With all the good news about increasing support for marriage equality and growing alliances between the African American and LGBT communities, social conservatives increasingly find themselves on the outside looking in. It should be no surprise, then, that the latest "research" by the right wing shows – gasp – that same-sex parenting is bad for kids.
What BS.
Studies and research going back 30 years show that same-sex parents are just as capable of raising children as their heterosexual counterparts. And mainstream media outlets would be wise to look into the background of not only the researcher, but also the groups funding his study, before writing another round of "Gay parents are bad" headlines.
The paper, "New Family Structures Study," will be published in the July issue of Social Science Research . The author, Mark Regnerus, of the Department of Sociology and Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, is known for his ultra-conservative ideology. The paper was funded by the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation – two groups commonly known for their support of conservative causes, according to a joint statement from the Human Rights Campaign, the Family Equality Council, Freedom to Marry, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
There are about 2 million kids being raised by 1 million gay parents in this country, noted Evan Wolfson of Freedom to Marry. Those kids "are doing great," he said, "and would do even better if their parents didn't have to deal with legal discrimination such as the denial of the freedom to marry, and ongoing attacks such as this kind of pseudo-scientific misinformation and the disinformation agenda that's funding it."
So what are the problems with Regnerus's study? The paper is fundamentally flawed and intentionally misleading: Most of the children examined in the paper were not being raised by parents in a committed same-sex relationship – whereas the other children in the study were being raised in two-parent homes with straight parents.
The study also ignores overlaps in its subpopulations because it fails to distinguish between particular subpopulations of gay parents, according to Media Matters For America, a progressive research and information center. Media Matters also noted that in order to maximize the size of the group of gay and lesbian parents, Regnerus lumped together divorced families, step families, single parent families, and a number of other varying family structure groups into the child of a lesbian mother (LM) or child of a gay father (GF) categories. In reality, some of those children were the products of failed heterosexual unions. Less than 1 percent of the kids in the GF sample were planned by an already-established gay parent or couple, noted Slate's William Saletan. "In short," he wrote, "these people aren't the products of same-sex households, they are the products of broken homes." He also pointed out that if some of the kids are still struggling 20 to 40 years later, does that reflect poorly on gay parents? Or does it reflect poorly on the era of fake heterosexual marriages?
To his credit, Regnerus acknowledges that the study does not establish causation between same-sex parenting and negative outcomes. Unfortunately, many on the right, such as the Family Research Council, National Organization for Marriage, and others likely will trumpet the study's findings as an indictment on same-sex parenting. But as Truth Wins Out Executive Director Wayne Besen astutely noted in his report on the study, "There are two things we know about the religious right: They have no faith in science, and they critically distort science to justify their faith."
Research over the decades by respected bodies like the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National Association of Social Workers have all confirmed that LGBT parents make good parents.
This latest dubious research is one more example of the religious right ignoring standard protocols in order to put forth a lazy, incomplete, and incorrect characterization of same-sex couples who raise children. Much like junk food on store shelves, this junk science belongs in the trash.