WHAT DO THE STUDIES SAY ABOUT SAME-SEX PARENTING? David Barnes replies to a site suggested by Gabriel Rosenberg

[David Barnes is a policy analyst for the Institute on Marriage and Public Policy, a.k.a. the people who bring you this weblog.]

"What do the studies say about same-sex parenting?"

Nothing, actually. To quote the post...

"This site contains an overview of what social science says about same-sex parenting. It includes summaries of 22 studies..."

20 of the 22 studies mentioned are attacked in detailed analysis in "No Basis" by Lerner and Nagai as being fundamentally flawed and unrigorous. The other two focus primarily on the extent to which lesbian parents share parenting responsibilities in an egalitarian manner, one of which does not even have a non-lesbian control group.

"...and a conversation with Dr. Stacey, a professor of sociology at USC, in which she responds to the criticisms of Nock and Lerner & Nagai."

The only "response" is to call Lerner and Nagai right-wing statisticians-for-hire. I would prefer an argument about why their study is wrong to an ad hominem attack, since the "No Basis" study is fairly persuasive. She does not refer to Nock, Lerner or Nagai by name. The only identifiable individual is Paul Cameron, who was thoroughly discredited and kicked out of various professional organizations. His research aimed toward proving that gays were positively harmful as parents and he apparently stated in public that the government should exterminate homosexuals. However, that has nothing to do with the "No Basis" study, which demonstrates why the pro-gay parenting studies are strongly flawed from a purely sociological perspective.

Lerner and Nagai attack pro-gay parenting studies based on their sampling sizes and the way the hypotheses are designed. They don't argue that the studies are wrong because gays are evil. The only criticism of any substance from Stacey is that if you accept the Lerner and Nagai critique from "No Basis" you would also be discrediting the entirety of social science research. I am very skeptical of this claim, but if all of social science research is as poorly done as the studies linked to on the "Let Him Stay" site, then that fate would be well deserved.

If you go to the University of Southern California's Sociology site and look at Dr. Stacey’s recent research you'll find this article (PDF), which criticizes pro-gay parenting researchers for downplaying differences between children of gay and straight parents for fear of their research being turned against them. For example, "[I]n some studies, lesbian mothers were less concerned than hetero sexual mothers that their children engage in gender 'appropriate' activities and play, a plausible difference most researchers curiously downplay." Stacey believes that such examples of the breakdown of hetero-normativity should be touted as an interesting benefit of gay parenting.

Furthermore, she writes in summarizing another study, "Relative to their counterparts with heterosexual parents, the adolescent and young adult girls raised by lesbian mothers appear to have been more sexually adventurous and less chaste... In other words, children (especially girls) raised by lesbians appear to depart from traditional gender-based norms, while children raised by heterosexual mothers appear to conform to them." Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I think the extent to which a young adult is sexually adventurous is a very important indicator of his or her well-being.
posted by Eve at 1:01 PM | link

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