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Serena Sigillito
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A Married Mom and Dad Really Do Matter: New Evidence from Canada
by Mark Regnerus
within Marriage

October 8th, 2013


1290 260 2453

A new academic study based on the Canadian census suggests that a married mom and dad matter for children. Children of same-sex coupled households do not fare as well.

There is a new and significant piece of evidence in the social science debate about gay parenting and the unique contributions that mothers and fathers make to their children’s flourishing. A study published last week in the journal Review of the Economics of the Household—analyzing data from a very large, population-based sample—reveals that the children of gay and lesbian couples are only about 65 percent as likely to have graduated from high school as the children of married, opposite-sex couples. And gender matters, too: girls are more apt to struggle than boys, with daughters of gay parents displaying dramatically low graduation rates.

Unlike US-based studies, this one evaluates a 20 percent sample of the Canadian census, where same-sex couples have had access to all taxation and government benefits since 1997 and to marriage since 2005.

While in the US Census same-sex households have to be guessed at based on the gender and number of self-reported heads-of-household, young adults in the Canadian census were asked, “Are you the child of a male or female same-sex married or common law couple?” While study author and economist Douglas Allen noted that very many children in Canada who live with a gay or lesbian parent are actually living with a single mother—a finding consonant with that detected in the 2012 New Family Structures Study—he was able to isolate and analyze hundreds of children living with a gay or lesbian couple (either married or in a “common law” relationship akin to cohabitation).

So the study is able to compare—side by side—the young-adult children of same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples, as well as children growing up in single-parent homes and other types of households. Three key findings stood out to Allen:

children of married opposite-sex families have a high graduation rate compared to the others; children of lesbian families have a very low graduation rate compared to the others; and the other four types [common law, gay, single mother, single father] are similar to each other and lie in between the married/lesbian extremes.

Employing regression models and series of control variables, Allen concludes that the substandard performance cannot be attributed to lower school attendance or the more modest education of gay or lesbian parents. Indeed, same-sex parents were characterized by higher levels of education, and their children were more likely to be enrolled in school than even those of married, opposite-sex couples. And yet their children are notably more likely to lag in finishing their own schooling.

The same is true of the young-adult children of common law parents, as well as single mothers and single fathers, highlighting how little—when you lean on large, high-quality samples—the data have actually changed over the past few decades. The intact, married mother-and-father household remains the gold standard for children’s progress through school. What is surprising in the Canadian data is the revelation that lesbian couples’ children fared worse, on average, than even those of single parents.

The truly unique aspect of Allen’s study, however, may be its ability to distinguish gender-specific effects of same-sex households on children. He writes:

the particular gender mix of a same-sex household has a dramatic difference in the association with child graduation. Consider the case of girls. . . . Regardless of the controls and whether or not girls are currently living in a gay or lesbian household, the odds of graduating from high school are considerably lower than any other household type. Indeed, girls living in gay households are only 15 percent as likely to graduate compared to girls from opposite sex married homes.

Thus although the children of same-sex couples fare worse overall, the disparity is unequally shared, but is instead based on the combination of the gender of child and gender of parents. Boys fare better—that is, they’re more likely to have finished high school—in gay households than in lesbian households. For girls, the opposite is true. Thus the study undermines not only claims about “no differences” but also assertions that moms and dads are interchangeable. They’re not.

Every study has its limitations, and this one does too. It is unable to track the household history of children. Nor is it able to establish the circumstances of the birth of the children whose education is evaluated—that is, were they the product of a heterosexual union, adopted, or born via surrogate or assisted reproductive technology? Finally, the census did not distinguish between married and common law gay and lesbian couples. But couples they are.

Indeed, its limitations are modest in comparison to its remarkable and unique strengths—a rigorous and thorough analysis of a massive, nationally-representative dataset from a country whose government has long affirmed same-sex couples and parenting. It is as close to an ideal test as we’ve seen yet.

The study’s publication continues the emergence of new, population-based research in this domain, much of which has undermined scholarly and popular claims about equivalence between same-sex and opposite-sex households echoed by activists and reflected in recent legal proceedings about same-sex marriage.

Might the American Psychological Association and American Sociological Association have been too confident and quick to declare “no differences” in such a new arena of study, one marked by the consistent reliance upon small or nonrandom “convenience” samples? Perhaps. Maybe a married mom and dad do matter, after all.

Mark Regnerus is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and senior fellow at the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture.

part 2

The Witherspoon Institute
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Ryan T. Anderson
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Serena Sigillito
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Mark Regnerus and the Storm over the New Family Structures Study
by Matthew J. Franck
within Marriage, Science

October 30th, 2012


18 0 361

Attacks on sociologist Mark Regnerus after he challenged the “no differences” thesis haven’t obscured the high quality of the New Family Structures Study or its troubling findings. The first of a two-part series.

Seldom has the publication of a dry, factual report in sociology caused such a storm of controversy. In June 2012, the bimonthly peer-reviewed journal Social Science Research published an article by University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus titled, “How different are the children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study.” The answer to his title’s question was: quite a bit different, and most of the differences are not good.

Within minutes, it seemed, Professor Regnerus, a gifted and highly productive scholar with two previous books published on related subjects, was denounced as “anti-gay,” attacked personally and professionally, and his thoughtful, measured research conclusions were buried under an avalanche of invective, abuse, and misunderstanding. For the remainder of the summer months, Regnerus withstood an onslaught of criticism, but as the autumn arrived, it became clear that his reputation and the soundness of his research had been vindicated.

What had happened?

The editor of Social Science Research, Professor James D. Wright of the University of Central Florida, had known that Regnerus’s article would spark discussion about family and sexuality among sociologists. As he would later say himself when others complained that he was trying to drive up the readership of the journal, “guilty as charged.” What editor doesn’t want people reading and talking about what he works so hard to produce?

This is why Wright published, alongside Regnerus’s new research, a probing criticism of the inadequacy of nearly all previous research on the question of parenting by people in same-sex relationships, authored by Professor Loren Marks of Louisiana State University (who was not connected with Regnerus’s new research in any way). It’s also why Wright invited critiques to be published, in the same issue, by three experienced scholars in the sociology of the family (Paul Amato, David Eggebeen, and Cynthia Osborne), with rejoinders by Regnerus and Marks. It made for a very interesting exchange.

The June 2012 issue of SSR was a red-hot topic of controversy because Regnerus and Marks overthrew a “consensus” among sociologists on the “no differences” thesis—the view that there are no meaningful differences, in the life outcomes of children, between those raised by heterosexual parents and those raised by gay or lesbian ones.

In its most extreme form—one that is not even supported by the generally low-quality research published before Regnerus’s article—the “no differences” thesis holds that children raised by parents who have same-sex relationships do just as well as, or in some cases even better than, those raised in the intact biological family by their own natural parents who are and remain faithfully married to each other.

The American Psychological Association, despite the cagy wording of its bombshell assertion, was probably happy to invite this unwarranted inference in its 2005 legal brief, published to influence judicial deliberations in same-sex marriage lawsuits. The APA said “the evidence to date suggests that home environments provided by lesbian and gay parents are as likely as those provided by heterosexual parents to support and enable children’s psychosocial growth.” And who didn’t think of the Ozzie-and-Harriet natural family when reading “heterosexual parents” in that sentence?

But as Loren Marks showed, the 59 studies grounding the APA’s statement were all deeply flawed, with sampling and design problems, inadequate statistical rigor, and conclusions about “no differences” that could not be justifiably generalized to the larger population.

And whereas Marks offered only well-founded criticism of previous research, Regnerus offered something new: the first research employing a large, random sample of the young adult population, directly asking them about their childhood experiences and their present state of life, across a range of variables touching on economic and educational success, romantic and sexual experience, substance abuse, experiences with crime and violence, and so forth.

Regnerus and his colleagues in the New Family Structures Study (NFSS), working with the research firm Knowledge Networks, screened more than 15,000 Americans between the ages of 18 and 39, and interviewed nearly 3,000 of them. The subjects’ family experiences were sorted into eight categories, ranging from the intact biological family (with the subject’s parents still together at the time of interview), across various family structures involving divorce, remarriage, adoption, and single-parenting, with two categories for subjects raised by mothers or fathers who had same-sex romantic relationships during their childhood.

The results were dismal for the “no differences” thesis: on 25 out of 40 outcomes variables, the children of mothers who had had lesbian relationships fared poorly compared to the children of intact biological families. And on 11 of the 40 outcomes, the children of fathers who had had gay relationships fared poorly on the same comparison. (For a summary of the study’s findings, see Ana Samuel’s Public Discourse article, “The Kids Aren’t All Right,” and http://www.familystructurestudies.com/.)

Regnerus was cautious in his conclusions: he didn’t label poor outcomes as effects of parents’ sexuality, and noted that “a variety of forces uniquely problematic for child development in lesbian and gay families” could account for the phenomena. But, he concluded, “the empirical claim that no notable differences exist must go.”

The high quality of the New Family Structures Study’s research design, data collection, and findings, and the firmness of Regnerus’s conclusion that the “consensus” in sociology was exploded, only seem to have encouraged interested parties, in the academy and outside it, to attempt to debunk the NFSS. UCLA demographer Gary Gates assembled about 200 scholars to denounce Regnerus’s article, but to little substantive effect.

In the public arena, Regnerus saw his research crudely hashed over at The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the Huffington Post, among other places—and found himself caricatured as strapped to a Catherine wheel on the cover of the Weekly Standard. These are not normal experiences for your average stay-at-home sociology professor. Clearly Regnerus’s political adversaries saw much at stake in the public reception of his research. (For the legal stakes, see my Public Discourse essay, “Supreme Court Take Notice: Two Sociologists Shift the Ground of the Marriage Debate.”)

The two main criticisms of Regnerus’s article, repeated in numerous variations, are these. First, he had used the abbreviations “LM” (for “lesbian mother”) and “GF” (for “gay father”) to describe subjects who knew that their mother or father had a romantic same-sex relationship of any length before the subject turned 18.

The use of “LM” and “GF” was culpably misleading, critics claimed, because the category might include persons who never “identified” as lesbian or gay, and might only have had a “one-night stand” with a same-sex partner. The second criticism, closely related, was that in comparing these young people raised in “LM” and “GF” households, so defined, with those raised in “IBF” households—married heterosexual couples raising their own biological offspring and staying together throughout the subjects’ lives (even beyond their childhood, to the present)—Regnerus was comparing apples to oranges.

In their view, he should have compared children of IBF households with children of long-term, intact, stable same-sex couples who identify as gay or lesbian. Then, they were sure, the differences he found would largely disappear—as they claimed was shown by the previous research Regnerus and Marks had each criticized for their small, unrepresentative samples. What he was really doing, they claimed, was setting stable family situations next to unstable ones—and so stability was the real variable at work. To make it seem that the differences were “about” sexuality was worse than an error, critics claimed: this was culpable distortion of the social phenomena, a twisting of social science in the service of conservative ideology.

A third, more ad hominem criticism was that Regnerus received the majority of his grant funding from the Witherspoon Institute (publisher of Public Discourse), and a minority from the Bradley Foundation—both of them viewed as “conservative” institutions in their educational and philanthropic efforts. But Regnerus declared these facts in his original article, and told his readers that neither Witherspoon nor Bradley had any role in shaping the conduct or the conclusions of his research, which he has made wholly transparent. No one has ever gainsaid this avowal on his part. For my part, I can say that Regnerus had no input on my choice to write this account of the controversy or its content.

In the less responsible precincts of the blogosphere, Regnerus was the target of vicious calumnies along the lines described above, one of which led to the opening of an official “inquiry” by the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches, to determine whether he had committed “scientific misconduct.”

At UT, the policy in such matters is that the merest squeak from any party alleging misconduct is enough to trigger a preliminary inquiry, which in 60 days must determine whether a full-blown investigation is warranted. The university swung into action, doing everything by the book, at no little inconvenience to Regnerus, but at the end of August the UT “research integrity officer” concluded that no plausible charge of misconduct could be substantiated. The university’s provost accepted that conclusion, and closed the matter without prejudice to Regnerus’s standing as a scholar and teacher.

Meanwhile SSR editor James Wright was under fire for publishing Regnerus’s article; for appearing to rush it to publication; and for placing Marks’s article alongside it. Opting for transparency at some risk to his own reputation, Wright asked a member of SSR’s editorial board to “audit” the process that led to the publication of Regnerus’s article.

The risk was that he chose Darren E. Sherkat, a sociologist at Southern Illinois University whom Regnerus would later describe (without fear of contradiction) as someone “who has long harbored negative sentiment about me.” Sherkat, speaking out of school, confidently told a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education in July that Regnerus’s study was “bull****” when his audit was still in draft form and neither Regnerus nor Wright had written a response to it.

Sherkat’s audit and several other items of interest have now been published in the November 2012 issue of SSR, in a special 40-page section introduced by Wright. To his credit, when he sticks to the charge he was given, Sherkat finds that the journal’s editor did nothing wrong in publishing either Regnerus’s article or Marks’s.

Wright referred both papers to knowledgeable scholars of the subjects involved, who held varying views on the politics of same-sex unions, and who unanimously recommended their publication. No violations of normal procedure occurred; Sherkat says he “may well have made the same decisions” Wright did, given the reviews; and he dismisses as “ludicrous” any suggestion that the editor was up to anything political.

To his discredit, Sherkat, a sociologist of religion who does not appear to have done any research on family and sexuality issues (but for a single article studying how religion and political affiliation affect views of same-sex marriage), nonetheless appoints himself a final referee of the merits of Regnerus’s research—not a function he was asked to perform—and opines that it should not have been published.

James Wright, correctly, takes Sherkat’s conclusions as an auditor as vindication of his editorial performance, and rightly discounts his colleague’s attempt to set himself up as a post hoc referee with a veto over publishing Regnerus’s scholarship. If he sent the work to knowledgeable reviewers who unanimously said to publish it (and Wright notes that such unanimity is unusual), that seems to be the end of the affair.

But it isn’t. In the latest issue Wright chose to publish two significant new contributions to the discussion begun in June. The real issues with Sherkat and other critics are joined by Regnerus, who returns to the pages of SSR with a vigorous response and a re-analysis of his data, and by Professor Walter Schumm of Kansas State, who contributes an expert review of what we know from social science today about the interwoven variables of sexuality, family stability, and childrearing outcomes.

I’ll say more on these contributions in tomorrow’s essay.

Matthew J. Franck is the Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Radford University.
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part 1

These are backwards part 2 before part 1 but you guys are smart enough to figure out all that.
I am posting also another article on this concept. I am using all of these because when I first put up the Regenerus study to contradict the LGBTQ activists claim that kids raised in same sex households were better, smarter and more well adapted than those from opposite sex married families the hate mail was unbleievable. now that the rest of the study is out and you can see the truth perhaps you will care more about the kids.

no propaganda please Loc: moon orbiting the third rock from the sun

he Kids Aren’t All Right: New Family Structures and the "No Differences" Claim
by Ana Samuel
within Marriage, Science

June 14th, 2012


597 64 3864

Two new peer-reviewed studies show that family structure matters and children do best when reared by their married biological mother and father.

The widely circulated claim that parents engaged in same-sex relationships do just as well as other parents at raising children—a claim widely known today as the “no differences” thesis—is not settled science. Two new peer-reviewed studies released this week by the academic journal Social Science Research challenge the claim that there are no differences in outcomes between children raised by parents who have same-sex relationships and those raised by their biological mother and father in intact, stable marriages.

In the first article, family studies scholar Loren Marks of Louisiana State University reviews the 59 studies that are referenced in the 2005 American Psychological Association brief that came to the conclusion that there are “no differences.” Marks concludes that “not one of the 59 studies referenced … compares a large, random, representative sample of lesbian or gay parents and their children with a large, random, representative sample of married parents and their children. The available data, which are drawn primarily from small convenience samples, are insufficient to support a strong generalizable claim either way.”[1] Marks’s study casts significant doubt upon the older evidence on which the APA brief, and thus the “no differences” paradigm, rests.

The second article, by sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin, presents new and extensive empirical evidence that shows there are differences in outcomes between the children of a parent who has same-sex relationships and children raised by their married, biological mother and father. This new evidence was gathered by Dr. Regnerus, the lead investigator of the New Family Structures Study (NFSS) of the University of Texas, which in 2011 surveyed 2,988 young adults for the specific purpose of collecting more reliable, nationally representative data about children from various family origins. (The Witherspoon Institute provided funding for this study.) Already, the NFSS has been acknowledged by critics to be “better situated than virtually all previous studies to detect differences between these groups in the population.”[2]

As Regnerus explains, the NFSS is unique among gay parenting research in three ways:

First, it compares the outcomes of children who reported having a mother who had a same-sex relationship with another woman (LM for short) or a father who had a same-sex relationship with another man (GF for short) with the outcomes of children who reported coming from an intact biological family (IBF for short). Most gay parenting research compares gay and lesbian parenting to single, divorced, and step-parent parenting, or conversely compares a select, and often socio-economically privileged, population of gay parents to a broad, representative sample of the general population.

Second, the NFSS gathered responses from young adult children. Other gay parenting studies focus on the responses of parents for their views about what it is like to be parenting as a gay man or lesbian woman. The NFSS interviewed the sons and daughters of GFs and LMs after they had grown up and matured into young adults (ages 18-39). This allowed the children to speak for themselves about their past experiences and to report on how they are doing at present.

Finally, the NFSS drew from a large, random sample of the U.S. population. To date, there is only one other gay parenting study that draws from a large, random sample, that of Michael Rosenfeld of Stanford University, who relies upon 2010 U.S. Census data. Every other gay parenting study thus far relies upon small or non-probability samples, which are inadequate for drawing conclusions about the population at large. Additionally, the NFSS gathered more data of interest to gay parenting researchers than did the U.S. Census, soliciting answers on a wide range of outcomes, including social, emotional, and relational well-being.

Qualifications of the Results

Before detailing the results of the NFSS, two important points must be made: First, the results do not claim to establish causality between parenting and child outcomes. In other words, the results are not a “report card” on gay parenting, but a report on the average condition of grown children from households of gay and lesbian parents versus those from IBFs. So, for instance, when the study finds that children who have had a parent in a same-sex romantic relationship are much more likely to suffer from depression as young adults than the children who come from IBFs, this does not claim that the gay parent was the cause of the depression in his or her child; simply that such children on average have more depression, for reasons unidentified by the study. That said, however, the study controlled for variables like age, gender, race, level of mother’s education, perceived household income while growing up, the degree of legislative gay-friendliness of the respondent’s home state, and experience of being bullied as a youth. Controls help eliminate alternative explanations for a given outcome, making the causal link between parenting structure and children’s outcomes more likely when the results are statistically significant after controls.

Second, the kind of gay parenting identified was rarely planned by two gay parents. The study found that the children who were raised by a gay or lesbian parent as little as 15 years ago were usually conceived within a heterosexual marriage, which then underwent divorce or separation, leaving the child with a single parent. That parent then had at least one same-sex romantic relationship, sometimes outside of the child’s home, sometimes within it. To be more specific, among the respondents who said their mother had a same-sex romantic relationship, a minority, 23%, said they had spent at least three years living in the same household with both their mother and her romantic partner. Only 2 out of the 15,000 screened spent a span of 18 years with the same two mothers. Among those who said their father had had a same-sex relationship, 1.1% of children reported spending at least three years together with both men.

This strongly suggests that the parents’ same-sex relationships were often short-lived, a finding consistent with the broader research on elevated levels of instability among same-sex romantic partners. For example, a recent 2012 study of same-sex couples in Great Britain finds that gay and lesbian cohabiting couples are more likely to separate than heterosexual couples.[3] A 2006 study of same sex marriages in Norway and Sweden found that “divorce risk levels are considerably higher in same-sex marriages”[4] such that Swedish lesbian couples are more than three times as likely to divorce as heterosexual couples, and Swedish gay couples are 1.35 times more likely to divorce (net of controls). Timothy Biblarz and Judith Stacey, two of the most outspoken advocates for same-sex marriage in the U.S. academy, acknowledge that there is more instability among lesbian parents.[5]

Therefore, while critics of the NFSS have faulted it for lacking comparisons between children of IBFs and the children of committed and intact gay or lesbian couples, this was attempted, but was not feasible. Despite drawing from a large, representative sample of the U.S. population, and despite using screening tactics designed to boost the number of respondents who reported having had a parent in a same-sex relationship, a very small segment reported having been parented by the same two women or two men for a minimum of three years. Although there is much speculation that today there are large numbers of same-sex couples in the U.S. who are providing a stable, long-term parenting relationship for their children, no studies based upon large, random samples of the U.S. population have been published that show this to be true, and the above-cited studies of different nations show that on average, same-sex couple relationships are more short-lived than those of opposite-sex couples.

Despite the lack of empirical evidence for the claim that today there are large numbers of stable, two-parent gay households, for the last ten years, contemporary gay parenting research has nevertheless claimed that there are “no significant differences” (and some benefits) to being raised by same-sex parents. Therefore, Regnerus analyzed the new NFSS data to verify this claim. In the end, he found the claim to be more plausible when comparing the grown children of parents who had a same-sex relationship to the grown children of divorced, adopted, single-parented, or step-parented arrangements. The claim is false if one compares the grown children of a parent who had a same-sex relationship to those from IBFs. While the study has been criticized for “comparing apples to oranges,” Regnerus’s work studies the reality of the population of children who were raised by parents who had same-sex relationships. As the next sections show, there are clear and, in most cases, very unfortunate differences between the children of parents who had a same-sex relationship and those from biological families of still-married parents.

The following selection of NFSS outcomes can be found animated, graphed, and numerically compared at: www.familystructurestudies.com.

Social Outcomes

Public perceptions and stereotypes of children of gays and lesbians usually assume them to be white, upper-middle-class members of society. However, in response to questions about race, 48% of the respondents with a GF, and 43% of the respondents with an LM indicated that they were either black or Hispanic, a number much higher than previously found by studies based on convenience samples.[6] On economic outcomes, grown children of an LM were almost four times more likely to be currently on public assistance than the grown children of IBFs. As young adults, they were also 3.5 times more likely to be unemployed than the grown children of IBFs.

On criminal outcomes, the children of GFs showed the greatest propensity to be involved in crime. They were, on average, more frequently arrested and pled guilty to more non-minor offenses than the young-adult children in any other category. The children of LMs reported the second highest frequency of involvement in crimes and arrests, and in both categories the young-adult children of intact biological families reported the lowest frequency of involvement in crimes or arrests.

Contrary to recent and widely circulated reports that there is no sexual victimization in lesbian households, the NFSS found that, when asked if they were ever touched sexually by a parent or other adult, the children of LMs were eleven timesmore likely to say “yes” than the children from an IBF, and the children of GFs were three times more likely to say “yes.” The children of IBFs were the least likely of all family types to have ever been touched sexually: only 2% reported affirmatively (compared to 23% of LMs who replied “yes”). When asked if they were ever forced to have sex against their will, the children of LMs were the worst off again—four times more likely to say “yes” than the children of IBFs. The children of GFs were three times more likely to have been forced to have sex than the children of IBFs. In percentages, 31% of LMs said they had been forced to have sex, compared with 25% of GFs and 8% of IBFs. These results are generally consistent with research on heterosexual families. For instance, a recent federal report showed that children in heterosexual families are least likely to be sexually, physically, or emotionally abused in an intact, biological, married family.[7]

Regarding physical health, when asked if they had ever had a sexually transmitted infection (STI), the young-adult children of GFs were three times more likely to say “yes” than those of IBFs. Children of LMs were two and a half times more likely to say “yes,” followed by the children of stepfamilies, who were twice as likely to have had an STI as children of IBFs. Children of IBFs and children from “other” family types were the least likely of all to have had an STI. When asked to report upon frequency of marijuana use, the young-adult children of divorced parents were the worst off, reporting that they had used marijuana on average one and a half times more frequently than children of IBFs; next came the children of LMs, followed by the children of single parents, and the children of GFs. The children adopted prior to age 2 by strangers (people unrelated to them) and the children of IBFs reported least frequent marijuana use as young adults.

Emotional and Mental Health Outcomes

Respondents were asked to report their sentiment about their family experiences while growing up. The children of LMs reported the lowest levels of perceived safety in their childhood home, followed by children of GFs, with the children of IBFs reporting the highest levels of perceived safety. When asked if they were recently or currently in therapy “for a problem connected with anxiety, depression, relationships, etc.,” children adopted by strangers reported receiving such therapy the most, followed by the children of LMs. The children from IBFs were least likely to report receiving therapy.

On the CES-D depression index, an eight-measure survey of respondents’ happy-to-depressed thoughts over the previous seven days, the young-adult children of LMs and GFs reported statistically significantly higher levels of depression than young-adult children from IBFs. The young-adult children of GFs were twice as more likely to have thought about suicide in the previous 12 months as the children of LMs, and almost five times more likely than the children of IBFs to have thought about the same.

Relational Outcomes

The study asked questions about the history and current status of the young adults’ relationships. When asked to rate the quality of their current relationship, the children of GFs reported the lowest, followed by children adopted by strangers, the children of stepfamilies, and then the children of LMs.

When asked about the number of times they thought that their current relationship was in trouble, the children of GFs reported the highest numbers again, followed by the children of divorced parents. The children of IBFs reported both the highest levels of relationship quality and the lowest frequency of thinking their relationship to be in trouble of all of the family arrangements.

When asked about infidelity, children of LMs were three times more likely to report having had had an affair while married/cohabiting than children of IBFs, followed by children from stepfamilies (who were two and a half times more likely than IBFs) and children of GFs (who were twice as likely).

The NFSS asked respondents to identify their sexual orientation and found that children of LMs were more open to same-sex romantic relationships, bisexuality, and asexuality than any other group. Daughters of LMs reported an average of just over one female sex partner and four male sex partners in their lifetimes, in contrast to daughters of IBFs who reported an average of only 0.22 female sex partners and 2.79 male sex partners in their lifetimes. Daughters of LMs were also most likely to self-report asexuality, “not sexually attracted to either males or females” (4.1% of females from lesbian mothers compared to 0.5% of females from IBFs). Children of GFs were the next least likely to identify as fully heterosexual. Children from IBFs were most likely of all family types to identify as entirely heterosexual.

Conclusions

Taken together, the findings of the NFSS disprove the claim that there are no differences between children raised by parents who have same-sex relationships and children raised in intact, biological, married families when it comes to the social, emotional, and relational outcomes of their children. On 25 out of 40 outcomes evaluated by Regnerus, there were statistically significant differences between children from IBFs and those of LMs in many areas that are unambiguously suboptimal. On 11 out of 40 outcomes, there were statistically significant differences between children from IBFs and those who reported having a GF in many areas that are suboptimal. The “no differences” claim is therefore unsound and ought to be replaced by an acknowledgement of difference.

Acknowledging the differences between the children of IBFs and those from LMs and GFs better accords with the established body of social science over the last 25 years, which finds that children do best when they are raised by their married, biological mother and father. At the turn of the millennium, social scientists widely agreed that children raised by unmarried mothers, divorced parents, cohabiting parents, and step-parents fared worse than children raised by their still-married, biological parents.[8] Although data on gay and lesbian parenting were not yet available at that time, it was difficult to imagine that gay and lesbian parents would be able to accomplish what parents in step-parenting, adoptive, single-parenting, and cohabiting contexts had not been able to do, namely, replicate the optimal child-rearing environment of married, biological-parent homes.

However, as early as 2001, social scientists working on sexual orientation and parenting began to claim just that, that there were not as many differences as sociologists would expect between outcomes for children in same-sex versus heterosexual unions, and that the differences were not negative, but favorable.[9] Since then, an increase in gay parenting research over the last decade has made similar claims, such that the emergent message from social scientists working in gay parenting has gone in a different direction, alleging that there are no differences in outcomes—and some advantages—for children raised by parents with same-sex behavior.[10]

By challenging these claims, the Regnerus and Marks papers are consistent with the social science consensus that existed at the turn of the millennium: to be raised in an intact biological family presents clear advantages for children over other forms of parenting. In particular, the NFSS provides evidence that previous generations of social scientists were unable to gather: that children from intact, biological families also out-perform peers who were raised in homes of a parent who had same-sex relationships. Therefore, these two new studies reaffirm—and strengthen—the conviction that the gold standard for raising children is still the intact, biological family.[11]

Ana Samuel is a Research Scholar of the Witherspoon Institute. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Notre Dame. For a more in-depth examination of the results and methods of the NFSS please see Dr. Regnerus’s article, “How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study,” and visit the website www.familystructurestudies.com.

[1] L., Marks, “Same-sex parenting and children’s outcomes: A closer examination of the American psychological association’s brief on lesbian and gay parenting,” Social Science Research (2012), 14, < http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2012.03.006>. Steven Nock, the late sociologist of the family at the University of Virginia, said comparable things in his affidavit for the Supreme Court of Ontario, in Halpern v. Canada, 2003. Stacey and Biblarz’s affidavit criticized Nock for arguing that there was no scientifically valid evidence for the claim that children with same-sex parents and children with heterosexual parents have equal outcomes. http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/Affidavit_of_J_Stacey.html

[2] P. Amato, “The well-being of children with gay and lesbian parents,” Social Science Research (2012), 772. Eggebeen, who like Amato is critical of the paper by Mark Regnerus that studies the NFSS, nevertheless argues that the real importance of the paper is “the description of a new data set that offers significant advantages. Whether the New Family Structures Study has the possibility of unsettling previously settled questions depends in equal parts on the richness of the information collected, as well as the willingness of scholars to make use of these data” (D. Eggebeen, “What can we learn from children raised by gay or lesbian parents?”, Social Science Research (2012), 777).

[3] Strohm, Charles Q., “The Stability of Same-Sex Cohabitation, Different-Sex Cohabitation, and Marriage.” California Center for Population Research, UCLA, 1 Feb 2012 <http://papers.ccpr.ucla.edu/papers/PWP-CCPR-2010-013/PWP-CCPR-2010-013.pdf>.

[4] Andersson, Noack, Seierstad and Weedon-Fekjaer, “The Demographics of Same-Sex Marriages in Norway and Sweden.” Demography, Volume 43 Feb 2006: 79-98. “We found that divorce risks are higher in same-sex partnerships than opposite-sex marriages and that unions of lesbians are considerably less stable, or more dynamic, than unions of gay men….In Norway, 13% of partnerships of men and 21% of female partnerships are likely to end in divorce within six years from partnership registration. In Sweden, 20% of male partnerships and 30% of female marriages are likely to end in divorce within five years of partnership formation. These levels are higher than the corresponding 13% of heterosexual marriages that end in divorce within five years in Sweden.” p. 95.

[5] Bibliarz and Stacey, “How Does the Gender of Parents Matter?” Journal of Marriage and Family. 72. (February 2010): 3-22. “…two women who chose to become parents together seemed to provide a double dose of a middle-class “feminine” approach to parenting. Some research suggests, however, that a double dose of maternal investment sometimes fostered jealousy and competition between the comothers, which the asymmetry of the women’s genetic, reproductive, and breast-feeding ties tot heir infants could exacerbate (Chrisp, 2001; Gartrell et al., 2000 .REimann, 1998; Stiglitz, 1990)….[P]reliminary data hint that their relationships may prove less durable.” p. 11

[6] M. Regnerus. “How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study,” Social Science Research (2012), 6, <http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2012.03.009>.

[7]http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/abuse_neglect/natl_incid/reports/nis_execsumm/nis4_report_exec_summ_pdf_jan2010.pdf

[8] Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). Sara McLanahan, “Parent Absence or Poverty: Which Matters More?” (1994). G. Duncan and J. Brooks-Gunn, Consequences of Growing up Poor. (New York: Russell Sage). Marquardt and David Popenoe, Life Without Father (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). Bruce Ellis et al., “Does Father Absence Place Daughters at Special Risk for Early Sexual Activity and Teenage Pregnancy?” Child Development 74 (2003), 801-821. Sara McLanahan, Elisabeth Donahue, and Ron Haskins, “Introducing the Issue,” The Future of Children 15 (2003), 3-12. Mary Parke, “Are Married Parents Really Better for Children?” (Washington, DC: Center for Law and Social Policy, 2003). Elizabeth Marquardt, “Family Structure and Children’s Educational Outcomes” (New York: Institute for American Values, 2005). Wilcox et al. (2005). Elizabeth Marquardt, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (New York: Crown, 2005).

[9] Judith Stacey and Tim Biblarz, “(How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter?” American Sociological Review (2001).

[10] Tasker, 2005; Wainright and Patterson, 2006; Rosenfeld, 2010.

[11] “[C]hildren appear most apt to succeed as adults—on multiple counts and across a variety of domains—when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father, and especially when their parents remain married to the present day. Insofar as the number of intact, biological mother/father families continues to shrink in the United States, as it has, this portends growing challenges within families, but also heightened dependence on public health organizations, federal and state public assistance, psychotherapeutic resources, substance use programs, and the criminal justice system” (Regnerus 15).
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I am providing all this information because the argument is heating up again, and the more you know the better off you will be. To believe the posts by the LGBTQ activists without having any other information to work with is foolish. you might want to cut and paste or print all of this so that you can review it at your leisure, and have it for further reference.

dennisimoto Loc: Washington State (West)

Lot of verbiage here, my hat is off to the researchers. Bottom line for me in regards to the topic thread, "Yes, they most certainly do."

no propaganda please Loc: moon orbiting the third rock from the sun

I was reluctant to post all of the articles, but when I try to shorten things, the response is "Right wing nut making it up out of thin air" for much of what i post, I have seen the reports, often a summary of the data, but that would be a problem to post. the issue of the study first came up shortly after I joined OPP and the American Pediatric Association examined the first mentioned study and said they the data indicated it would be ill advised to allow homosexual couples to adopt children that were not biologically related to either one. the LGBTQ screams could be heard across the country, so they said the study was invalid and used their selected voluntary same sex parenting group for their study. Thus the debate. Glad that the results have been reexamined and the data proven valid. Just like the genetic studies for "born that way" if the data is fully examined, the study is proven invalid. Interesting isn't it.?

dennisimoto Loc: Washington State (West)

It is but this is a discussion that will go on for way past me I'm afraid.

no propaganda please Loc: moon orbiting the third rock from the sun

The points for you to remember are that same sex couples who adopt children are putting the children in harms way and causing them to possibly have many more problems that they would have in a heterosexual, married man and woman household. If the discussion comes up again, and you need facts and statistics you can always find them.
Other point to remember Studies are only as good as the protocol behind getting and analyzing the data, and the agenda behind the study. If you automatically believe a study that is put out by a group that has an established bias toward a certain result, you will be easy to lie to. Pay attention to how the data was collected, how large the sample was, whether it was random or hand selected for the results. I could do a study that "proves" that all dogs are no more than 25 pounds and get hundreds of samples to prove that by going to the AKC toy dog nationals where hundreds of toy breeds are exhibited each time, most averaging about 7 pounds. That data would not be valid, and that would be obvious. When it comes to behavior studies getting random samples is much more difficult, so be suspicious of the conclusions.

fiatlux

Sorry, having grown up in an abusive home ruled by a heterosexual Christian couple, man/woman marriage does not translate as the best environment for children. Love translates as the best environment for children. This does and does not happen with all combinations of couples. The effect on children is not an argument against gay marriage but my account of 50 years and talks with friends, man/woman is highly flawed. The divorce rate amongst heterosexuals is about 50%: how salubrious is that on children?

no propaganda please Loc: moon orbiting the third rock from the sun

On a level of personal experience I would agree with you, not all heterosexual parents are good for kids, but to assume that homosexual parents would be more loving and kinder is a false assumption. By the way, the rate of heterosexual marriage drops rapidly when same sex marriage is legal. the rate of out of wedlock babies also skyrockets, as marriage is considered less valuable and only a civil arrangement, marriage vows are less important. In Canada since 2005 the rate of out of wedlock births has decidedly increased, in Norway the rate of out of wedlock births is so bad that 80% of children now being born are out of wedlock. Recent polls here find that almost 70% of people believe that you don't need a marriage to raise children. That will keep reflecting the idea that marriage has no suportive or religious value.

Dummy Boy Loc: Michigan

This is your story: It seems to me that you and your brother would have been better with just a mother?

I am 71, married to She Who Must Be Obeyed (SWMBO) for 49 years. I grew up in an unloving household, with a father who probably would rather I had never been born. Because I have a double curvature of the spine, I require special shoes to walk normally and obviously am not very athletic. I had a brother who was two years my senior who showed promise as a sports star, so my father pushed him to be perfect in everything, told him that he was not good enough and told me I was useless. When my brother was about 11 he was molested by a neighbor, which lasted for over two years. My father found out and told him he was a "faggot" who wanted this relationship, and was the slime of the earth. In retrospect, I would expect that Brian was just looking for a male role model who would love him as a father figure.. I left home the day I graduated from high school, lived in a one room apartment in a flop house, where the bathroom was down the end of the hall. I worked at odd jobs, mostly manual labor during the days and went to school at night. I had started drinking at 14, and using pot regularly. It wasn't until I was in college that I found out the story behind the hatred and what my father did to Brian. I changed my major from biology to psych at that point hoping to become a psychologist, but ran out of money before attaining that goal. Along the way I met SWMBO in a human and animal behavior class. (She is now a well established dog trainer) Fortunately she was able to see past the screwed up gimp, and helped me put my life together, including a strong belief in Jesus. Her parents were the greatest people and taught me what a family is supposed to be.
I studied techniques to assist children who have been abused, and because of my brother concentrated on man boy molestation. We have been part of a Christian group headed by a psychologist, who work with children helping them grow from victims to survivors. We also train therapy dogs to help work with kids. Since we are officially retired, we do the same work we have always done, on a voluntary basis.
Right now we are working with two boys "Pete" and "David" David ran away from a highly abusive home and ended up with a homosexual couple who used him for child pornography and prostitution, After they were arrested David came into the "system", spent time in psychiatric hospitals before becoming a foster child for a wonderful couple who have done wonders with him. We are "foster grandparents" that the boys can trust and talk to. right now we have two CaneCorso Mastiffs that are therapy dogs, and one Welsh Terrier puppy who will (hopefully) be doing the same work when he learns how to behave.
That's probably more than you ever wanted to know but should explain our obsessions with issues that affect these kids. Because of threats from the LGBTQ activists Christian groups keep their identity secret and their locations private. We have received threats because we dare tell the boys that just because you were molested doesn't mean you are homosexual.

no propaganda please Loc: moon orbiting the third rock from the sun

Yes, are are exceptions but that does not change the general rule. I hope you did go and read the other two articles that I posted at the same time. Otherwise you are taking the one article somewhat out of context. Frankly I always did envy SWMBO her parents, but then they did welcome me into the family even though at that time I was still a very mixed up angry young man.

Dummy Boy Loc: Michigan

Oh...so just considering YOUR STORY is a little biased...??? I need to look at more stories to make an informed decision...okay...funny, you finally understand bias and why I don't believe third party stories.

For instance, is the incidence of suicide among those who change sexes higher than anyone else with depression? Is the risk higher for someone that is a homosexual? Are they just as much at risk if they had stayed the same sex?

It is why I call myself dummy boy. I like to ask questions because I learn something and what I learn time and time again is that you are as dumb as me.
People that are so dogmatic about their opinion are just deep seated hypocrites inside and measure the world with their tiny little scales. I'm not saying you're completely wrong, I'm just saying that you've stopped asking questions. Good thing you weren't actually a Doctor.

fiatlux

Do they take in the devastating effects abundantly evident in society and throughout history of male/female marriages? Name the many tyrants down through the centuries and they all were the product of heterosexual relationships--sick ones, yes, but what some insist is for the best. The Old Testament is not clear on either marriage or children. There was incest that seemed approved by God. There were concubines and hand maidens. Mary, the mother of God, is thought to have been twelve at the time, the age of a virgin. Marriages were arranged. Wives were chattel. Evolving in thought from those OT ideas appears ok. We do not kill our children for disrespect, today we listen. This is against the law. Has God changed? Isn't Christ the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow? Why are insubordinate or disrespectful children allowed to live, never mind get Iphones and computers?

no propaganda please Loc: moon orbiting the third rock from the sun

Just because not all heterosexual marriages are good ones, does not mean that homosexual marriages are good for the children. That would be like saying my parents drank a lot, would it have been better if my parents were drug addicts who had wife swapping parties. The old testament is a history of the Jewish people and therefore has the bad things that people did, as well as the good things. God did not validate the times when people did not abide by His Commandments, but the Bible shows the destruction that human behavior caused. the New Testament is about Jesus and His life. Jesus was perfect, those around Him were not. By your logic, the people who were crucified for their crimes were all innocent victims, and therefore punishment for crimes such as murder were always wrong. Jesus was crucified for political reasons, but it was God's plan that His son suffer so we could be forgiven for our sins, by his sacrifice for us.

Yes, I know you did not have the kind of childhood that you should have had, nor did I. Of course the boys we work with certainly did not have a childhood that was free from horror and pain. that is man's doing, not God's. Claiming that because of the evil that men do, same sex marriages are the right choice is like saying that because some tainted meat gets through FDA inspections, all meat should be allowed through.
This article should be of some interest to you and will be of interest to others. Please read it with an open mind.

Dale O'Leary | Oct 2 2007

What is best for the children? The legal battles over marriage frequently revolve around this very question. Gay activists argue that many same-sex couples already have children, and these children need the protections afforded by legal recognition of their relationship. To support this line of argument, they present the courts with numerous studies claiming to prove that children raised by persons with same-sex attractions (SSA) are just as happy, healthy, and academically successful as children raised by their married biological parents.

In her book Children as Trophies? European sociologist Patricia Morgan reviews 144 published studies on same-sex parenting and concludes that it fosters homosexual behaviour, confused gender roles, and increased likelihood of serious psychological problems later in life. A French parliamentary report on the rights of children decried the "flagrant lack of objectivity" in much of the pro-gay research in this area, and concluded with the warning that "we do not yet know all the effects on the construction of the adopted child's psychological identity. As long as there is uncertainty, however small, is it not in the best interest of the child to apply the precautionary principle, as is done in other domains?"(1)

When spouses "fall in love" with their children, it doesn't diminish their love for the other spouse, but enriches it. Same-sex couples may seek children hoping they will provide this same effect, but will more often find them an obstacle to and a competitor for affection.

Even a recent meta-analysis by two gay activists failed to support the "just like other children" myth. In 2004, Judith Stacey and Timothy J. Biblarz,(2) both supporters of gay parenting, published a study entitled, "(How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter?" In it they re-examined twenty studies of same-sex parenting that had supposedly shown no difference, and charged their authors with ignoring the differences they had indeed found. There were differences: children raised by parents with SSA showed empathy for "social diversity", were less confined by gender stereotypes, more likely to have confusion about gender identity, more likely to engage in sexual experimentation and promiscuity, and more likely to explore homosexual behaviour. Stacey and Biblarz characterized these as positive differences, suggesting that same-sex parenting may in fact be superior.

Paula Ettlebrick of the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce admitted that Stacey and Biblarz had "burst the bubble of one of the best-kept secrets" of the gay community - namely, that the studies it had been using did not actually support the claims it was making. Not all gay activists saw this as a problem. Kate Kendall, head of the San Francisco-based National Center for Lesbian Rights, who raises two children with her partner, took the Stacey/Biblarz article as good news:

There's only one response to a study that children raised by lesbian and gay parents may be somewhat more likely to reject notions of rigid sexual orientation -- that response has to be elation.

Gay activists have tried to put the best spin possible on the study, but they also know there are political consequences to admitting that there are real differences. Comments such as Kendall's above, though meant to be supportive, throw into relief the ongoing dissonance between the public face of gay rights activism, which pleads for acceptance into the "heteronormative" world, and the majority of its committed ideologues, who want to unmake it.

Boys in woman space

Any same-sex parenting scenario will be "different" from ordinary families, with consequent effects on children, but as evidence suggests, none more so than two women raising boys.

Many women with SSA have extremely negative attitudes toward men. Some are still very angry with their fathers, and that antagonism carries over to males in general. Some extend their hostility to masculinity itself, and frown on traditional boyish pursuits. It's common for same-sex parents to discourage play with gender-typing toys and games, but women seem to do it more thoroughly than men.(4) Some women with SSA go so far as to advocate "lesbian separatism," which Ruthann Robson defines as

an ethical forward/moral/political/social/theoretical lifestyle in which lesbians devote their considerable energies, insofar as it is possible, exclusively to other lesbians or, in some cases, exclusively to other women.(5)

Needless to say, a fatherless boy living among women who are deeply hostile to masculinity itself will find it difficult to develop a healthy masculine identity.(6) The book Lesbians Raising Sons - a collection of essays by lesbian mothers of boys -- reveals numerous cases of boys who, by their mother's admission, exhibit symptoms of gender identity disorder. One mother defends her adopted son's cross-gender behaviour and castigates society for not accommodating him. She herself is pleased with it:

He has watched the college girls who student-teach, the video mermaids, the female heroines of the silver screen. He knows how to toss his head just so, to tuck a lock behind his ear, to suck on a strand that reaches the mouth.(7)

When he is asked if he is a girl or a boy, she encourages him to say "Well it doesn't matter to me what you think… whatever you decide." (8) The school also accommodates his problem. The kindergarten class was asked to line up,

boys on one side, girls to the other, for races. My son stood in the middle a little dumfounded that such a request was being made, then slid himself to the girls' side. Afterwards a confused Mr. M. went to the teachers for clarification. They recommended he no longer divide the children by gender and that was that. (9)

A sad scene like that is made possible not just by lesbian hostility towards men, but also by the constructionist ideology, which denies that there are essential differences between the sexes. No matter how strong the evidence for such differences, radical feminists will not relinquish their vision of world where we can choose our gender. Every little victory ("and that was that") for their side shows once again how the rest of society can't avoid being caught up in the battle.

Lesbians raising boys think they can fully compensate for the absence of a father -- that fatherlessness is not a problem unless an oppressive society makes it one. But the children do not see it that way:

Parents reported a number of instances where children age four and older would ask about their father. Children would ask someone to be their daddy, ask where their father was, or express the wish to have a father. They would make up their own answers, such as their father was dead, or someone was in fact their father.(10)

Can the "second mommy" compensate for the absence of a father? There is substantial evidence that children benefit from having a second sex represented in the home -- not just a second person. Developmental psychologist Norma Radin and her colleagues studied the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren born to adolescent unwed mothers living with their parents. The young children who had positively involved grandfathers displayed more competence than those with an absent or uninvolved grandfather. The presence of the grandmother, on the other hand, did not have a clear-cut impact, suggesting a redundancy between the two forms of maternal influence.(11) Children, especially boys with involved grandfathers, showed less fear, anger, and distress.(12)

Even gay-affirming therapists are noting the problem. In an article entitled, "A Boy and Two Mothers", Toni Heineman reports that in spite of the pretence that two "mothers" were the same as a mother and father, families had to cope with the reality of an absent father.(13)

Men and women grow up with certain natural expectations about what it means to be a man or a woman. Although activists may claim that these feelings are mere social constructions which they can overcome, in practice nature will always have its way.

Parenting strains same-sex relationships

Apart from the additional risks and stresses borne by a child raised by same-sex parents, having a baby can strain and even destroy a same-sex relationship. Sometimes the strain begins even before the baby is conceived: in some cases both women want to bear a child and have to "negotiate" who gets to go first. In cases where a female couple is deeply enmeshed, the child can threaten to drive a wedge between them. If one or both of the women entered the relationship hoping to have her deep need for mothering met, a baby can destabilize it.

In some instances the woman's needs are so completely met by the baby that she no longer is interested in meeting her partner's needs. One woman explained:

What can I say? I loved our baby and didn't know how to love two people at the same time. I fell in love with the baby and my lover felt neglected, rejected, and understandably totally abandoned.(14)

Often compounding the stresses is the fact that most persons with SSA come from dysfunctional families. The addition of a child often serves to resurrect old traumas:

My parents fought all the time when we were growing up. I didn't have any idea that would happen to us. But it did. We were totally unprepared for the way being parents brought up all those old issues from the past.(15)

Of course, having a baby can also cause problems for a husband/wife couple, particularly if either spouse came to the marriage with deep, unresolved problems. The difference is that solving those problems will strengthen their relationship, with the child's presence deepening the bond between them. When spouses "fall in love" with their children, it doesn't diminish their love for the other spouse, but enriches it. Same-sex couples may seek children hoping they will provide this same effect, but will more often find them an obstacle to and a competitor for affection. And when persons with SSA do succeed in solving their deep problems and meeting their unmet needs, it tends to diminish the attractions that form the very basis of their relationship, and likewise undoes it.

Doesn't everyone have a right to children?

Persons with SSA are human beings. It is natural for them to want to experience the joy of having children: to love, to nurture, to leave a legacy. There is nothing wrong with a woman wanting to become pregnant and bear a child, or a man wanted to experience the joy of seeing his son grow into manhood or his daughter develop into a beautiful woman.

But children are not trophies, or a way to meet one's personal needs, or props to help forward an ideology. People are not a means to an end; they are meant to be loved for their own sake. Therefore no one has a "right" to a child. It is children who have the rights. When circumstances separate a child from one or both biological parents, adults should try to create a situation for him that is as normal as possible. No matter how honourable the intention, no one has the right to compound the tragedy of separation from biological parents by subjecting a child to another sub-optimal situation.

Activists may claim that couples with SSA are "rescuing" children by adopting them out of poverty or other hard circumstances. Although laudable, this intent does not negate the real problems caused by same-sex parenting: problems deeper and longer-lasting than material deprivation. This argument also loses force when you consider the many roadblocks to adoption faced by stable, well-to-do married couples. Same-sex adoption doesn't provide more homes for needy children -- it just keeps those children away from married couples who would otherwise adopt them.

Of course, when AID and surrogacy are used to create babies for same-sex couples, these children not being "rescued" from anything. Instead they are being intentionally conceived to be placed in suboptimal situations. This is child abuse.

As more persons with SSA acquire children, society will increasingly be pressured to ignore the problems caused by same-sex parenting -- just as it ignores the problems caused by divorce -- and join in the pretence that that having two mommies is just the same as having a mommy and a daddy. But no matter how many people praise "family diversity," children being raised by parents with SSA will always know that it's not the same, and someday they will resent how their needs have been sacrificed for the sake of a social experiment. In a sad irony, the more that cultural elites insist that there is nothing wrong with their situation, the more these children will feel guilty about resenting it, and this guilt will lead them to conclude that there must be something wrong with them.

This is an extract from One Man, One Woman by Dale O'Leary, published by Sophia Institute Press and reproduced here with permission. Dale O'Leary is an award-winning American journalist with a special interest in marriage and gender issues.

Notes

1. Parliamentary Report on the Family and the Rights of Children, French National Assembly, Paris, January 25, 2006, www.preservemarriage.ca
2. Judith Stacey, Timothy J. Biblarz "(How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter," American Sociological Review, April 2004.
3. David Crary, "Professors Take Issue With Gay Parenting Research" and "Report: Kids of gays more empathetic," AP/Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2001
4. P. H. Turner, Scadden, Harris, "Parenting in gay and Lesbian families." Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy, 1(3) p. 55-66.
5. Albert Mohler Jr., "Lesbians raising sons; got a problem with that?" Baptist Press, December 30, 2004 http://www.sbcbaptistpress.org/bpnews.asp?ID=19814
6. Since relatively few male couples have raised girls from birth without a female caregiver, the effects of such arrangements on a girl's development have not been fully studied. Although girls raised by male couples still do not have a female model, men with SSA are not generally as openly hostile to femininity as women with SSA are to masculinity.
7. Sara Asch, "On the way to the water," Lesbian Raising Sons, L.A.: Alyon Books, 1997, p. 4.
8. ibid., p. 4
9. ibid., p. 6
10. Barbara McCandlish, "Against all odds: Lesbian mother family dynamics (in Fredrick Bozett, Gay and Lesbian Parents, NY: Praeger, 1987). p. 30.
11. Radin, N., Oyserman, D., Benn, R., "Grandfathers, teen mothers, and children under two," in P.K. Smith (ed) The psychology of grandparenthood: An international perspective, London: Routledge,1991, pp. 85-89.
12. Comments on Radin, in Biller, H., Fathers and Families: Paternal Factors in Child Development, Westport CT: Auburn House, 1993
13. Toni Heineman, "A Boy and Two Mothers: New Variations on an Old Theme or a New Story of Triangulation? Beginning Thoughts on the Psychosexual Development of Children in Nontraditional Families," Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2004, 21, 1, pp. 99-115.
14. Cheri Pies, "Lesbians and the Choice to Parent," Homosexuality and Family Relations, New York: Harrington Park Press, 1990 p.

Dummy Boy Loc: Michigan

This was good reading. I particularly appreciated how the data was spun, in that, the executive summary said that the children weren't damaged in any way, and yet when the author dug into the verbatim, it was clear that the outcome was biased. The kids lives weren't ruined but they weren't better either.

I come to kids that are raised in a Christian home versus a secular home. I doubt that you will find any differences between the two. Suicides rates, drug abuse, bad behavior probably indistinguishable from on or another.

Emotionally well adjusted people, will beget well adjusted kids regardless of the religious "kabuki" theater in their lives. I like to visit the Barna.org website. There is a lot of good research going on. I include below an interest comparison between the churched and unchurched and their behavior. As you can see those that claim church affiliation aren't that much different from the unchurched.

fiatlux

Sorry, but this argument is doomed to abysmal failure. Study heterosexual marriages. Name a serial killer, dictator, child molester, rapist that was raised in a same sex home? Hitler, Stalin, Himmler, Manson, Pol Pot, et al? How is heterosexual union superior when history is abundant with its perversities and faults.