The cause for marriage equality got a major boost late yesterday. The American Academy of Pediatrics announced that it now supports same-sex marriage.
The academy’s new policy statement says same-sex marriage helps guarantee rights, benefits and long-term security for children, while acknowledging that it does not now ensure access to federal benefits. When marriage is not an option, the academy said, children should not be deprived of foster care or adoption by single parents or couples, whatever their sexual orientation.
The academy’s review of scientific literature began more than four years ago, and the result is a 10-page report with 60 citations.
“If the studies are different in their design and sample but the results continue to be similar, that gives scientists and consumers more faith in the result,” said Dr. Ellen Perrin, a co-author of the new policy and a professor of pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine.
Read the full report
here. It argues that the parents' sexual orientation matters far less than social and economic resources and the strength of family relationships. It also cites a large body of research that indicates kids raised by LGBT parents do as well as the kids of heterosexual relationships.
One study in England compared 39 families with lesbian mothers to 74 heterosexual parents and 60 families headed by single heterosexual women. No difference was found between the groups in emotional involvement, abnormal behaviors in children as reported by parents or teachers, or psychiatric disorders in them. Both mothers and teachers reported more behavioral problems among children in single-parent families than two-parent ones, whatever their sexual orientation.
A 2010 study of children born to 154 lesbian parents in the United States compared mothers’ reports of their 17-year-olds to a national sample of age-matched peers. The mothers’ reports indicated that their sons and daughters had high levels of competence and fewer social problems, compared with their peers.
For some time, fundies have cited a study conducted last summer by Mark Regnerus as proof that gay marriage is bad for kids. However, the journal that published that study,
Social Science Research, recently did an audit that determined
the paper was so badly flawed it should have never been published. Glad to see that there's finally a study to counter it.