Change of Subject: Same-sex marriage validation from an unlikely ...

A ?game changing? study that really isn?t
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Recently published academic research examining the long-term fate of children whose parents have had homosexual relationships lends support to the idea that legalizing same-sex marriage will be good for kids.

What? A rebuttal to the July 2012, New Family Structures Study that identified problems suffered by children with gay parents and is currently being trumpeted as a game changer by opponents of same-sex marriage?

Nope. Same research.

The author of the paper, University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus, set out to test the claim often made by proponents of gay marriage that there?s no meaningful difference between children reared by same-sex couples and children reared by male-female couples.

He analyzed nearly 3,000 questionnaires filled out by adults ages 18 to 39, and the one-sentence summary of his conclusion ? children whose parents had same-sex relationships fared worse by many statistical measures than children whose male-female parents were married ? touched off end-zone dancing on the right, where gay marriage is often ominously portrayed as a dangerous social experiment that imperils our nation?s youth.

But take a closer look at that one-sentence summary. It reveals that the comparison is between children whose mother or father at some point had a gay or lesbian relationship of unspecified duration and children who grew up in a conventional, intact home.

No surprise there.

It?s hardly a news flash that kids from stable, two-parent households are statistically more likely to thrive and be happy than children from disordered or fraught households where, say, one parent or the other swaps out for a same-sex partner. And this would be particularly true for kids who came of age at a time when homosexuality was less accepted than it is today.

So why didn?t Regnerus make an apples-to-apples comparison of children reared from infancy by stable, committed lesbian or gay couples and children reared from infancy by stable, committed straight couples?

He tried. But as he explained to Slate?s William Saletan in an online dialogue about his research, even when making a first pass through some 15,000 random initial contacts, he and his team identified ?only two cases in which mom and her partner were together for 18 years ? only six cases (for) 10 or more years, and 18 cases for five years.?

Not that gay relationships are inherently unstable, but that such circumstances were statistically rare in the years he was looking at.

He noted to Saletan that the longer the children were in these lesbian-mother families, ?the better the kids? outcomes appear,? but that the sample size was far too small for anything other than anecdotal research. So he broadened the category of ?gay parents? to include all who?d had even a brief romantic fling with someone of the same sex.

And, yes, the children of such people, when they become adults, are statistically? more likely to suffer depression, use illegal drugs, be unemployed, cheat on their partners and so on.

But that could be explained by ?a variety of forces uniquely problematic for child development in lesbian and gay families ? including a lack of social support for parents, stress exposure resulting from persistent stigma, and modest or absent legal security for their parental and romantic relationship statuses.?

Says who?

Regnerus.

Even though he?s a social conservative and his research was funded primarily by a right-wing think tank, he allows in interviews that the major takeaway from his study ought to be not that gay people are worse parents than straight people, but that ?family instability ? whatever the sources ? is often a top culprit in predicting dysfunction in the lives of children.?

Just so. And, hmmm, let?s think ? what institution, what cultural tradition do we have that encourages and promotes family stability? That creates legal bonds to match the social and romantic bonds that help parents stay together?

Well that would be marriage, of course. So the logical implication of the New Family Structures Study, given that same-sex couples will continue to adopt or have children through artificial insemination, is that kids will benefit if such parents are granted access to this stabilizing institution.

?It?s possible,? said Regnerus, when challenged with this observation in an online Q-and-A.

Actually, if he believes his own numbers, it?s more than possible. It?s a near certainty.

?REFERENCES:

See these previous posts:?

...about that gay parenting study

Still more about the gay parenting study

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Source: http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2012/08/sothere.html

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