All Happy Families

The looming battle over gay parenting.

Julian Sanchez from the August/September 2005 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

The Gay Baby Boom: Extrapolating from 2000 census data, Urban Institute demographer Gary Gates conservatively estimates there are at least a quarter million children living in households headed by same-sex couples; 4.2 percent are either adopted or foster children, almost double the figure for heterosexual couples. (Single gay parents, of course, are not captured by those numbers.) While the increase in gay parenting can't be precisely measured, Gates estimates that one in 20 male same-sex couples and one in five female couples were raising children in 1990. By 2000 those figures had risen to one in five for male couples and one in three for female couples. A 2003 survey by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute found that 60 percent of adoption agencies place children in gay households, and a 2001 Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that, while about 8 percent of gay respondents were currently parents or guardians of children under 18, almost half of those who weren't hoped to one day adopt children of their own. As the ranks of gay parents swell, they become more visible--and more visible targets.

The Tipping Point: A 2004 Harris poll found that a plurality of Americans still disapproves of adoption by same-sex couples--43 percent and 45 percent for female and male couples, respectively. But that represents a dramatic decrease in opposition since 1996, when majorities of more than 60 percent disapproved in both cases. Conservatives may worry, with good reason, that if laws restricting gay parenting aren't locked in now, perhaps drawing strength from the momentum behind anti�gay marriage legislation, their time will soon have passed.

The Marriage Factor: "Among both the youngest and oldest cohorts," a 2003 study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found, "those who know someone who is gay are about twice as likely to favor gay marriage as those who do not." The expansion of gay parenting means people who might not otherwise encounter gay couples will be more likely to see them at PTA meetings and Little League games. And the Harris poll found an overwhelming majority agrees that children being raised by gay couples should "have the same rights as all other children." For practical purposes, that means ensuring that their parents have rights too. If, other things being equal, it's better for children to be raised by married couples, then as the number of kids raised by gays increases, the conservative case for expanding marriage rights becomes more potent. All of which means that as more same-sex couples raise children, opposition to gay marriage is likely to erode--a matter of concern to the social conservatives on whom Republican politicians increasingly rely for support.

The Lawrence Effect: Until recently, sodomy laws in 13 states confirmed Judge Moore's assessment of homosexuality as "an evil disfavored under the law." But in the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court held that sodomy laws were unconstitutional, yielding, in the words of the Human Rights Campaign's Evans, "rapid changes in custody and visitation case law." The Lawrence decision, she explains, "really helped us because for a long time, especially in adoption cases, judges restricted gay parents' rights on the grounds that sodomy was a felony." But now the baton has been passed to lawmakers, who know that courts are more deferential to legislators on questions of family policy than on issues of sexual privacy.

"Kids Need a Mom and Dad": Even Americans otherwise favorably disposed to gay rights may have concerns about how growing up in a gay household affects children. Traditionalists have done their best to heighten those concerns, arguing that discriminatory laws serve the best interests of kids.

The Phantom Menace

The mantra that "children need a mother and a father" has acquired a patina of conventional wisdom through frequent repetition. Yet there is little evidence that children raised by gay couples fare worse than other children.

Gay rights opponents such as Family Research Institute chief Paul Cameron and the Family Research Council's Timothy Dailey are fond of arguing that gay men are disproportionately likely to molest children--a potent charge rejected by the serious social scientists who have directly investigated it. Large-scale studies of molestation victims have repeatedly found that abusers overwhelmingly were either heterosexual in adult relationships or lacked any sexual response to adults.

Noting that about a third of molestation cases involve male adults targeting male children, Dailey and Cameron insist those adults must, by definition, be homosexual. Since homosexual men make up a far smaller proportion of the general population, Dailey reasons, gay men must be disproportionately likely to abuse children.

The problem with this view is that psychologists generally regard pedophilia an orientation of its own. Men who molest boys are not necessarily--indeed, are almost never--"gay" in the colloquial sense. Even if one accepts a definition that calls such men "homosexual," the fact remains that there is little overlap between that group and men who pursue romantic relationships with other adult men, the relevant comparison group for gay adoption.

Most child welfare professionals don't see things Dailey and Cameron's way. After reviewing the available data in 2002, the American Academy of Pediatrics endorsed second-parent adoption rights for gay couples. A resolution passed by the American Psychological Association in 2004 declared that there was "no scientific evidence that parenting effectiveness is related to parental sexual orientation: lesbian and gay parents are as likely as heterosexual parents to provide supportive and healthy environments for their children." It also noted that "the children of lesbian and gay parents are as likely as those of heterosexual parents to flourish."

The Child Welfare League of America, an organization founded in 1920 that now comprises more than 1,100 public and private agencies providing child services, filed an amicus brief in 2004 supporting the ACLU's challenge to Florida's adoption ban, noting the consensus that "children are not adversely affected by their parents' lesbian or gay orientation" and that "all of the mainstream professional organizations in the fields of child health and welfare agree that there is no basis to exclude gay men and lesbians from adopting children." That same year, an Arkansas circuit court overturned a state Child Welfare Agency Review Board regulation prohibiting gay foster parenting after extensive fact finding, including testimony from a variety of psychologists, social workers, and sociologists, concluding that the ban contradicted the agency's mandate to serve the best interests of children.

The statistical evidence meshes with the experience of Adam Pertman, executive director of the Donaldson Institute, an adoption policy-research organization, and author of Adoption Nation. "The evidence on the ground, based on the markers that we have, is that these are good families," he says. "The social workers I talk to are asking how they can recruit more [gay parents], because they're working. That's the best validation I can think of, unless you think all these child welfare professionals are out to harm kids."

Opponents of gay parenting, for the most part, have been forced to fall back on the assertion that the jury's still out. Noting--correctly--that none of the research on children of gay couples made use of the large random samples that generate the most robust results, they claim studies to date provide no basis for supposing that gay parents won't be inferior. But as New York University sociologist Judith Stacey argues, "they have to stretch pretty far to find that. The studies have been very consistent and very positive." Stacey concedes that most of them are "small scale" but adds that "there are some 50 studies now, and we don't see them going the other way. I have yet to see one legitimate refereed publication or scholar come out with a generally negative finding."

As in so many other disputes, child welfare may be serving as a proxy for a values debate. Marjorie Heins, director of the Free Expression Policy Project at the National Coalition Against Censorship and author of Not in Front of the Children: "Indecency," Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth, puts it this way: "If you're convinced that certain attitudes and values are wrong, then you consider exposing a child to those values a harm in itself."

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