SPLODEY HEAD DEFCON Level 4 –  Progressives rush to hide this in the liberal “Keep This From The Media” file.

(Volokh Conspiracy Blog – Via Washington Post)  There was a small furor yesterday over an MSNBC staffer’s intolerant views of conservatives and the political right. Erik Wemple at the Post published MSNBC’s apology, which announces that a staffer was fired. You can also follow the dispute at New York Magazine, Reason, Michele Malkin, Instapundit, and Gateway Pundit (which captured the fullest screenshot of the now-scrubbed tweet).

My interest today is not in what happened or in the responses of MSNBC and the people it insulted, but rather in the substance of the claim: that people on the right side of the political spectrum would be opposed to mixed-race families including an adopted child.  This follows a somewhat similar MSNBC kerfuffle over jokes implying that an African-American grandchild was somehow out of place in a Romney family photo.

I thought perhaps a little academic light might clear up some of the press’s ignorance about adopted and step-families in America (the Romney case).

The General Social Survey, which is the best-run of the omnibus surveys (getting about a 70 percent response rate as opposed to a 1-25 percent response for more typical opinion polls) has data on family makeup.  I was able to analyze their 2000 through 2012 data on 723 households in which any family members were adopted children or step-children of the head of the household or of the spouse of the respondent.  For almost all of these households, the GSS reports both political views and whether the household is mixed race, as opposed to a white household, an African-American household, or whatever.

Not surprisingly, there is no statistically significant left-right political differences in the proportion of adopted or step-families that are in mixed race households.  Indeed, among families with step-children or adopted children, 11 percent of conservatives were living in mixed race households compared to 10 percent of liberals living in mixed-race households.

Similarly, 9.4 percent of Republicans living in step- or adopted families were in mixed-race households, compared to only 8.8 percent of Democrats in such families. (Again, this small advantage for Republicans is not large enough to be statistically significant).

If one breaks things down further by both party and political orientation, only 7.7 percent of liberal Democrats and 3.6 percent of moderate Democrats lived in mixed-race adopted or step-households, compared to an insignificantly different 10.6 percent of conservative Republicans.  (continue reading)