Is the Talton Amendment dead or not?

Well, if push comes to shove, Governor Perry would prefer privatizing CPS to stigmatizing gay foster parents. I guess that's progress.

Perry said he didn't think the House amendment against gay foster parents, which faces strong opposition from senators, will survive a House-Senate conference committee.

But he added, "If the bill has the funding in it (and) if it does the things that we've laid out needs to happen, I'm going to sign the bill if that amendment's on it or not.

"CPS is really important, getting it fixed," Perry said, noting he had declared the legislation an emergency in the wake of a series of highly publicized deaths of children who weren't adequately protected by the agency.

Perry said that in an "ideal world" he would want foster children placed with "a family that had a mom and a dad."

But gay foster parents who are "loving and caring," he added, are "better than having the kids being abused, obviously."

You'd think that would be obvious, wouldn't you? It's not to Crazy Bob Talton, however. Someone's way out of the mainstream here, Bob, and I'm thinking it's you.

Crazy Bob does have company, though, in the form of Cathy Adams of the Texas Eagle Forum, who cited some incredibly bogus research in an appearance on CNN defending his anti-gay amendment.

Ms. Adams told me that her source for the claim was an article she had read on the conservative site WorldNetDaily, about a study published in February by Paul Cameron, chairman of the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based Family Research Institute, a group that says homosexuality is a major public-health threat. In the journal Psychological Reports, Dr. Cameron analyzed cases of sexual abuse committed against foster children and children in subsidized adoption homes, as reported to Illinois's Department of Children and Family Services from 1997 to 2002. There were 270 reports, and 34% of those were same-sex in nature: committed by a male adult against a male child, or a female adult against a female child. Dr. Cameron called those homosexual acts of abuse, and, citing several studies, including a joint report by the University of Michigan and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, concluded that gays make up between 1% and 3% of the adult U.S. population. "Thus, homosexual practitioners were proportionately more apt to sexually abuse foster or adoptive children," Dr. Cameron wrote.

This required several leaps of logic, some of which I'll discuss later. The biggest is that Dr. Cameron had no data about the makeup of homes in which the Illinois children were abused; indeed, a state DCFS spokeswoman told me the agency doesn't record whether households are same-sex. It's possible that much of what Dr. Cameron calls homosexual abuse occurred in what would be considered heterosexual homes.

Yet Ms. Adams simply divided 3% into 34% to get her 11 number. When I asked her about this discrepancy between what the study found and what she said, she replied, "I believe I didn't have that articulated as well as I should have." But she also said it seems unlikely that abuse would be homosexual in nature yet committed by an apparent heterosexual. "It just requires more explanation than what you can do in soundbites," she said.

Naturally, CNN's anchors let her get away with it completely unchallenged. As a tonic for that, you can also see a clip of Jon Stewart from The Daily Show ripping into the CNN airheads here - click the "Gaywatch" icon, it's the second item in. Via Lasso. WSJ link via LGRL and PinkDome.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on April 29, 2005 to That's our Lege | TrackBack