(=Note; this is from 2011=)

Al Franken’s attempt to embarrass Focus on the Family fails

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday for the incredibly named “Respect for Marriage Act” - the measure to repeal DOMA - Democrat Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota attempted to make a fool of Focus on the Family’s Tom Minnery for asserting that children in traditional households do much better in several respects than those in nontraditional households.

Minnery had used data from a comprehensive, national HHS study to make the point that the traditional family model actually works pretty well, and that things tend to get screwed up majorly whenever it’s tampered with. The senator and former comedian took issue with this, and offered a logical parry destined to send LGBT blogs and media outlets into raptures.

“I— checked the study out,” said Franken, shrugging, as a titter of laughter was heard in the room. “And it actually doesn’t say what you said it says.”

The study, as Franken notes, defines a “nuclear family” as consisting of “one or more children living with two parents who are married to one another and are each biological or adoptive parents to all children in the family.”

“Isn’t it true, Mr. Minnery, that a married same-sex couple that has had or adopted kids would fall under the definition of a family in the study that you cite?” Franken questioned. “I frankly don’t really know how we can trust the rest of your testimony, if you are reading studies these ways.”

Only Franken seems to have forgotten that as of 2007, the end date of the study’s data, there was only one state in the union with gay “marriage.” According to UCLA’s William Institute, Massachusetts in 2008 had 13,285 homosexual “marriages.” This would put the 2007 national total at even less - let’s say 13,000.

Meanwhile, there were around 59 million total married households in America at the same time, putting same-sex “marriage” households at 0.0002% of all the “nuclear households” theoretically considered by the HHS study.

Minnery’s point, that a traditional household shouldn’t be messed with, is decidedly not debunked by calling foul over a two ten-thousandths technicality. The real question is whether Congress will swallow the push to slap a band-aid labeled “marriage” on yet another such experiment.