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Article Excerpt
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION I. THE STATE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ON LESBIGAY PARENTING A. Early Research Returns: "No Differences" Between Children Raised by Lesbigay Versus Heterosexual Parents B. Critics Take a Fresh Look at the Research: Fatally Flawed or Flawed But Informative? C. The Importance of "Getting It Right". D. Three Recent Studies II. DOES SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ON LESBIGAY PARENTING PROVIDE A BASIS FOR PROHIBITING LESBIGAY MARRIAGE OR ADOPTION? A. Are Children Raised by Lesbigay Parents More Likely to Be Homosexual? B. Are Children Raised by Lesbigay Parents Likely to Have Difficulty with Peers? C. Does the Mental Health Status or Sexual Behavior of Lesbigay Parents Put Children At Risk? D. Do Children Need a Mother and a Father (and Two Biological Parents)? E. Are There Advantages to Lesbigay Parenting? III. DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH IV. (IT'S REALLY ABOUT SEX): ATTITUDES TOWARD LESBIGAY PARENTING AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DISGUST CONCLUSION
INTRODUCTION
Lesbian and gay (hereinafter "lesbigay") parenting is becoming ever more prevalent in America. As many as nine million children living in the United States have a gay or lesbian parent, (1) and twenty-five percent of all lesbigay couples are raising children. (2) Indeed, marriage and parenting are aspirations of most Americans, yet these rights have often been denied to gays and lesbians. (3) For many years, states maintained legal presumptions against awarding custody to a lesbigay parent, (4) assuming that doing so would not serve the child's best interests. However, much has changed over the last quarter-century and most courts now consider a parent's homosexuality to be irrelevant in child-custody decisions. (5) All but eight states (i.e. Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah, Wisconsin) permit adoption by gay and lesbian couples. (6) All but two states--Nebraska and Utah--allow them to serve as foster parents. (7) Yet, only four states allow same-sex couples to legally marry or enter into civil unions. (8)
The national debate surrounding same-sex marriage has galvanized renewed interest in the issue of lesbigay parenting, (9) and in the last several years ballot measures have been proposed in sixteen states to prohibit gays and lesbians from adopting children. (10) Asserting that the central purposes of marriage are procreation and childrearing, opponents of lesbigay marriage argue that children are harmed or disadvantaged when reared in homosexual households: (11)
Man-woman marriage is the irreplaceable foundation of the child-rearing mode ... that correlates ... with the optimal outcomes deemed crucial for a child's--and hence society's--well being. These outcomes include physical, mental, and emotional health and development; academic performance and levels of attainment; and avoidance of crime and other forms of self--and other destructive behavior such as drug abuse and high-risk sexual conduct. (12)
They further argue that since marriage is a social institution that helps determine sexual and procreative norms by "guid[ing] individuals' identities, perceptions, aspirations, and conduct," same-sex marriage will serve to change social norms by legitimizing lesbigay parenting, (13) resulting in greater numbers of children being raised by non-biological parents:
[A]ccepting same-sex marriage necessarily means accepting that the societal institution of marriage is intended primarily for the benefit of the partners to the marriage, and only secondarily for the children born into it. And it means abolishing the norm that children.., have a prima facie right to know and be reared within their own biological family by their mother and father. (14)
The effects of lesbigay parenting on children was a key issue in recent litigation in Hawaii, (15) Vermont, (16) Massachusetts, (17) Washington (18), and New York (19) on same-sex marriage. In the 1993 case of Baehr v. Lewin, the Hawaii Supreme Court held that the denial of marriage licenses to same-sex couples was potentially discriminatory and an Equal Protection violation of Hawaii's constitution. (20) On remand to trial court, (21) the parties centered their arguments "almost entirely around the issue of the possible effects on children of allowing same-sex marriages. All of the witnesses called for both sides of the case either were social scientists or commented on the social scientific research, in order to persuade the court which family structure would ultimately be in the best interest of the child." (22)
Lesbigay parenting also was the touchstone issue in the 2003 case Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, in which the Massachusetts Supreme Court held 4-3 that denying of marriage rights to lesbigay couples violated the Massachusetts constitution. (23) Two of the three rationales proffered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts involved parenting. (24) Massachusetts argued that the primary purpose of marriage was to provide a "favorable setting for procreation" and to "ensure[] the optimal setting for child rearing," which it defined it "a two-parent family with one parent of each sex." (25) But the Court held that denying marriage benefits to same-sex couples "cannot plausibly further" the State's policy of protecting the welfare of children. (26) Utilizing "rational basis" review, it struck down the Massachusetts marriage law as a violation of the state constitution's equal protection guarantee. (27) According to the Court, the State had not proffered persuasive evidence that lesbigay parenting was harmful to children. The Court noted that lesbigay parenting was a reality, and that denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples deprived them of the financial and other benefits that positively impacted the parenting of children in married households. (28) However, Justice Sosman's vigorous dissent emphasized that a statute need only satisfy "a minimal threshold of rationality" (29) to survive rational basis review. "[T]he Legislature [could] have some rational basis for concluding that, at present, [same-sex] family structures have not yet been conclusively shown to be the equivalent of the marital family structure that has established itself as a successful one over a period of centuries." (30) Justice Sosman concluded that the Massachusetts legislature had at least a minimally rational basis for denying marriage rights to same-sex couples:
The Legislature can rationally view the state of the scientific evidence as unsettled on the critical question it now faces: are families headed by same-sex parents equally successful in rearing children from infancy to adulthood as families headed by parents of opposite sexes? Our belief that children raised by same-sex couples should fare the same as children raised in traditional families is just that: a passionately held but utterly untested belief. (31)
In an equally vigorous dissent, Justice Cordy opined that the denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples satisfied the deferential rational basis test:
We must assume that the Legislature ... would be familiar with many recent studies that variously support the proposition that children raised in intact families headed by same-sex couples fare as well on many measures as children raised in similar families headed by opposite-sex couples; support the proposition that children of same-sex couples fare worse on some measures; or reveal notable differences between the two groups of children that warrant further study. ... [Thus], the Legislature could rationally conclude that a family environment with married opposite-sex parents remains the optimal social structure in which to bear children, and that the raising of children by same-sex couples, who by definition cannot be the two sole biological parents of a child and cannot provide children with a parental authority figure of each gender, presents an alternative structure for child rearing that has not yet proved itself beyond reasonable scientific dispute to be as optimal as the biologically based marriage norm. (32)
Thus, courts are looking to the extant social science research on lesbigay parenting. This research addresses the five sets of concerns that courts, policymakers, and commentators frequently express about the possible negative effects of lesbigay parenting on children. (33) First, there is a concern that lesbigay parenting may produce psychological or adjustment problems in children such as anxiety, depression, lowered self esteem, or behavior problems, and that homosexual parents themselves are more likely to have serious mental health problems that may adversely impact their children. (34) Second, there is the concern that children of lesbigay parents will be teased or rejected by peers, and thus experience difficulties in their social relationships. (35) Third, there is the concern that children of lesbigay parents will have gender identity problems and are more likely to become homosexual. (36) Fourth, some argue that children do best when raised by a mother and a father because men and women each contribute something unique and important to childrearing. Finally, some argue that gays and lesbians are inherently unfit to be parents because they are more likely to sexually abuse children, to engage in promiscuous sexual conduct that puts their children at risk for premature and inappropriate sexual behavior, and to have unstable families due to relationship infidelity. (37)
To assess the validity of the claim that the denial of marriage or parenting rights to same-sex couples serves the goal of promoting the welfare of children, I will review and critique social science research relevant to these five concerns. In particular, I will focus on research relevant to whether growing up in a lesbigay household is as positive an experience for children as growing up in a heterosexual household, since most of the commentary to date has addressed the issue of whether lesbigay parenting is psychological harmful to children. Indeed, the extant research permits the conclusion that lesbigay parenting is not psychologically harmful to children. Yet, the research on lesbigay parenting has methodological limitations, and some research suggests that dual-gender parenting may be modestly advantageous for children. Given this state of affairs, laws prohibiting same-sex marriage on the theory that lesbigay parenting disadvantages children can (and probably should) pass constitutional muster under the highly deferential rational basis test for judicial review of legislative action.
But as a matter of public policy, the research fails to support the theory that denying marriage or parenting rights to same-sex couples serves the welfare of children. First, research suggests that children raised by lesbigay parents may be more likely to develop a homosexual orientation, but this should not and cannot be viewed as a negative outcome. Second, children raised by lesbigay parents frequently report concerns about peer rejection if friends find out that their parents are gay or lesbian, and many times they go to considerable lengths to keep this a secret. Yet, this stressor is likely not so different in magnitude from the many other peer-related stressors commonly experienced by adolescents, and research shows that the children of lesbigay parents have normal peer relationships. Third, gays and lesbians have higher rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse than the general population, perhaps in part due to the effects of stigma and prejudice. But most gays and lesbians do not have mental health or substance abuse problems. Gays and lesbians also have higher rates of promiscuity and infidelity. Yet, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and particularly childrearing in the context of these committed relationships, would promote fidelity in lesbigay relationships. Fourth, the extant research suggests that mothers and fathers each make a unique contribution to children's social, emotional, and intellectual development, though the relative advantages of dual-gender parenting appear to be modest. Thus, a two-parent mother and father family may be the best family structure for childrearing, but the law has never required that parents conform to a perfect model of family life. If this were the case, the state would deny marriage licenses to a substantial minority of heterosexual couples, a substantial number of whom have unplanned or unwanted children.
After proposing new directions for future research on lesbigay parenting, I will conclude by suggesting that public opposition to gay marriage, particularly in the context of lesbigay parenting, is animated in large part by a deeper concern--the proverbial "elephant in the room" on gay rights issues. That elephant is the visceral disgust reaction that many Americans feel toward homosexual sex, particularly gay anal sex, and the accompanying moral intuition that homosexuality and homosexual relationships are immoral. Thus, regardless of what the research may otherwise show about the effects of lesbigay parenting on children, many people will conclude that it is better for children to be raised in heterosexual households because they do not want children exposed to the lesbigay "lifestyle," nor do they want to increase the "risk" that children will develop a homosexual orientation if they are raised by lesbigay parents. The article concludes with a discussion of emerging psychological research on moral decision making, which suggests that the emotion of disgust (an emotion that evolved to protect the body from contamination and disease) that many feel towards homosexual behavior is at the root of anti-gay attitudes on policy questions surrounding gay parenting and marriage. Recent research demonstrates the powerful role that disgust plays in the moral judgments people make about sexual behavior and the fact that such judgments are often based more on emotion than rational analysis. I argue that the disgust reaction is likely a byproduct of human evolution that fails to inform rational judgments about the moral rightness or wrongness of homosexuality, much less the public policy questions surrounding lesbigay parenting and marriage rights.
I. THE STATE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ON LESBIGAY PARENTING
Because the existing psychological literature uniformly agrees that children raised by lesbians are as psychologically healthy as children raised by heterosexual parents, courts influenced solely by this literature would have to agree that raising a child in a lesbian-mother family is not against a child's best interests. (38)
A. Early Research Returns: "No Differences" Between Children Raised by Lesbigay Versus Heterosexual Parents
Social scientists and mental health professionals have conducted over fifty studies, of varying quality, to examine the effects of lesbigay parenting on children. In many cases, the investigators undertook the research to inform, if not directly influence, legal policy. They have concluded that the findings "are exceptionally clear," (39) and demonstrate that there are no relevant differences in outcomes between children raised by heterosexual versus homosexual parents and that lesbigay parenting has no negative effects on children. (40) Children raised by lesbigay parents do not have disturbances in gender identity, they have normal peer relationships, their mental health and psychosocial adjustment is as positive as that of children raised in heterosexual households, and homosexual parents are no more likely to sexually abuse children than are heterosexual parents. (41)
Indeed, leading professional organizations including the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychoanalytic Association, and the National Association of Social Workers, (42) and most recently, the American Medical Association, (43) regard the findings as sufficiently compelling to warrant statements against policies that disadvantage lesbians and gays in child custody, adoption, and foster care proceedings. Advocates have used these research conclusions to bolster support for lesbigay parenting and marriage rights, and the research is now frequently cited in public policy debates and judicial opinions. (44)
B. Critics Take a Fresh Look at the Research: Fatally Flawed or Flawed But Informative?
We must ... assume that the Legislature would be aware of the many critiques of the methodologies used in virtually all of the comparative studies of children raised in these different environments, cautioning that the sampling populations are not representative, that the observation periods are too limited in time, that the empirical data are unreliable, and that the hypotheses are too infused with political or agenda driven bias. (45) [A]lmost everyone agrees that the research has substantial limitations, whether the critics are pro-gay or anti-gay. Nevertheless, the research continues to be trusted to provide serious answers. It is quite remarkable how many authors note the limitations quite fairly and then ignore those weaknesses in order to draw relatively firm conclusions ... the researchers tend to see what they want to see and once they have found it, they quit, rather than trying to test their results from an oppositional perspective. (46)
As Professors Stacey and Biblarz observe, "contemporary scholarship on the effects of parental sexual orientation on children's development is rarely critical of lesbigay parenthood. Few respectable scholars today oppose such parenting." (47) Challenging the social science conclusion that there are no differences between children raised in lesbigay versus heterosexual households "has been a bit of a David and Goliath situation, and the Davids have not fared so well in the published scholarly analysis." (48) Perhaps this is partly because the psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers conducting the research are members of professional disciplines where the majority is politically liberal. (49) Most of the researchers favor lesbigay parenting and marriage rights. Many are also gay or lesbians (50) and likely have a personal stake in the outcome of the research. (51) This raises the concern in some quarters that unconscious biases may have affected their research, or at least, how they interpreted the results of their research studies. (52)
Recently, a few (mostly) conservative social scientists and legal scholars have questioned the validity and reliability of this research and the "no difference" conclusion. (53) As Professor Wardle concludes, "the social science evidence is very important, [but] thus far that evidence has been immature, biased, and unreliable. The day will come when thorough, serious, longitudinal research will be available, but that day has not yet arrived." (54) Eight published critiques of the empirical research on lesbigay parenting concluded that the methodological limitations of the studies render them unreliable, particularly when inferring that there are "no-differences." (55) A 1993 review of fourteen studies was published in a peer-reviewed social science journal, (56) but is now outdated in light of the additional thirty-eight studies that have been conducted since their review. With one exception, the five more recent critiques have appeared in low-prestige psychology journals, in the law reviews of conservative, religiously-affiliated law schools, or in a book sponsored and published by a conservative organization. Therefore, they may not receive the attention they deserve from policymakers much less social scientists. Indeed, the critiques have received scant attention in the scholarly literature, (57) though they have been cited in several recent court opinions. (58) As discussed in Section II (infra), this research suggests possible differences in outcomes between children raised in homosexual as compared to heterosexual households.
The most detailed and persuasive methodological critique was provided by the quantitative sociologists Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai in their 2001 book, No Basis: What the Studies Don't Tell Us About Same-Sex Parenting, (59) which reviews the methodology and statistical analysis used in the forty-nine empirical studies of lesbigay parenting. They concluded that the studies are deeply flawed, and "offer no basis for that conclusion." (60) Although researchers have made the case that "it is not the results obtained from any one specific sample but the accumulation of findings from many different samples that will be most meaningful," Lerner and Nagai retort that even when taken as a whole, the research is too unreliable to meaningfully inform public policy. (61) None of the forty-eight studies fully satisfied the key methodological criteria required for strong validity and reliability: a heterosexual control group, adequate control for extraneous variables, reliable measures, use of a random or probability sample, appropriate statistical analyses, and adequate sample size and statistical power. (62)
The most significant and widely acknowledged limitation is the small size of the samples used in the studies. Most studies typically include only fifteen to fifty participants per comparison group, which results in insufficient statistical "power" to detect small or moderate differences in outcomes between children raised by heterosexual versus lesbigay parents. (63) Lerner and Nagai estimate that the probability of finding a false negative (i.e., failing to find true existing differences) (64) was eighty to ninety percent in most of the studies. (65) However, this is true only with respect to detecting relatively small differences ("effect sizes") that would account for five-to twenty-five percent of the variance. Several of the more recent studies had sample sizes large enough to detect large differences, and some were powerful enough to detect even moderate differences. (66) But many of the important discoveries found in psychological research involve relatively modest effects. (67)
The second major limitation concerns the use of non-representative, self-selected samples of convenience rather than random samples, making it difficult to generalize the findings to the larger lesbigay or heterosexual populations. According to Cameron, "[i]t is always difficult to judge the relevance of findings from studies utilizing volunteer samples.... They look 'real' in that they have methods, statistical treatments, and report results, but unlike studies based on random samples, their findings can not be used to generalize to any population...." (68)Most of the lesbigay participants in these studies were white, middle- and upper-middle class, professional parents living in politically liberal urban areas (e.g., the San Francisco Bay area), (69) while most of the single-parent heterosexual participants were "draw[n] heavily from [populations] that seem extremely unrepresentative of single parents." (70) The lesbigay participants in many of the studies had family incomes and educational levels higher than the general lesbigay population or heterosexual comparison group. These factors have been shown to be advantageous in childrearing. (71) In addition, most participants were volunteers recruited through lesbigay organizations, advertisements in lesbigay publications, and/or through other study participants ("snowball sampling"), (72) rather than through a random sampling of the lesbigay community. Participants "are usually relatively open about their homosexuality and, therefore, may bias the research towards a particular group of gay and lesbian parents." (73) Moreover, participants usually knew what the studies were designed to investigate, leading to the possibility of conscious or unconscious biases that produce results favoring lesbigay parenting. (74)
Professors Rekers and Kilgus similarly argue that the confluent problems of small sample size and non-representative samples make the "no-difference" finding of most studies wholly unreliable:
[W]hen a small sample is drawn in a non-representative fashion and no statistically significant difference is found between two groups ... the persistent problem is that the findings from an unrepresentative sample have no demonstrated generalization to the larger population of homosexual parents and their children. Additionally, there is the added possibility that even if the sample had been representative of the population, the study's small sample size rendered it methodologically limited in being able to detect any actual differences that may exist in the large population studied. Therefore, a finding of no difference between small, unrepresentative samples provides insufficient evidence to determine whether a group difference is present or not in the larger population of homosexual parents and their children compared to others. (75)
Furthermore, the studies variously suffer from a number of other methodological problems including: failure to control for important variables (parents' educational level or socioeconomic status, parents' living arrangements, amount of childrens' contact with biological parents, single-versus dual-parent homosexual families, ex cetera); a lack of heterosexual control or matched groups; over-reliance on self-report; lack of longitudinal data; improper formulation and statistical testing of the "no difference" hypotheses; (76) and measures that fail to distinguish adequately between sexual identity, behavior, and desire. (77) Importantly, "visible lesbigay parenthood is such a recent phenomenon that most studies are necessarily of the children of a transitional generation of self-identified lesbians and gay men who became parents in the context of heterosexual relationships that dissolved before or after they assumed a gay identity. These unique historical conditions make it impossible to fully distinguish the impact of a parent's sexual orientation on a child from the impact of such factors as divorce, re-mating, the secrecy of the closet, the process of coming out, or the social consequences of stigma." (78) Many early studies compared development among children of divorced lesbian mothers living with a lesbian partner against children of divorced, heterosexual single mothers. Consequently, it is difficult to disentangle the possible effects of parents' sexual orientation from those relating to living in single-parent versus two-parent households. "Because two parents have more resources (time, money, energy, etc.) than a single parent, finding no difference in child outcomes in such studies does not provide legitimate or valid data on the comparability of parenting by homosexuals to heterosexuals." (79)
In addition, current research has not yet examined several important groups of lesbigay parents and their children. Most studies include lesbian parents but few have included gay parents, and there are no studies specifically of adoptive parents. Given the small sample sizes, the studies do not permit a statistically reliable examination of whether lesbigay parenting may affect boys and girls differently. Most importantly, very few studies have included the adult children of lesbigay parents. Most studies are of pre-adolescent or young adolescent children, although some outcomes of interest (such as sexual orientation) may not occur until late adolescence or adulthood. Finally, no study has examined the custody preferences of the children of divorced lesbigay parents.
C. The Importance of "Getting It Right"
Many of the methodological limitations in the existing studies are not due to the negligence of the researchers, but rather, to the difficulty in recruiting participants for these kinds of studies. "[I]t is still not safe for lesbians and gay men to be publicly 'out' about their sexuality, so a representative sample of lesbian and gay parents and their children probably constitutes an unattainable goal at present." (80) One common criticism is that the studies set out to prove a scientific impossibility--the "null hypothesis." (81) As Professor Williams explains, "[i]t is impossible for science to prove a negative.... It is, in principle, inadvisable to base important decisions on a body of nonaffects. Absent findings do not aggregate." (82) It is a fundamental principle of statistical inference that unless one samples the entire population of interest (e.g., all children of lesbigay parents versus all children of heterosexual parents), a study cannot affirm the null hypothesis. Scientific studies are designed to detect differences. Yet, adherence to this principle would mean that research could never be used to support policies favoring lesbigay parenting because any "no difference" findings would be disregarded. Although one can never prove the null hypothesis, an adequate number of methodologically sound studies finding no differences should be sufficient to permit an inference--if only tentatively--that the null hypothesis is likely correct.
But when considering fundamental changes in family law policies that may affect the welfare of children for generations to come, the importance of "getting it right" argues for setting a fairly demanding standard when relying on lesbigay parenting research in guiding public policy. Studies should be designed so as to maximize the chances of detecting possible differences in outcomes between children raised by lesbigay versus heterosexual parents. (83) "How sure we need to be before we accept a hypothesis will depend on how serious a mistake it would be" if we are wrong. (84) In this regard, researchers as well as those making policy decisions must consider the ethical consequences of making a "type II error" (i.e., accepting the null hypothesis when it is false).
At a minimum, researchers must be fully candid about the differences they do find. Commentators note that some studies appear to report findings inaccurately or incompletely, (85) leading some to question the biases or political motivations of the researchers. (86) Seemingly some researchers, "disregard[ed] their own results" (87) when they claimed that parents' sexual orientation does not influence children's sexual orientation. For example, Professors Rekers and Kilgus notes that Green and colleagues "stated in the abstract of their article, [that] no significant differences were found between the two types of households for boys' ... but this contradicts the [many differences] reported in the body of the article." (88) Similarly, Tasker and Golombok concluded that lesbigay parents are no more likely to have gay sons or lesbian daughters than are heterosexual parents, (89) yet their study found that "the daughters of lesbians were more likely to (a) be open to a gay lifestyle, (b) have engaged in same-sex sexual activity if they had experienced same-sex attraction, and (c) that 20% of the lesbian's children had considered same-sex sexual relationships even though they had never experienced same-sex sexual attraction." (90) Professors Rekers and Kilgus also note that:
Tasker and Golombok ... [concluded]: 'The commonly held assumption that lesbian mothers will have lesbian daughters and gay sons was not supported by the findings.' But this is an illegitimate conclusion from their study.... The finding of 12% active homosexual adult children among daughters of homosexuals in this methodologically flawed exploratory study is at least three times the base rate of homosexuality in the adult female population ... (91)
In another example, Tasker and Golombok concluded from their comparative study of twenty-five children of lesbian mothers and twenty-one children of heterosexual mothers that the children of lesbian mothers "were no more likely than their counterparts from heterosexual single-parent families to experience peer stigma [and teasing] during adolescence." (92) Although a technically accurate description of the study findings, the data show that thirty-six percent of the children of lesbian mothers experienced teasing as compared to only fourteen percent of the children of single heterosexual mothers. (93) It is likely the difference is not statistically significant merely because of the small sample size. Had the same findings been obtained with a larger sample, they likely would have been statistically significant, requiring the conclusion that children of lesbian mothers are indeed more likely to be teased. Moreover, even with the small sample size, the study did find a statistical trend indicating that the children of lesbian mothers were more likely to have been teased about their own sexuality. (94)
At the same time, allegations that researchers are biased in interpreting the literature to favor lesbigay parenting are overstated. For example, Professor Schumm points out that "most reviewers ... frequently overlooked an interesting article by Sotirios Sarantakos which, in contrast to most other research, used a relatively large sample of families. However, that article, though a methodological improvement over much of the other research, happened to find several adverse outcomes associated with gay parenting. It seems too convenient for such an important article to have been completely overlooked by virtually all of those who have reviewed the literature so thoroughly." (95) The Sarantakos study, however, was published in an obscure Australian journal that is not indexed in most of the American on-line databases. Although the largely qualitative study is a methodological improvement in having a larger sample size (116 homosexual couples and 58 heterosexual couples), it is methodologically weaker insofar as the findings are based primarily on interviews with teachers who were not blind as to whether children came from heterosexual or homosexual households.
D. Three Recent Studies
Three recent studies rest on a much sounder methodological foundation than previous research and therefore merit a detailed discussion. The sample sizes in these studies, while somewhat larger than those of previous studies, are also relatively small. However, they drew their samples from large community studies in which participants were recruited randomly and not on the basis of sexual orientation, or from sperm-bank clients, which eliminated any confounding effects of a parent's sexual orientation status with those of divorce. These three studies also found that lesbigay parenting has no negative psychological effects on children
A 2004 study by Wainright and colleagues compared the psychosocial adjustment and school outcomes among twelve- to eighteen-year-old children of forty-four same-sex couples and an equal number of heterosexual couples. (96) Their data were obtained from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (a large random sample of adolescents). The study included adolescents (rather than young children) who were drawn from a randomly selected national sample, and the lesbigay and heterosexual parents were matched on relevant characteristics (e.g., child's age and gender; parent's age, income, ethnicity, and educational level). (97) The study found no differences in children's levels of depression, anxiety, or self-esteem as a function of family type. There also were no differences in parental warmth, care from adults and peers, children's autonomy, or children's integration into their neighborhoods, nor were there any differences in the children's GPA or difficulties experienced at school. Adolescents in lesbigay households, however, were more connected to their school than those living in heterosexual households. (98)
A 2003 study by Professor Golombok and colleagues, which used mostly random sampling techniques to draw from a large community study of 14,000 mothers and children in the United Kingdom, compared thirty-nine single-parent lesbian families, sixty single-parent heterosexual mother-families, and seventy-four two-parent hetero-sexual families. (99) The average age of the children was seven. The study used a number of standard and reliable measures of parenting quality (warmth, conflict, supervision, and play with child); mothers' psychological health (depression, anxiety); children's gender role behavior, and children's socioemotional development (measures of self-esteem, peer relations, hyperactivity, emotional symptoms, conduct problems, and prosocial behavior). These measures were variously assessed via interviews with children, parents, and teachers. (100) Although a number of differences were found between single-parent and two-parent families that generally favored the two-parent families, only several were found as a function of maternal sexual orientation and these differences favored the lesbian families. (101)
Finally in a 1998 study, Chan and colleagues generally found no differences in the family relations and psychosocial adjustment of the children of fifty-five families headed by lesbians as compared to twenty-five families headed by heterosexual parents. (102) The average age of the children was seven and all had been conceived through the same California sperm bank. No demographic differences between those who agreed to participate in the study and the larger population of families who used the sperm bank were found. (103) The study utilized parent and teacher ratings of children's behavioral adjustment and sampled systematically from a known larger population (sperm bank clients). (104) There were, however, "differences between lesbian and heterosexual families in the study that favored the lesbian families," (105) since the lesbians tended to be older and to have higher income levels. (106)
II. DOES SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ON LESBIGAY PARENTING PROVIDE A BASIS FOR PROHIBITING LESBIGAY MARRIAGE OR ADOPTION?
The extant research currently permits the conclusion that lesbigay parenting does not psychologically harm children. A number of studies, including the three recent studies discussed above, have examined whether children raised by lesbigay parents are more likely to have mental health or psychosocial adjustment problems. Despite the methodological limitations inherent in many of these studies...
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