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from Parenting & Family
Flawed Studies Used For Promoting Same-Sex Marriage, Says Policy Institute
Gay activists have used flawed research in promoting the legalization of gay
marriage, according to a recent paper published by the Institute for
Marriage and Public Policy.
Writing in "Do Mothers and Fathers Matter?" by Maggie Gallagher and Joshua K.
Baker, the authors claim that thousands of studies done over the past thirty
years overwhelmingly show that children thrive best in intact, two-parent
families consisting of a mother and a father.
Yet pro-gay researchers are using their own data to prove that children can be
reared in same-sex households without any negative consequences, their paper
says.
Gallagher and Baker point out a notable flaw in most of the research designs:
most of the research does not directly compare children with a married mother
and father, to children raised from birth by homosexual couples. Instead, the
typical comparison made was between single heterosexual mothers--whose families
are typically stressed by divorce conflict, absent fathers, and economic
problems--to lesbian mothers.
Pro-gay researcher Judith Stacey claims that "...the research demonstrates that
children of same-sex couples are as emotionally healthy and socially adjusted,
and at least as educationally and socially successful, as children raised by
heterosexual parents." In 1996, Stacey authored "The Father Fixation," an
article critiquing the idea that fathers are necessary to children, which was
published in the Utne Reader.
"Not One Study Conducted
According to Generally Accepted Research Standards"
But Stacey is incorrect, according to Steven Nock, a sociologist at the
University of Virginia. Nock has studied several hundred studies on same-sex
parenting. He observes that each of the studies he surveyed contained at least
one fatal flaw of design or execution, and not one of them was conducted
according to generally accepted standards of research.
The greatest flaw in many of these studies, he says, was that single lesbian
mothers were compared to single heterosexual mothers. As Gallagher and Baker
note, "Most of the gay parenting literature thus compares children in some
fatherless families to children in other fatherless family forms." They
conclude, "Children do best when raised by their own married mother and father."
Updated: 8 February 2008
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