The Survey Says - Gay Parents are Great!
December 26, 2006: William Saletan recently wrote in the Washington Post and Slate that while conservatives are furiously condemning my new favorite person Mary Cheney, (actually, I have mixed feelings about her. As she faces these terrible attacks against her and her family, I keeping thinking “as ye reap, so shall ye sow.” But I’ll try to be more charitable in the New Year) they are searching for any study they can point to that says that gay parents are unfit.
I wrote earlier about one researcher whose findings were so distorted by James Dobson of Focus on the Family that she asked him to stop lying about her work!
Saletan looked at the studies to see if he would have better luck finding truly negative outcomes for the children of LGBT parents. Here’s what he turned up:
The 30-year search for proof that gay parents are destructive looks a lot like the hunt for WMD. The American Psychological Association has compiled abstracts of 67 studies. Some are plainly biased, and only the latest two or three have avoided the methodological flaws of earlier investigations. But after 67 tries, you’d expect the harm of gay parenting to show up somewhere. Yet in study after study, on measure after measure, kids turn out the same.
One study found that straight parents “made a greater effort to provide an opposite-sex role model for their children,” but it doesn’t say whether this affected the kids. Another says children raised by lesbian couples “were more likely to explore same-sex relationships,” but it doesn’t say they turned out gay. Other studies say they seldom do.
That’s it. That’s the evidence against gay parenthood. On the other hand, three studies say lesbians share child care more equally than straight couples do. Others conclude that lesbians are more satisfied with their relationships, that they show more “parenting awareness skills,” that nonbiological lesbian moms “played a more active role in daily caretaking than did most fathers,” and that their kids are less domineering and experience “greater warmth and interaction with their mother.”
Such unwelcome findings haven’t chastened the antigay lobby any more than they’ve chastened the Bush administration. If the direct evidence doesn’t bear you out, look for indirect evidence. So conservatives have developed a subtler argument: On average, children do best when raised by their two married, biological parents.
Let’s take this argument a piece at a time. It’s true that two parents are better than one. It’s also true that married parents are better than unmarried ones. But those aren’t arguments against gay parenthood. They’re arguments for gay marriage.
You can read Saletan’s clever and correct article here.