Same-sex parenting: A response

While spilling a great deal of ink complaining about a lack of intellectual honesty, Samuel engaged in exactly the kind of intellectual dishonesty about which she was complaining.

There are any number of things one might say in response to Samuel’s assertions. I’d like to begin, however, with a full disclosure of my own beliefs and biases. I support same-sex marriage. I do not believe there are any inherently negative effects of “same-sex parenting,” as it is occasionally described. On to Dr. Samuel.

Her employer, the Witherspoon Institute, has a long history of funding conservative research and has close ties to hard-right conservative groups like the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council, which have been designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center for the “dissemination of false and demonizing propaganda about gays and lesbians.”

The Regnerus paper, cited extensively throughout Samuel’s piece, is highly controversial. Drawing on what Regnerus described as an “unprecedented” set of data, he came to the conclusion that children of gay and lesbian parents are worse off than children of “biologically intact families.”

It is important to note, however, that the Regnerus paper has been controversial not because of its findings, as Samuel would have you believe, but because of a deeply flawed methodology that both confused causation and correlation and was highly deceptive. Even though Samuel did not disclose this in her column, Regnerus’ article was extensively audited by the journal that published it, which found the paper was “extremely misleading,” its publication guilty of “both ideology and inattention” and, finally, “inappropriate for a journal that publishes original quantitative research.” It should be noted that the same man who levied these charges, Dr. Darren Sherkat, had written Regnerus a letter of recommendation earlier in his career — hardly a rigid ideologue.

In short, Regnerus’ article didn’t say what he — or Samuel — claimed it said. They both tried to draw a false comparison between families like mine — stable, loving families with two parents of the same sex — and any family in which a parent had engaged in even a single sexual act with a person of the same sex. We have to understand there is a real difference between the two.

All that being said, even if there were some inherent attribute developed by engaging in a sexual act with a person of the same sex (i.e. half of the world’s population) we have to understand causation. The reality is that, yes, there were some hardships I had to endure in my life because I had gay parents. It turns out that having same-sex parents isn’t the easiest family situation to have in the Midwest during the early ’90s. Shocking, I know. But to somehow blame my parents for the harassment and bullying that other kids put me through is equivalent to arguing that young women are the ones who should bear responsibility when they’re raped.

It’s despicable.

Finally, Samuel and Regnerus discuss LGBT parenting as though it’s some monolithic, perfectly uniform family situation. In fact, my biological mother was single when I was born, so you might lump her in with other single mothers, the overwhelming majority of which are straight. But she was a well-paid physician, so her income bracket was more similar to that of a two-parent household. But she was living in rural Wisconsin, so she — and I — faced some serious social stigmatization. But we moved to a more progressive part of the country when I was 9 years old. But I actually faced more hardship from my peers in Iowa than I had in Wisconsin.

The point, here, is that there is no single universal experience for kids with gay parents, just like there is no universal experience for kids with straight parents. And it doesn’t take a Ph. D. to understand that, because parenting is so subjective, the most important part of raising kids is not the parent or parents’ sexual orientation or gender. It’s whether that parent or those parents is or are willing to put in the blood, sweat, toil and tears it takes to sculpt little hellions into well-adjusted adults. This matters more than anything else, and the literature — and common sense — has and will continue to bear this out.

Samuel spent a good number of words complaining about a lack of intellectual honesty in the literature surrounding children raised in my situation. Unfortunately, I doubt she — or Dr. Regnerus — will see the irony in any of this.

Zach Wahls is a national marriage advocate and the best-selling author of “My Two Moms: Lessons of Love, Strength and What Makes a Family.”