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"Pediatrics Group Backs Gay Marriage, Saying It Helps Children," proclaims a headline in The New York Times. But the advocacy group presented no new studies, no new data, to support this claim. And the studies the group cites have been shown to be insufficient to come to this conclusion about same-sex parenting.

Turns out the press release, picked up nationwide, was a PR stunt aimed at influencing the Supreme Court. The nine justices are set to hear oral arguments Tuesday and Wednesday in two cases about the constitutionality of marriage laws.

Today, 41 states define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Marriage is at the center of an intense national debate, a family-by-family, state-by state conversation that CNN substantively encourages by making room for varying perspectives and supplying state-based data. However, CNN risks obscuring that conversation about what marriage is by framing the issue as measurable by an "LGBT rights calculator."

This writer is for equal rights for all Americans. But no one has the right to redefine marriage.

It's important to future generations that Americans understand what marriage is, why it matters, and the consequences of redefining it. The Supreme Court shouldn't truncate the debate and redefine marriage by judicial decree to include same-sex relationships.

So what about that release from the American Academy of Pediatrics? Two eminent political scientists, Leon Kass (a professor at University of Chicago) and Harvey Mansfield (a professor at Harvard), filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court cautioning against accepting politicized science: "Claims that science provides support for constitutionalizing a right to same-sex marriage must necessarily rest on ideology. Ideology may be pervasive in the social sciences, especially when controversial policy issues are at stake, but ideology is not science."

Kass and Mansfield urge the court not to redefine marriage based on new, inconclusive research. The academic studies on same-sex parenting purporting to show "no differences" are, they argue, "subject to severe constraints arising from limited data" and a lack of "replicable experiments." The professors contend:

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"Even if same-sex marriage and child rearing by same-sex couples were far more common than they now are, large amounts of data collected over decades would be required before any responsible researcher could make meaningful scientific estimates of the effects."

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Although we still have much to learn about the impact of same-sex parenting, we do know quite a bit about marriage and child well-being. We have decades of rigorous social science data confirming that children do best with a married mother and father.

In another amicus brief submitted to the court, a group of social science professors explains:

"It is not simply the presence of two parents ... but the presence of two biological parents that seems to support children's development. ... Experts have long contended that both mothers and fathers make unique contributions to parenting."

Indeed, scholars have known this for quite some time. Professor David Popenoe of Rutgers University explains:

"We should disavow the notion that 'mommies can make good daddies,' just as we should disavow the popular notion ... that 'daddies can make good mommies.' ... The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary—culturally and biologically—for the optimal development of a human being."

These statistics have penetrated American life to such a great extent that President Barack Obama can refer to them as well understood:

"We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it."

Fathers matter, and marriage helps to connect fathers to mothers and children.

But how can the law teach that fathers are essential if we redefine marriage to make fathers optional?

Redefining marriage denies the importance of mothers and fathers, and same-sex parenting arrangements, as the social science professors note, "by definition, exclude either a mother or a father." The concern is not whether same-sex couples can make "quality and successful efforts in raising children." The concern is that there "remain unique advantages to a parenting structure consisting of both a mother and a father, political interests notwithstanding."

Marriage policy should place the needs of children before the desires of adults. It should respect the rights of children to the care of the man and woman who created them as much as the rights of adults to live and love as they choose—which adults can do, without redefining marriage for the entire nation.

One thing CNN's calculator makes clear is that, wherever they live, Americans are in the middle of a national conversation about what marriage is, why it matters, and the consequences of redefining it.

The Supreme Court shouldn't make marriage policy for the entire nation. Rather than cut short democratic deliberation, the court should uphold the constitutional authority of citizens and their elected officials to make decisions about marriage. http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/22/opinion/anderson-states-same-sex-marriag
e/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7

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a policy statement in support of same-sex parents’ right to wed as well as to foster or adopt children. The policy was guided by the organization’s belief in gay marriage “to promote optimal health and well-being of all children.”

“We know enough about child development that we can say that children are nurtured when they have two loving, supportive, committed-to-each-other adults to take care of them,”

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"Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God."

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...it should be pointed out and reinforced that such a union is most desirable.

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In fact, in some ways, gay parents may bring talents to the table that straight parents don't.

Gay parents "tend to be more motivated, more committed than heterosexual parents on average, because they chose to be parents," said Abbie Goldberg, a psychologist at Clark University in Massachusetts who researches gay and lesbian parenting. Gays and lesbians rarely become parents by accident, compared with an almost 50 percent accidental pregnancy rate among heterosexuals, Goldberg said. "That translates to greater commitment on average and more involvement."

And while research indicates that kids of gay parents show few differences in achievement, mental health, social functioning and other measures, these kids may have the advantage of open-mindedness, tolerance and role models for equitable relationships, according to some research. Not only that, but gays and lesbians are likely to provide homes for difficult-to-place children in the foster system, studies show. (Of course, this isn't to say that heterosexual parents can't bring these same qualities to the parenting table.)

research suggests that gay and lesbian parents are actually a powerful resource for kids in need of adoption. According to a 2007 report by the Williams Institute and the Urban Institute, 65,000 kids were living with adoptive gay parents between 2000 and 2002, with another 14,000 in foster homes headed by gays and lesbians. (There are currently more than 100,000 kids in foster care in the U.S.)

An October 2011 report by Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute found that, of gay and lesbian adoptions at more than 300 agencies, 10 percent of the kids placed were older than 6 — typically a very difficult age to adopt out. About 25 percent were older than 3. Sixty percent of gay and lesbian couples adopted across races, which is important given that minority children in the foster system tend to linger. More than half of the kids adopted by gays and lesbians had special needs.

The 2007 report by the Urban Institute also found that more than half of gay men and 41 percent of lesbians in the U.S. would like to adopt. That adds up to an estimated 2 million gay people who are interested in adoption. It's a huge reservoir of potential parents who could get kids out of the instability of the foster system, Brodzinsky said.

"When you think about the 114,000 children who are freed for adoption who continue to live in foster care and who are not being readily adopted, the goal is to increase the pool of available, interested and well-trained individuals to parent these children," Brodzinsky said.

In addition, Brodzinsky said, there's evidence to suggest that gays and lesbians are especially accepting of open adoptions, where the child retains some contact with his or her birth parents.


Research has shown that the kids of same-sex couples — both adopted and biological kids — fare no worse than the kids of straight couples on mental health, social functioning, school performance and a variety of other life-success measures.

In a 2010 review of virtually every study on gay parenting, New York University sociologist Judith Stacey and University of Southern California sociologist Tim Biblarz found no differences between children raised in homes with two heterosexual parents and children raised with lesbian parents.

"There's no doubt whatsoever from the research that children with two lesbian parents are growing up to be just as well-adjusted and successful" as children with a male and a female parent," Stacey told LiveScience.

The bottom line, Stacey said, is that people who say children need both a father and a mother in the home are misrepresenting the research, most of which compares children of single parents to children of married couples. Two good parents are better than one good parent, Stacey said, but one good parent is better than two bad parents. And gender seems to make no difference. While you do find broad differences between how men and women parent on average, she said, there is much more diversity within the genders than between them.

In fact, the only consistent places you find differences between how kids of gay parents and kids of straight parents turn out are in issues of tolerance and open-mindedness, according to Goldberg. In a paper published in 2007 in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Goldberg conducted in-depth interviews with 46 adults with at least one gay parent. Twenty-eight of them spontaneously offered that they felt more open-minded and empathetic than people not raised in their situation.

"These individuals feel like their perspectives on family, on gender, on sexuality have largely been enhanced by growing up with gay parents," Goldberg said.

One 33-year-old man with a lesbian mother told Goldberg, "I feel I'm a more open, well-rounded person for having been raised in a nontraditional family, and I think those that know me would agree. My mom opened me up to the positive impact of differences in people."

Children of gay parents also reported feeling less stymied by gender stereotypes than they would have been if raised in straight households. That's likely because gays and lesbians tend to have more egalitarian relationships than straight couples, Goldberg said. They're also less wedded to rigid gender stereotypes themselves.

"Men and women felt like they were free to pursue a wide range of interests," Goldberg said. "Nobody was telling them, 'Oh, you can't do that, that's a boy thing,' or 'That's a girl thing.'"

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"I was just thinking about this with a couple of friends and just was in tears thinking about how different my childhood might have been had same-sex marriage been legalized 25 years ago," a 23-year-old man raised by a lesbian couple told Goldberg. "The cultural, legal status of same-sex couples impacts the family narratives of same-sex families — how we see ourselves in relation to the larger culture, whether we see ourselves as accepted or outsiders." More at http://www.livescience.com/17913-advantages-gay-parents.html

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