Maggie Gallagher says that stable, same-sex relationships are “rare,” in a column she wrote yet again defending the debunked, flawed Regnerus anti-gay parenting “study.” Gallagher, writing at the National Review — which itself has been repeatedly attacked for the ugly racism within its ranks — was commenting on a U.K. study that claims that same-sex couples are more-likely to separate or divorce than opposite-sex couples.
“This of course cannot tell us how children fare on average when they are raised by stable same-sex couples, or whether gay marriage will significantly increase stability in same-sex couples,” Gallagher claims. “It can tell us why Professor Mark Regnerus’s study turned up so few: They are rare.”
Of course, that’s false and if Gallagher is anything, she’s a smart woman, so we can assume she knows it is.
(And we also know that the Regnerus study did not examine adult children raised by same-sex couples –except for two — rather, he examined adults who claimed they believed one of their parents had had some sort of a same-sex relationship while they were growing up. Big, big difference, especially when the people you’re surveying assuming if they say “yes” they’ll continue on in the study.)
The 2010 U.S. census found there are two million children being raised by LGBT parents. And we also know, via the U.S. Government’s Census Bureau, “there were 131,729 same-sex married couple households and 514,735 same-sex unmarried partner households in the United States.”
These numbers, of course, do not include the hundreds of thousands, or millions, of same-sex couples who are not co-habitiating but whose relationships are stable.
Is that “rare”? Are the vast majority of those relationships unstable?
Regnerus, mind you, was not searching for “stable” same-sex relationships — not by any degree.
Yet Maggie Gallagher — herself an unwed mother for many years — is telling the vast majority of approximately 650,000 same-sex couples (and, likely, far, far more) that their relationships are unstable.
Common sense alone tells us that millions of LGBT people would not be fighting so hard for marriage equality if our relationships were unstable.
Maggie Gallagher is dead wrong. So, wrong, it’s insulting.
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