...in support of same-sex marriage: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/obama-sex-marriage-legal-16312904

5/9/2012 3:11:43 PM

Better late than never I guess. Would have been nice last week.

5/9/2012 3:30:08 PM

He had to; he looked silly dancing around the issue and losing supporters.

5/9/2012 3:33:15 PM

Yeah, and it's not like he's going to relose the bigot vote. Though I guess black evangelicals is a question mark.

5/9/2012 3:34:05 PM

Quote :

"He had to; he looked silly dancing around the issue and losing supporters."

5/9/2012 3:34:20 PM

^^^hay that's the phrase the bigots used against Barney Frank in o-ten

5/9/2012 3:53:35 PM

I can see this being a concern with the black vote.

Although it shouldn't be a big deal at all. If I want to go out tonight and screw some dude, then so be it. I don't understand what all of the debate is about over such a pointless issue.

5/9/2012 4:01:22 PM

The fuss is it gets the sheep off their asses into the voting booths, which, for the time being, is still a necessary rubber stamp to retain power.

5/9/2012 4:05:15 PM

I don't think the majority of black supporters will abandon him over this.

5/9/2012 4:38:16 PM

http://gawker.com/5908981/president-obama-same+sex-marriage-should-be-legal

5/9/2012 4:44:48 PM

Brilliant move. Half of Americans as a whole support gay marriage, but only 39% of black Ameicans

He's going to get the black vote no matter what.

5/9/2012 7:11:31 PM

yeah, i'm sure his entourage of political advisers only told him to do this because they somehow figured it would pay off politically. i'm sure they even helped him contrive the "dinner table" story.

5/9/2012 7:30:04 PM

my question is will there be the same turnout of blacks at the poles.

5/9/2012 7:34:49 PM

There's a stripper joke in there somewhere.

5/9/2012 8:21:16 PM

if its any lower i doubt it'll be cause obama is pro gay marriage. theres no chance they're gonna vote for ultra-honkey mitt romney


[Edited on May 9, 2012 at 8:22 PM. Reason : g]

5/9/2012 8:21:52 PM

It's only a matter of time until Mitt says something like "I talked to my queer friends and they tell me that marriage equality is not what they're worried about right now."

5/9/2012 8:23:38 PM

IMO the kind of wealthy, business-oriented crowd that is Romney's natural constituency is actually okay with same-sex marriage, but he just needs to keep the bigots sending in that campaign cash and making that effort to get out the vote.

5/9/2012 9:52:19 PM

Everyone KNEW he was already out...we were just waiting for him to admit it.

That's like Tom Cruise or John Travolta coming out of the closet.

oh wait...

5/9/2012 10:05:45 PM

How does this help him win NC if he's disagreeing with 60% of the voting population and telling them they were wrong yesterday?

5/9/2012 10:42:08 PM

Would've been smart to do 2 days ago.

5/9/2012 10:46:56 PM

where's the DNC again this year???

5/9/2012 11:04:03 PM

Perfect Timing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6q8tggGAgQ

5/9/2012 11:06:26 PM

Let's see...

He comes out with this one day after it would have mattered and had an effect on the vote. Coincidentally, it's now that he can get the most attention.

He gets no credibility on this. This was a tactical move - don't give me this shit about evolving views.

5/9/2012 11:11:20 PM

Terrific. Now, since he has absolute authority over the armed forces he can declare such marriages legal for service members. Right? Or some other tangible policy change in the executive branch. Right? No? Must be a campaign stunt.

5/9/2012 11:17:55 PM

Quote :

"Terrific. Now, since he has absolute authority over the armed forces he can declare such marriages legal for service members. Right? Or some other tangible policy change in the executive branch. Right? No? Must be a campaign stunt."

Yeah the substantive stuff - like extending benefits to same sex partners of executive branch employees for example - were done before this.

5/10/2012 12:44:49 AM

Quote :

"How does this help him win NC if he's disagreeing with 60% of the voting population and telling them they were wrong yesterday?"

Like all southern states, NC has a large black population. Black people, especially rural southern black people, generally don't like gays. But they do like Obama.

Breaking it down simplistically, I'd say if you assumed all the whites who voted yes to amendment one vote for Obama and all the whites who voted no vote for Mitt, then had all the blacks vote for Obama regardless of how they voted for amendment one, I bet it would be a VERY close race.

[Edited on May 10, 2012 at 1:23 AM. Reason : ]

5/10/2012 1:22:54 AM

Quote :

"How does this help him win NC if he's disagreeing with 60% of the voting population and telling them they were wrong yesterday?"

Because the youth are very in favor of equality for gays, and this will energize them. I've seen 1 die hard republican friend publicly claim he's now voting Obama. Why not? Him and mitts economics and foreign policy views are practically the same, save a small few percentage here and there.

Not only does Obama have the youth vote locked up now, he has them energized.

5/10/2012 9:51:49 AM

Quote :

"Not only does Obama have the youth vote locked up now, he has them energized."

No. Youth turnout this year will probably be pretty low. There's just too many youth voters who have been turned off by his complacency and unwillingness to fight on their behalf. That, in addition to the GOP strategy of limiting early voting and closing DMVs, and this election will probably be close. The record number of people who voted for the first time to get Obama elected will probably go back to being politically apathetic. And voters on the left are still furious with Obama for being a 'centrist' and capitulating to a radical Republican party.

That being said, the calculus that went in to this decision was a smart move for the Democratic brand. It's forcing Republicans to be anti-equality, which is just a bad move, because they'll lose a generation of voters in the future.

5/10/2012 12:20:35 PM

Quote :

"Not only does Obama have the youth vote locked up now, he has them energized."

haha, okay sure

5/10/2012 1:02:30 PM

Yeah, he should have qualified, "youth-that-aren't-bigoted-assholes" vote.

[Edited on May 10, 2012 at 1:42 PM. Reason : fixd]

5/10/2012 1:33:40 PM

well I can't stand the guy, but I voted against the Amendment. See how that works? One without the other...


Oh fuck, am I not "the youth" anymore?

5/10/2012 2:00:45 PM

yes, you, the one person, invalidates the sentiment entirely.

It was good to see the youth conservatives with common sense on one issue come out in droves and knock down this Amendment on Tuesday.

5/10/2012 2:09:50 PM

This announcement was just a way to divert attention from the children killed in airstrikes this week.

5/10/2012 2:14:43 PM

^have you not figured out the pecking order, yet?


1) Bankers
2) Politicians
3) Christian white men
4) Christian white women
5) Minorities
6) Gays

.....

.....


.....


Muslims.

5/10/2012 2:29:14 PM

He just put the republicans in a really hard place. In essence, they already know that they are going to have to come out for marriage equality before Nov, but coming up with a gameplan to get there while not pissing off the evangelicals is going to be quite the task for their political strategists. I wouldn't want to have that job.

On the other hand I like to see things moving so quickly for once. I like to think that our hard work fighting against amendment 1 in NC had something to do with this sudden surge of momentum.

5/10/2012 6:45:15 PM

Quote :

"That being said, the calculus that went in to this decision was a smart move for the Democratic brand. It's forcing Republicans to be anti-equality, which is just a bad move, because they'll lose a generation of voters in the future."

Or bring about the impending fracturing of the republican party between the Christians and non Christians.

If this ever happens democrats and progressives would be in a tough spot.

When the supreme court castrates the health reform bill, how does that mix with this? Romney was weak on that anyway because of the law he pUshed for in his state.

[Edited on May 10, 2012 at 7:55 PM. Reason : ]

5/10/2012 7:51:27 PM

Quote :

"Or bring about the impending fracturing of the republican party between the Christians and non Christians. "

I don't think the divide is between Christian and non-Christian unless one pulles the whole "no true Scottsman" on Christians who would be in favor of equal-treatment of homosexual unions in some form.

Unless you mean that's how the anti-gay marriage part of such a split would characterize it? If that's the case then yeah that seems exactly how they'd characterize it since that's pretty much how religious-political schisms have been characterized by the traditionalist remainder from the Catholic schism to splits within Islam and so on.

[Edited on May 10, 2012 at 8:10 PM. Reason : ]

5/10/2012 8:04:42 PM

Well thank god Bristol Palin came out to tell us how it is...

"We know that in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home."

Amen!

5/11/2012 11:59:05 AM

Indeed, those orphans are better off with no parents than gay ones!

5/11/2012 2:59:03 PM

I think Bristol's salient point was that children growing up without a mother and a father are fucking worthless.

5/11/2012 9:55:14 PM

which is inaccurate: http://mediamatters.org/research/201205110008
especially for those who grow up with two mommies: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1994480,00.html

5/12/2012 6:25:13 AM

but you guys, Bristol is going to prove all those statistics wrong by raising her child in a strict mother/fath...oh wait

5/12/2012 3:41:32 PM

^^ Academic standards for studies like that just don't exist any more.

The whole point of doing a scientific study is to compare two groups that have one thing different between them, or to come as close to that ideal as possible.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2010/06/07/peds.2009-3153.full.pdf+html

That's the paper they reference for the longitudinal study.

So they include 1/12 as many Latinos as the control group, 1/5 as many African-Americans as the control group, and 40% more Caucasians than the control group. The income demographics are also very different from the control, but not by quite as much.

That's fine, mostly because of how difficult it had to have been to get any reasonable sample of planned lesbian motherhood in the late 80's. But they just compare the two groups as if they are the same.

To be meaningful, they would need to compare those in their experimental group along income and ethnicity lines to the appropriate slice of the control group.

When you have at least 5 major demographic differences between the experimental group and the control group, and then pretend that they're the same, the study becomes worthless regarding the variable you were trying to isolate.

I'd like to believe they didn't rig the groups to give this result. I don't know if I believe that, but I'd like to.

[Edited on May 12, 2012 at 4:07 PM. Reason : a]

5/12/2012 4:06:07 PM

^This limitation is mentioned in page 7 (page 8 of the PDF):

Quote :

"A final limitation is that although the NLLFS and the normative samples are similar in socioeconomic status, they are neither matched nor controlled for race/ethnicity or region of residence. The NLLFS sample is drawn from first-wave planned lesbian families who were initially clustered around metropolitan areas with visible lesbian communities, which were much less diverse than they are today; recruiting was limited to the relatively small number of prospective mothers who felt safe enough to identify publicly as lesbian, who had the economic resources to afford DI, and who, in the pre-Internet era, were affiliated with the communities in which the study was advertised."

The first limitation mentioned was the non-random sample, which is understandable because not many lesbians were out in the '80s.

5/12/2012 5:42:19 PM

Quote :

"well I can't stand the guy, but I voted against the Amendment. See how that works? One without the other... Oh fuck, am I not "the youth" anymore? "

Reality hits you hard, bro.

5/12/2012 6:54:53 PM

^^ I'm saying they failed to take an obvious step to fix that problem, either intentionally or by ignorance. It is inexcusable for that to be a distant footnote, and to refuse to publish their data segregated by demographic so readers could at least compare apples to apples.

The study doesn't even have any purpose or point as it stands, but they publish as if it did. And they damn well know that no journalist is going to notice any of that.

5/12/2012 8:11:28 PM

Purpose and objective are synonymous.

5/12/2012 8:57:06 PM

Lol, I know they have a section with that word used.

I mean it is of no proper use to anyone. It not only fails to prove something, it is not even good enough to count as any kind of evidence whatsoever on anything. Either they have no understanding of the scientific method as presented in 5th grade textbooks, or they willfully suppress such knowledge so they can get cited by ignorant Time writers.

5/12/2012 9:12:26 PM

^^^I think even the non-white sub-populations combined were so small (7% of sample of 84 families at T1: 3% black (3), 2% Native American (2), 1% Hispanic (1), 1% Asian (1), and no mixed or other, for a total of 7) that results would be statistically insignificant: The full sample is problematic enough, with a margin of error (max. radius of 95% confidence interval) of about 11% (0.98/sqrt(84)), but the set of non-white families would have a margin of error of 38%, black families 58%, Hispanic families 69%, and Hispanic and Asian families 98% each (also for white families, it's also about 11% but this time rounding down); this means that although you could get a rough idea of the outcomes for children of lesbian couples generally, you can't get such a good idea of the outcomes for children of non-white lesbian couples generally, and you can't get a good idea at all of the general outcomes for children of lesbian couples in any specific non-white racial group.

It's even worse for T5 (the couples who stuck through all the way), because only 77 couples remained (margin of error: 11%) of whom 96%, or 74, were white (margin of error: 11%), and figures for other racial groups weren't even mentioned, possibly because only 3 total were non-white (margin of error: 58%).
BTW it does make sense to do it by the couple, because only one partner in each couple even filled out the surveys (the biological mother, where available), and each couple (except for one with a mother of twins) had one child.
Also, the situation is even worse than that because they were unable to get a random sample; in particular, Native Americans were wildly overrepresented (they represent about 0.9% of the American population).

As the authors said, it is hoped that in the future, they will be able to do a similar survey with an actually random sample of many more lesbian (and also gay male) couples, like 1000 (to ensure a margin of error of about 3%) or maybe 8000 (to ensure that black (12.6% of pop.) and Hispanic (16.3% of pop.) data can be reported with a margin of error of about 3%).
Figures for percentages of racial groups come from the 2010 Census: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html

[Edited on May 12, 2012 at 9:23 PM. Reason : ^Such is the state of woefully underfunded science on sexual orientation and gender identity.

5/12/2012 9:21:44 PM

^ TULIPlovr is trolling you.

5/12/2012 9:26:24 PM