Although it used to be common knowledge that children do best in a stable home environment with both biological parents, a number of popular writers and magazines have asserted that gay couples are just as good at parenting, and in the case of lesbians even better.
A study out of Canada casts serious doubt on these assertions. According to University of Texas Austin Professor Mark Regnerus, out of all households, children of lesbian couples have the worst outcomes:
While in the US Census same-sex households have to be guessed at based on the gender and number of self-reported heads-of-household, young adults in the Canadian census were asked, “Are you the child of a male or female same-sex married or common law couple?” While study author and economist Douglas Allen noted that very many children in Canada who live with a gay or lesbian parent are actually living with a single mother—a finding consonant with that detected in the 2012 New Family Structures Study—he was able to isolate and analyze hundreds of children living with a gay or lesbian couple (either married or in a “common law” relationship akin to cohabitation).
So the study is able to compare—side by side—the young-adult children of same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples, as well as children growing up in single-parent homes and other types of households. Three key findings stood out to Allen:
children of married opposite-sex families have a high graduation rate compared to the others; children of lesbian families have a very low graduation rate compared to the others; and the other four types [common law, gay, single mother, single father] are similar to each other and lie in between the married/lesbian extremes.
Employing regression models and series of control variables, Allen concludes that the substandard performance cannot be attributed to lower school attendance or the more modest education of gay or lesbian parents. Indeed, same-sex parents were characterized by higher levels of education, and their children were more likely to be enrolled in school than even those of married, opposite-sex couples. And yet their children are notably more likely to lag in finishing their own schooling.
The same is true of the young-adult children of common law parents, as well as single mothers and single fathers, highlighting how little—when you lean on large, high-quality samples—the data have actually changed over the past few decades. The intact, married mother-and-father household remains the gold standard for children’s progress through school. What is surprising in the Canadian data is the revelation that lesbian couples’ children fared worse, on average, than even those of single parents.
That children of lesbian couples do even worse than children of single mothers has sobering implications. It definitely brings up ethical issues concerning sperm donation (would you want your own flesh and blood raised in that environment?), but it also demonstrates how reckless our cultural elites are being when they tinker with proven models of the family.
It seems that the welfare of children is of scarce importance when it comes to making a point about “equality,” no matter how much of a stretch it is. In fact, the more equality points any given deviation from tradition and the norm can score them, the more children they are willing to sacrifice.
It makes God’s test of Abraham look positively humane in comparison.
