council, Colage, Voices For Utah Children, And The Children’s Center Of Salt Lake City, Kitchen v. Herbert.