from Parenting & Family

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.

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."