NOM, the National Organization For Marriage, today jumped all over an anti-gay “research” paper and posted a thoroughly false graphic purportedly taken from a Washington Times article on the paper. The graphic — which does not as of this writing appear in the misrepresenting Washington Times article — absolutely misconstrues both the facts and conclusions of the flawed research paper, which was authored by Mark Regnerus, an associate professor in Texas who constantly writes about sex and marriage, and was privately-funded by conservative think tanks.
The graphic, above, titled, “Two Moms vs. Mom And Dad,” is false. It claims:
“A study released Sunday finds that adult children (ages 18-39) of lesbian mothers are more likely to report negative outcomes in several categories than adult children raised by married mother-father parents.”
Absolutely false.
The paper, titled, “How Different are the Adult Children of Parents Who Have Same-Sex Relationships?,†does falsely suggest children of gay parents are not as emotionally and physically healthy or successful as their peers raised in intact biological (read: heterosexual) families. Decades of research proves purported “findings” taken from the Regnerus paper to be untrue.
READ:Â NOM Founder And Mormon Church Tied To First Report Of New Anti-Gay Parenting Paper
And to anyone who actually reads the paper, what it actually does is compare biological adult children of opposite-sex married couples to adult children who stet that at any point in their growing up, before the age of 18, either of their parents had some sort of same-sex relationship.
The paper does not compare adult children adopted at birth and raised by same-sex couples, rather the paper actually examines the effects of a disrupted household on children.
NOM, by suggesting this graphic is from the Washington Times article, is falsely suggesting the allegations in the graphic are true. They are not.
This is yet another of NOM’s lies, which are becoming more prevalent as they lose the war on same-sex families.
“Only two of the 175 subjects who reported having a mother in a lesbian relationship spent their whole childhood with the couple, and no children studied spent their entire childhood with two gay males,” a conservative author who writes at the National Review, where NOM co-founder Maggie Gallagher pens a regular column, states, after reviewing the Regnerus paper.
NRO’s Charles C. W. Cooke writes that “most of the children studied spent only a few years with their same-sex parents, which makes it likely that their family arrangement changed more than once and, thus, that their childhood was unstable.”
Moreover, given that the study is a snapshot of a time period that predated legalization of gay marriage (in some states), one might speculate that social stigma played a role in Regnerus’s data, and that such stigma will have a smaller effect in future surveys. Indeed, one should concede that people could legitimately employ Regnerus’s study to justify gay marriage on the grounds that societal disapproval of unmarried gay parents leads to the very instability that causes their children to experience negative outcomes: Marriage between gay partners will enhance the family’s stability and therefore be good for the children. I consider this to be a step too far — the high rate of divorce among gays does not suggest that same-sex households will soon be a model of stability — but it is worth consideration.
For NOM to post a false graphic is tantamount to an attack on the millions of same-sex parents in America, the vast, vast majority of whom are doing an amazing job raising children, as study after study after study has proven.
If same-sex couples were raising children with so many problems, as this chart claims, don’t you think there would be daily news reports about these “problems”?