Obama to Supreme Court: 'Overwhelming expert consensus' gay parents as good as heterosexuals
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| Official photographic portrait of US President Barack Obama (born 4 August 1961; assumed office 20 January 2009) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
According to the legal brief opposing California's Proposition 8, the “overwhelming expert consensus,” which is “supported by numerous scientific studies,” is “that children raised by gay and lesbian parents are as likely to be well adjusted as children raised by heterosexual parents.”
“The weight of the scientific literature strongly supports the view that same-sex parents are just as capable as opposite-sex parents,” the Obama administration stated.
The amicus cites a number of studies, as well as policy statements from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Child Welfare League of America, and the American Medical Association.
However, the most comprehensive studies to date on the issue of how children fare being raised by homosexual or heterosexual parents have come to much different conclusions.
Last June, Dr. Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin found most previous studies suffered serious flaws in data, including relying on unscientific and unrepresentative reports gathered from those who willingly stepped up at women's bookstores and other homosexual venues.
Dr. Mark Regnerus came to a different conclusion than Barack Obama.
His own study, published in the journal Social Science Research last July, found that children raised in a nuclear family were far less likely to suffer traumatic life events than those raised by homosexuals.
He found the children of gays and lesbians were more than four times as likely to report having been raped and up to 12 times as likely to have been sexually touched by a family member than those from intact heterosexual households. They were more than twice as likely to have contemplated suicide.
Children raised by two men or two women were more likely to be unemployed than the children of single parents.
In August, the University of Texas at Austin dismissed charges from LGBT activist and blog author Scott Rosensweig that Dr.Regnerus “harbor[ed] anti-gay prejudices” because he is Catholic.
A study released later in 2012 found the children of heterosexual parents do better in school than those raised by homosexuals.
Dr. Douglas Allen of Simon Fraser University found that children of married parents are 35 percent more likely to make normal progress in school than children who grow up in same-sex households.
Children raised by homosexuals were 15 percent less likely to succeed in school than those raised by cohabiting heterosexual parents and 23 percent less likely than those raised by single parents.
His work corrected a 2000 study from Stanford sociologist, Dr. Michael Rosenfeld.
He found that Dr. Rosenfeld excluded 700,000 same-sex couples from his research, which found no difference between homosexual and heterosexual parenting success.
