On Sunday, anti-gay activist Tony Perkins appeared on a Fox News panel discussing same-sex marriage, and lied. Politifact wasn’t afraid to rate his claim “false.”
Politifact, the fact-checking arm of the Tampa Bay Times, heard Tony Perkins on “Fox News Sunday,” and decided he wasn’t telling the truth.
In a heated debate, during which the head of the Family Research Council got pummeled by both Fox News anchor Mike Wallace and Ted Olson, a Republican attorney who brought same-sex marriage to California and Virginia, Perkins said, “We know from the social science that children do best with a mom and a dad.”
These days, most anyone who hears that statement might automatically dismiss it as the dying vestiges of a failed hate movement, but Politifact wanted to go one step further.
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“We have examined this sort of claim before,” Politifact reported just hours after Perkins made the claim. “The independent research fails to back up Perkins’ view.”
And where did they look for facts to back up Perkins’ statement? On the web pages of his own organization, of course.
“The Family Research Council has a Web page with 10 arguments from social science against same-sex marriage. We went through the list to see which spoke to the welfare of children, and of those points, which were based on studies that compared children in same-sex and opposite-sex households.”
What did they find?
“Five of the 10 had more to do with marriage and society than children. They advanced claims that opposite-sex marriage promotes the domestication of men, paternal commitment, sexual fidelity, “gender-typical” roles and the association of marriage with procreation. A sixth one spoke of how children conceived through artificial insemination “hunger” to know about their biological fathers. While those questions no doubt occur, the book cited by the Family Research Council focused largely on what fathers can bring to child-rearing. It was more a guide to fathering, and less a comparison study of different kinds of households. In fact, it wasn’t a peer-reviewed comparison study at all.”
“That leaves four items on the Family Research Council list. One asserted that children need fathers and cited a study on households where the father is absent. However, that research looked at single-parent households, not children with same-sex parents, and so it addresses a different issue entirely.”
Ultimately, Politifact dismissed or debunked every source cited by Perkins’ Family Research Council.
Then they went and found the infamous Regnerus anti-gay “parenting” “study,” and dismissed that as well.
In short, Politifact concludes, “We rate Perkins’ claim False.”
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