By Bob Lepine
An article published recently in the Journal of Marriage and Family claims a review of research shows that children of same-sex couples do as well as those raised by traditional couples, and that sexual preference has no bearing on the quality of a person's parenting. As was reported in USA Today:
Sociologists Stacey and Timothy Biblarz of the University of Southern California, spent five years reviewing 81 studies of one- and two-parent families, including gay, lesbian and heterosexual couples. "No research supports the widely held conviction that the gender of parents matters for child well-being," they conclude.
"Children being raised by same-gender parents, on most all of the measures that we care about, self- esteem, school performance, social adjustment and so on, seem to be doing just fine and, in most cases, are statistically indistinguishable from kids raised by married moms and dads on these measures," Biblarz says.
So you could catch the subtle jockeying of the language in the last paragraph, I included italics.
Gender and roles today seem to be like choices in cafeteria line where you grab what fits your current tastes. That is not at the heart of the research, and definitely not in the media’s reporting of the study.
What the study doesn’t measure is gender confusion in the life of a child raised in a same sex parent setting. Of course, the study doesn’t acknowledge homosexual desire as gender confusion, so that’s not a factor to those doing the study nor those reporting it. It also doesn’t measure how little girls who grow up with two daddies function as wives and mothers in a marriage years later. Or little boys who grow up with two mommies and how they function as husbands and dads. Absent a model, where do they get their pattern? Inherent in their thinking is that husband/wife roles are gender neutral. Undiscerning Egalitarian thinking is not challenged at all.
I’d want to see a longitudinal study that looks at depression rates, substance abuse rates, whether kids who grow up in same sex parent homes are more likely to experience same sex attraction than children who grow up in the general population to be.
Stumble It!
