The Same-Sex Parents Tautology

People have been debating whether same-sex couples should be "allowed" to raise children for years, and the issue of children is one of the biggest slams against gay marriage. Mitt Romney has said gays should be able to adopt, and  when his right flank grumbled he backtracked, saying he only meant it was legal.

A recent study by Mark Regnerus claims that children of parents who have had a same-sex relationship (usually extra-marital) fare more poorly than children in stable heterosexual families. Writers in Slate and Scientific American have found fault with this study, as have many others, for methodological reasons.

In essence the study found that kids whose parents who commit adultery have more problems than kids whose parents don't. Well, duh. That goes without saying. But why did Regnerus have to do the study this way, instead of comparing same-sex and heterosexual families straight-up?

Well, there just aren't numerically enough children of stable same-sex parents to make an apples-to-apples statistical comparison. Previous studies of children of lesbian parents have found them to be more well-adjusted than children of heterosexual parents, but the results have been questioned because those families were well-off financially and their numbers were so tiny that the statistical significance of the conclusions was questionable.

So let's take the following hypothetical, a common situation that has occurred innumerable times throughout human history. A woman's husband dies in Afghanistan, leaving her a widow with two children. The only other person is her life is her husband's sister. The aunt has been especially close to the children, since her brother had to serve three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The aunt has actually spent far more time with the children than their father ever could, because he was serving his country since before his first child was born, up until the time of his death.

This is an age-old pattern: when men die in war, their wives and sisters are left to pick up the pieces and raise the children.


The two sisters-in-law move in together, sacrificing their own romantic goals in order to provide a stable environment to raise the children. All other things being equal, the kids would almost certainly turn out better with these two women as their parents, than if their mother went through a series of relationships with various men and was lucky enough to eventually find one who wasn't a jerk.

Now replace the aunt with a lesbian spouse who was a mother to the children from birth. There is no material difference in the relationships between the members of such a same-sex family unit and the first example, except that the bond of love between the parents is romantic rather than familial.

The real difference between the two situations is the way society responds. The children of same-sex parents are treated differently than children of heterosexual parents. Any trauma the children suffer does not derive from the quality of parental love, because all parents can love their children equally well regardless of gender or sexual orientation. Trauma the children might suffer  from question of "who's my daddy" is caused by society when it forces the kids to confront that question on a daily basis.

The argument against same-sex parents is thus a tautology: same-sex parents are bad because society thinks they're bad, and will treat their children badly.

It's exactly the kind of logic the Taliban uses to force women to wear head-to-toe burqas: don't show your face or ankles to us, or we will be forced to rape you for tempting us. In the minds of bigots the victims of their intolerance are always the responsible party.

Opponents of same-sex marriage are saying, "We don't like what you are and what you're doing and we will instruct our kids to ostracize and taunt your children because of it. Don't force us to torment your kids."

Nice family folks, huh?