Important new study on the effects of same-sex marriage

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D. | June 12, 2012

When I testified last year about a proposed law that would redefine marriage in my state, the legislation’s proponents rested much of their case on a study saying lesbians make better moms than the rest of us. No significant report has emerged to counter it, and so in the public debates the marriage equality side has had the edge in peer reviewed research. That changed this week with a new study that shows why children raised by homosexual couples suffer more and why previous studies are flawed.  The new study by Mark Regnerus was published in this month’s Social Science Journal.

Here is NRO’s assessment of the bottom line:

Children with a parent in a same-sex relationship “underperform” in almost every category. Some of these differences may be relatively benign — whether one voted in the last presidential election, for example — but most are decidedly not. One deficit is particularly worrying: Less than 2 percent of children from intact, biological families reported experiencing sexual abuse of some nature, but that figure for children of same-sex couples is 23 percent. Similarly disturbing is that 14 percent of children from same-sex couples have spent some time in foster care, compared with around 2 percent of the American population at large. Arrest, drug experimentation, and unemployment rates were all higher among children from same-sex families.

And here is Ross Douthat’s conclusion from the NYT:

Regnerus’s study is a reminder of why marriage has traditionally been regarded as something other than just a celebration of love and a signifier of civic equality, and why the rationale for the institution has involved a child’s rights to his or her biological parents as well as in two lovers’ rights to one another. Marriage’s purpose, in this sense, has not been just to validate the consenting adults who enter into it, but to provide support and recognition for a particular way of bearing and rearing children – one whose distinctive advantages remain apparent, even as that recognition declines and disappears.

 

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