Undercover At NOM's Anti-Gay Conference

Equality Matters reporter Carlos Maza went undercover at a NOM conference to pose as a straight college student interested in "defending traditional marriage." Today he has posted a lengthy accounting of the events, seminars, and outright lies told to NOM's young attendees.

Maza's report is quite lengthy and I'll excerpt just a bit:

At noon, I sat in on a talk titled "The Truth About Same Sex Parenting Studies," led by economist Douglas Allen. I had read Allen's work through the Ruth Institute blog before - including a piece in which he wrote that same-sex relationships were more unstable, unhealthy, and promiscuous than heterosexual relationships.

Allen began his talk by attempting to debunk the enormous body of research indicating that same-sex parents can effectively raise children. He listed a number of familiar but inaccurate criticisms of modern same-sex parenting studies: sample sizes are too small, sample sizes aren't random, the studies' authors are biased, and so on.

Allen went on to claim that lesbian relationships were more likely to experience instability and dissolution because women's menstrual cycles become synchronized when they live together for a long period of time. I could barely choke back my laughter when I heard Allen's explanation. I'd been exposed a lot of terrible arguments against allowing same-sex couples to raise children, but "lesbians will menstruate at the same time" was the kind of claim I'd expect to hear from someone parodying the anti-gay position.

A few moments later, though, I wasn't laughing...

Read the full Equality Matters report.