A new study purports to show that children of gay parents are worse-off than children in heterosexual unions. It's an attention-grabbing headline, and one that seems likely to influence the same-sex marriage court cases.
It's also totally useless. When you actually break it down, the study demonstrates little more than the lengths to which conservative anti-marriage activists have to go in order to argue that heterosexual parenting is better for kids. Even if the study's conclusions were accurate, they should not influence the legal question of whether same-sex couples should be able to marry.
The study claims that, counter to a host of other studies on gay and lesbian parenting, same-sex parents are bad for kids. The study concludes:
"[Children of gay parents] were more apt to report being unemployed, less healthy, more depressed, more likely to have cheated on a spouse or partner, smoke more pot, had trouble with the law, report more male and female sex partners, more sexual victimization, and were more likely to reflect negatively on their childhood family life, among other things."
That all sounds pretty bad. Except it turns out that it's not right. The definition of "gay parent" relied upon in the study is questionable (to put it generously), and was determined by one question:
"From when you were born until age 18 (or until you left home to be on your own), did either of your parents ever have a romantic relationship with someone of the same sex?
"• Yes, my mother had a romantic relationship with another woman
"• Yes, my father had a romantic relationship with another man
"• No"
If you answered "yes", you were grouped as the child of a "gay parent" and excluded from the category of "intact biological family". In other words, by the terms outlined in this study, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, and Mark Foley are all gay dads.
As Amy Davidson at the New Yorker points out, very few study respondents were actually raised by same-sex partners, and many of them were raised by parents who identified as heterosexual and were in straight marriages. Try imagining the study in reverse: a look at gay families that classified a child raised by a lesbian couple as being raised by a heterosexual parent because one of the women once kissed a man.
The study also only included respondents over the age of 18 – people who were born into a country where same-sex marriage and civil unions weren't legal anywhere; where same-sex couples were almost universally barred from adopting children; and where gay relationships flew under the radar because homosexuality was socially marginalized. Many of the same-sex "romantic relationships" reported in the study were undoubtedly extramarital affairs; extramarital affairs, unsurprisingly, tend to destabilize marriages, and destabilized marriages tend to lead to poorer outcomes for children.
Destigmatizing same-sex relationships has the nice benefit of being the right thing to do and leading to fewer unstable relationships. But a world in which gay couples are free to marry and their marriages can be compared to those of straight couples is not the world we currently occupy; it's very far from the way things were, 18-plus years ago.
So the study took children in never-divorced, two-parent, opposite-sex households and compared them with a wide range of children – very few of whom could reasonably be said to have been raised by "gay parents", but many of whom were raised by opposite-sex parents who had affairs – and concluded that because children in the most stable of households had better outcomes than children in households that were far more likely to be unstable, heterosexual parenting is better than gay parenting. The desperation would be funny if it didn't have real-world consequences.
This lazy and incredibly faulty study is already being used to argue against same-sex marriage rights for gay couples. The "gay parents are worse parents" argument shouldn't just fail because it's false; it should fail because even if it were true, less-than-ideal child outcomes do not justify the state's refusal to extend the fundamental right of marriage to consenting adults.
The United States supreme court has addressed these issues before. The court has held time and again that the right to marry is of fundamental importance. Restrictions on marriage must be critically examined to see what state interests those restrictions forward, and the restrictions must be carefully tailored to further those state interests. In Loving v Virginia, the famous case on interracial marriage, the supreme court held that:
"The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men."
When the state of Missouri barred the rights of prisoners to marry without the prison superintendent's permission, the court struck down the law as unconstitutional. And when Wisconsin made it more difficult for "deadbeat dads" to get married – passing a law that required any man with unpaid child support to get a court order allowing him to enter into a new marriage – the court also struck it down, holding that the state's justifications for the law did not outweigh the fundamental right of marriage.
It's probably safe to say that the children of fathers who refuse to pay child support fare less well than the children of involved fathers who do financially support all of their children; children of fathers who refuse to pay child support probably also do less well than children raised in households where their biological parents are married to each other. Deadbeat dads, though, retain the fundamental right to marry. And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that children of convicts generally fare worse than children raised in two-parent families where no one goes to jail – but convicts too can marry, even while they're incarcerated. Similarly, children raised in low-income households tend to do less well in school and have poorer health outcomes than wealthier children. But it would be outrageous to use that data to conclude that the state has an interest in preventing poor people from getting married.
In the current marriage equality cases moving their way through the US court system, the opponents of same-sex marriage have been charged with identifying the compelling state interest in blocking marriage rights for same-sex couples. It's a tough job. Until now, most of the studies on gay and lesbian parenting showed that children of those couples did not fare significantly worse than children of straight parents, and many of the hardships they did face came as a direct result of their parents being treated like second-class citizens.
So, marriage equality opponents typically went for the procreative angle, insisting that the state had an interest in blocking same-sex marriage because the purpose of marriage is for the couple to reproduce. That, of course, doesn't logically follow: states don't block old or infertile people from getting married; lots of gay couples have children; and married straight couples have a legal right to use contraception to prevent procreation within marriage. But "marriage is for procreation" was the one argument that anti-gay advocates could push with a straight face.
Now that there's one study claiming that kids of "gay" couples fare worse than children in two-heterosexual-parent homes, there's no doubt that marriage equality opponents will add "gay marriage is bad for kids" to the justification for why the state should deny marriage rights to same-sex couples. Of course, the faulty methodology means that this study isn't worth the paper it's printed on: it took a dogmatic researcher, major influx of rightwing money and an incredible manipulation reality and methodology to generate a study that can, in some universe, be interpreted as an indictment of gay parents.
But even if the results were accurate and children of same-sex parents fared less well than children of opposite-sex parents, would that justify banning same-sex marriage? I say no – and the supreme court should, too.
The state does have an interest in protecting children. And loving same-sex parents who are barred from getting married and who are the object of rightwing contempt see their children being hurt – by discriminatory laws and by bigoted individuals. In its decision upholding the right of married people to use contraception to prevent pregnancy, the supreme court's view on the sanctity of marriage was clear:
"Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in our prior decisions."
Marriage laws are about the state making it easier for two people to live in harmony and in bilateral loyalty, not about blocking a union between people who may create less-than-perfect children. If that were the case, we'd all be in a lot of trouble – and red-state straight couples, with their higher divorce rates, lower education rates and poorer health outcomes, would be the first to have their marriage rights revoked.