Gays and lesbians make bad bed-fellows

Slate's William Saletan on gay parenting, here. Slate likes the bratty contrarian angle, and they're willing to challenge feminists and a few other liberal shibboleths, but it's impossible to imagine them taking on the gay initiative.

I don't know enough about the research to have a position, but I certainly don't trust Saletan's take the studies. My biggest question: why do the studies consider male-male and female-female parenting pairs together, if they do? They're virtually certain to be widely divergent in some very fundmental ways. If some studies do consider the groups separately, why doesn't Saletan report on the findings? (I don't have a problem with female-female parents, as long as they have plenty of money, but I can't say the same about male-male.)

Diamond-encrusted fraud

Particularly bad little Weisberg article in Slate on why reasonable folks won't vote for Romney, here.

Boils down to: people who would believe in a fraud as transparent as Joe Smith are too stupid to be trusted in office. No, Smith's claims are no more outrageous than the central claims of Christianity and Judaism, but they're worse, because they're newer, because.... not quite clear on that one.

Self-critical essay on atheism

Interesting essay on atheism from The New Republic here. I really dislike the word "atheism" in this context.

Illegitimate births and teen pregnancy highest among most vulnerable groups (duh)

These stats on out-of-wedlock births from "Hispanic Family Values?" by Heather MacDonald, appearing in City Journal, here.

Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country—over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 1,000 unmarried white women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian women, and 66 for every 1,000 unmarried black women. Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian births. Only the percentage of black out-of-wedlock births—68 percent—exceeds the Hispanic rate. But the black population is not going to triple over the next few decades.

As if the unmarried Hispanic birthrate weren’t worrisome enough, it is increasing faster than among other groups. It jumped 5 percent from 2002 to 2003, whereas the rate for other unmarried women remained flat. Couple the high and increasing illegitimacy rate of Hispanics with their higher overall fertility rate, and you have a recipe for unstoppable family breakdown.

The only bright news in this demographic disaster story concerns teen births. Overall teen childbearing in the U.S. declined for the 12th year in a row in 2003, having dropped by more than a third since 1991. Yet even here, Hispanics remain a cause for concern. The rate of childbirth for Mexican teenagers, who come from by far the largest and fastest-growing immigrant population, greatly outstrips every other group. The Mexican teen birthrate is 93 births per every 1,000 girls, compared with 27 births for every 1,000 white girls, 17 births for every 1,000 Asian girls, and 65 births for every 1,000 black girls. To put these numbers into international perspective, Japan’s teen birthrate is 3.9, Italy’s is 6.9, and France’s is 10. Even though the outsize U.S. teen birthrate is dropping, it continues to inflict unnecessary costs on the country, to which Hispanics contribute disproportionately.

I don't know what data set she's mining for these numbers, and I don't care for the tone of the piece. But I think the numbers bear out the idea that a permissive sex culture puts the most vulnerable segments of a population at greatest risk.