Maybe you’ve heard about the study that says that lezmos (that’s lesbian moms, in case you forgot) raise much more well-adjusted kids than the hyperactive deviants of straight couples? We’re all for pro-gay parental studies, especially since that we hear that “every child deserves a mother and a father” crap whenever some bigot wants to shaft gay families. But in all the celebrating, few have asked why the lezmos in this study ended up with such well-adjusted kids. It could be because the lezmos in question averaged around age 35. Or because of that shadowy “homosexual agenda”! We did some digging and found five possible explanations why Heather is better off with two mommies than with Britney Spears and Kevin Federline.
Wendy Wright, the most concerned woman of the group Concerned Women for America, pointed out that the lezmo study was funded by LGBT groups like the Gill Foundation and the Lesbian Health Fund from the Gay Lesbian Medical Association. According to Wright, “That proves the prejudice and bias of the study. This study was clearly designed to come out with one outcome—to attempt to sway people that children are not detrimentally affected in a homosexual household.”
Of course she’d say that. Thankfully the study’s author Dr. Nanette Gartrell quickly stepped up to say that the “funding sources played no role in the design or conduct of the study.”
“My personal investment is in doing reputable research,” said Gartrell. “This is a straightforward statistical analysis. It will stand and it has withstood very rigorous peer review by the people who make the decision whether or not to publish it.”
The study was featured in the journal Pediatrics, the 62-year-old publication of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is the most-cited journal in the field. But fuck it, Pediatrics is probably just some liberal front for fag lovers. In fact, Dan Savage is completely willing to throw out the lezmo study on one condition:
I’m happy to scrap the results of this study—this peer-reviewed, 25-year-study—on the condition that the haters stop citing the results of discredited, non-peer-reviewed studies funded by anti-gay advocacy groups, studies that are “designed to come out with” anti-gay outcomes, studies conducted by disgraced and discredited “scientists” like Dr. George Rekers.
Amen.
The average age of the lesbian mothers in the study averaged around 35. To give you some perspective, Britney Spears was 24 when she popped out her first gremlin and my mom was 17 when she popped out my sister. I can’t speak for Britney, but my mom’s pregnancy was definitely an accident and my sister’s upbringing was, um… rocky, to put it mildly.
So one could expect that two grown woman who had taken the time to plan an insemination and sort out legal details might possibly be more prepared when it comes to—oh I dunno—almost every other aspect of raising healthy and intelligent children. I mean they’re more prepared to tackle the easy stuff like feeding, changing, reading bedtime stories, cheering at soccer games, etc.
Dating, menses, and Twilight-fever… nobody can plan for that.
Time lays it down:
Because their children are more likely to experience discrimination and stigmatization as a result of their family circumstances, these mothers can be more likely to broach complicated topics, such as sexuality and diversity and tolerance, with their children early on. Having such a foundation may help to give these children more confidence and maturity in dealing with social differences and prejudices as they get older.
Similarly, a nurse friend of mine recently informed me that babies born by cesarian section tend to have more developmental problems than babies born vaginally. Some pediatric researchers think it’s because the brain has to deal with a lot more pain, physical sensation, and trauma in a vaginal birth. Having to deal with insane shit makes you a stronger person—anyone who thinks they’ll just pop out a complete person at the end of childhood is severely mistaken.
How about we take this to the next level?
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Lezmos is the study disproportionately came from the New England and the West Coast, dudes. Comparatively, the straight couples and their kids came from the South and Midwest and we know there’s nothing there but livestock and fake manners.
It could be that the kids seem more adjusted because the coasts provide a more diverse cosmopolitan upbringing than the landlocked southern and midwestern regions have to offer. Given the choice, I would have rather been raised in New York or LA too. I probably would have ended up a whole hell of a lot less uptight.
The economic breakdown of the parent groups showed a larger number of “working class” types on the lezmo side, but the costs of insemination suggest that the lezmos also had higher paying jobs and possibly higher degrees of education. Women who get collegiate and university degrees and high paying careers tend to be older, more stable, and overall better equipped to handle a baby.
Of course, it’s ridonkulous how many loopholes gay couples still have to jump through just to become parents when straight couples can pop out kids, divorce, remarry, and respawn as often as they like. But the more of these studies we have under our belts, the better equipped we will be not only to fight the opponents of gay adoption, but to learn how to be better LGBT parents ourselves.
Fitz
I think that, in fairness, you have to remember that a queer couple who decides to have as kid has already self selected for financial security and maybe even had a home-study done by a licensed social worker. With heterosexual couples, (including many of our parents, BTW) pregnancy just “happens” ready or not.
Jerrold
All the more reasons to license all reproduction.
Yeah, I kinda mean it on some level.
bskibs
What about kids with two dads? Is there a study on that?
Lamar
@bskibs: There should be, gays can be just as good parents as women since they are probably gonna be more emotionally connected to their children than straights too because of the struggle they likely would have had to go through to just have a child. Gays are great emotionally with children too unlike a lot of straight fathers who just up and go when they get women pregnant.
Queer Supremacist
Lesbian mothers are better parents because they are LESBIANS. Plain and simple.
The Greeks and Romans were right about same-sex love. They knew that breeder sex is disgusting and deviant and was only good for baby-farming and nation-building. It is only tolerated today because science has not come up with a better solution.
FlopsyMopsyCT
I am so happy that Queerty wrote this. Studies have long shown that the joined efforts of two women parents, not always homosexual, usually raise happier, more well-adjusted children than other parental pairings. The studies that I’ve seen usually show a great disparity between the parenting of two women and that of mother/father parenting.
The studies I’ve seen on the parenting of two men, again, not always homosexual, vary greatly. Generally, parenting by two men tends to come out behind other pairings. However, it should be noted that the studies behind the parenting of male/male headed families are not nearly as complete simply because there are not as many male/male parents as there are woman/woman parents. Also, gay men tend to use foster care programs as a way to parent children rather than undertaking an adoption or facilitating a surrogate. Since foster care programs tend to produce less emotionally stable children and the relationships between foster parents and children are often not permanent, it makes the situation more difficult and lowers the numbers for gay men.
There’s also the fact that the female portion of parenting is biologically more “necessary” to a child’s development than the male portion. Thus, an overload on the female portion in the child’s upbringing from two mothers is probably more good than bad.
FlopsyMopsyCT
One more thing, on the second page of this article, this issue always infuriates me and I think the last quote from Dan Savage paraphrases it nicely. The studies that religious groups and pro-traditional-family groups cite are ALWAYS so sketchy. I was reading an article from Catholic Online on this same topic and of course the findings they reported were in complete contrast to this article. So many of those studies are developed by NARTH, a group of allegedly unbiased researchers and therapists that are out to prove that homosexuality is an abomination and a threat to society. Anything developed by NARTH is often religion-sponsored, and the vast majority of NARTH members subscribe to Christian beliefs. Talk about setting out to prove a particular result! It’s science at its worst. For sure, there are probably the same problems with pro-homosexual studies and that shouldn’t be ignored, but the anti-homosexual side is sooooo patently guilty of this, it’s despicable. Luckily, NARTH has no real following outside of the religious sphere and most reputable members of the scientific/medical community condemn its research practices.
Evan
On the male/male question, I do think it’s very important to recognize that gay men’s intentional families look quite different from lesbians’. Lesbians have historically had greater access to means of having biological children, since artificial insemination doesn’t require nearly as much outside contribution than surrogacy. And historically, women (including lesbians) have had an easier time retaining kids form previous heterosexual relationships.
Children of gay men are disproportionately adopted. And since there’s discrimination against gays by many of the private adoption organizations that procure healthy mostly-white infants, gay men are more likely to go through the foster system. There are plenty of studies that have established that kids who have been in the foster system tend to do worse than kids adopted as newborns or ones raised by their biological parents. So we can expect that on average, gay men’s kids might not be as well-adjusted. A good study would have to control very carefully for the children’s background.