And She's No Accident!!
This event has two important revelations:
First:
for the first time since I've covered the machinations of FOX News, it
has managed to get something from the left right (got that?). OK, I'll
start again: FOX News has dared to put a gay-positive piece (from
Reuters) in its daily net news! Yes. OMG! And it didn't edit the headline.
Which brings us to the second (and more important) revelation : Children of Lesbian Couples Do Well in School, Life. Oh, some of the other MSM picked it up, (TIME/CNN did a good piece, but the headline said Study: Children of Lesbians MAY Do Better Than Their Peers), but Fox News stated it as a straight news piece.
The Christian
Right is reeling from the shock at both the results of the study and
the fact that their biggest voice dared to publish those "inspired by
Satan" results. Do they have enough time to launch a counter-attack? Of
course, you can bet that members of the Christian Right community are
hatching plans to thwart reporting in as many MSM venues as possible.
They've already
attacked co-researcher Nanette Gartrelle as a lesbian and therefore
biased. But they have another Elena Kagan on their hands, in a sense
because, like Kagan, Gartrelle and her co-author, Henny Bos have
flawless academic careers: (Gartrelle)
MD: Center of Excellence in Women's Health, University of California,
San Francisco, San Francisco, California and JD: Williams Institute,
UCLA School of Law, Los Angeles, California, (Bos) Graduate School of
Pedagogical and Educational Sciences, Faculty of Social and Behavioral
Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Wendy Wright of Concerned Women of America was the first to fire a shot at the study:
"You have to be a little suspicious of any study that says children being raised by same-sex couples do better or have superior outcomes to children raised with a mother and father," she said. "It just defies common sense and reality."
But
"Common Sense and Reality" in this case, are both on the side of a
lesbian's children: who but a person who has experienced
discrimination is fit to raise children who might be discriminated
against? In a sense, Wright is also condemning the journal Pediatrics, a trusted judge of such findings. Like other medical journals, Pediatrics
subjects a rigorous investigation to each and every study it publishes.
Is such a criticism rational? Bryan Fischer of the radical Right
American Family Association is, at this writing, podcasting a tirade against the study, citing past (discredited) studies by the mouthful.
The study, labeled US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Psychological Adjustment of 17-Year-Old Adolescents, was conducted over 17 years with 78 sets of lesbian parents who underwent in vitro fertilization and resulted in these findings:
Results According to their mothers' reports, the 17-year-old daughters and sons of lesbian mothers were rated significantly higher in social, school/academic, and total competence and significantly lower in social problems, rule-breaking, aggressive, and externalizing problem behavior than their age-matched counterparts in Achenbach's normative sample of American youth. Within the lesbian family sample, no Child Behavior Checklist differences were found among adolescent offspring who were conceived by known, as-yet-unknown, and permanently unknown donors or between offspring whose mothers were still together and offspring whose mothers had separated.
Conclusions Adolescents who have been reared in lesbian-mother families since birth demonstrate healthy psychological adjustment. These findings have implications for the clinical care of adolescents and for pediatricians who are consulted on matters that pertain to same-sex parenting.
None of the children, by the way, were home-schooled. The study also points to the fact that lesbian parents are more attentive to the needs of the children which may account for their having less behavioral problems.
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