Apparently, lesbian couples can be as good at parenting children as traditional married couples. That was the conclusion of a new study anyway. Who authored it, and who funded it?

Excerpt:

Several media outlets including CNN, Time magazine, Reuters and US News and World Report, have promoted the US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, which claims children raised by lesbian parents are “psychologically well-adjusted” and have “fewer behavioral problems” than children raised by heterosexual parents.

Of those four outlets, however, only Reuters reported that the author of the study, Dr. Nanette Gartrell, is herself a lesbian. According to the New York Times Gartrell wed her partner, Dee Mosbacher, in 2005.

Seven out of nine groups that provided funding for the study are gay advocacy groups, including the Gill Foundation and the Gay Lesbian Medical Association. Reuters, Time and U.S. News and World Report did not include the sources of funding for the study.

[…]The problem with many studies regarding children of gay parents, according to the late Steven Nock in a 2004 National Public Radio interview, is that they rely on “self-recruited” subjects. The question, Nock said, is “whether or not people who volunteer to participate in studies resemble the sort who do not.”

Gartrell’s study reportedly recruited its 78 subject couples “through announcements in bookstores, lesbian events and newspapers” in Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, according to CNN.

So already we should be on guard.

But there’s more! Here’s the methodological problem with the study: (H/T ECM)

In a letter published online in Pediatrics, Professor Walter Schumm, who has served as an expert witness for the State of Florida in a trial concerning gay adoption, points out, “at least 67 per cent of the mothers in the [lesbian family study] had at least a college education compared to approximately 28 per cent of women of similar age in US Census data” so that the effects seen could be partly due to higher levels of education rather than “gender” per se.

Another letter points out that ethnicity and region of residence also differ considerably between the two groups, with the control group having “many times more minorities and many more children from the South” of the US. For example, around 68 per cent of the controls were “white/Caucasian” compared with 93 per cent of the study group. That writer expresses surprise that there was no attempt to adjust the results for these differences, and that the study was accepted all the same by Pediatrics — the journal of the country’s leading professional group.

So this study is as reliable as East Anglia studies on man-made global warming. But a lot of people in the media will cite it anyway, because it sends the right message. It sends the message that people who oppose same-sex marriage are ignorant bigots and that fathers are totally unnecessary for the development of children.

And that’s what the elites in media, education and government want people to believe. They want that view to be made into law and reflected in public policy. And they don’t really care if children are raised without fathers, just like they don’t care if unborn children are killed in the womb. Because adult happiness is more important than children’s well-being.

Here is my previous post explaining how same-sex couples differ from traditional couples.