Last week, I wrote about Mark Regnerus’s negative flawed study of children growing up in same-sex households.  Even the Sociology Department at the University of Texas (Austin) where Regnerus works has distanced itself from Regnerus’s findings that incorporated loose definitions of “lesbian mothers” and “gay fathers.” 

But straight parents, take heart.  Your GLBTQ children will  be parents, as some already are, and you will have grandchildren.

Don’t believe everything you read! For every Regnerus’s study supported by right-wing organizations, there are other more scientific studies that prove Regnerus wrong.

·      The “Adolescents of the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study”by Nanette Gartrell, MD  and Henny Bos, PhD .2012 found that the absence of male role models produces no negative effects for teens with lesbian mothers.

·      Most importantly, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) in 2013 stated that more than twenty-five years of research have found no link between parents’ sexual orientation and their children’s emotional well-being.  “Many factors confer risk to children’s healthy development and adult outcomes, such as poverty, parental depression, parental substance abuse, divorce, and domestic violence, but the sexual orientation of their parents is NOT among them.”

·      The Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families, conducted at Melbourne University, concluded in 2013 that kids 17 years old and younger with two-committed same-sex parents are generally happier and healthier than their peers raised by straight parents. The children raised by same-sex parents scored significantly higher in terms of family cohesion and general health than did kids raised by opposite-sex partners.

Preliminary results from the Australian study indicated that children of gay and lesbian parents were no different from their peers raised by straight parents in terms of physical and mental health, and in their interactions with others and their parents.

·      The Cambridge University Study, published by the British Association of Adoption and Fostering, March 2013, found that” children with same-sex adoptive parents are no more likely to suffer from psychological disorders than children with heterosexual adoptive parents.  Neither do they differ in gender role behaviour.”

What the studies didreveal was that children of gay and lesbian parents are more likely to encounter discrimination based on their parents’ sexual orientation.

In other words, sociologists can not find reasons why same-sex parents shouldn’t adopt, but society nevertheless feels a need to criticize those families with same-sex parents.