You remember last July, when the media gushed about an Australian study which showed children of gay parents were healthier and happier than children of hetero parents? It was all over the internet and newspapers, from NBC [1] to CBS [2] to The Washington Post [3], The Huffington Post [4], and Salon [5] all hyping it.
But what the media neglected to report was the huge holes in the study. As the FRC’s Tony Perkins pointed out [6], the study’s biggest flaw was that it studied single, “same-sex attracted” moms or dads, not exclusively same-sex couples. That small, inconvenient fact was ignored. So was the fact that the data sample was gathered from an ad put out in gay media by researchers and answers were self-reported by the gay parents.
Now a new larger-scale and more scientific study in the U.S. has been published with contrary results, and all we get from the media is embarrassed silence.
The study titled "Emotional Problems among Children with Same-Sex Parents: Difference by Definition [7]," was conducted by sociologist and priest Donald Sullins of the Catholic University of America and published in “The British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioral Science” this month.
Sullins set out to discover whether the Australian study’s findings could be replicated using more reliable methodology. So he took a larger representative sample from the general population: 207,007 children, including 512 with same-sex parents, from the U.S. National Health Interview Survey.
The results of the study were not good for children of same-sex parents:
Eight of 12 psychometric measures used in the study showed that children with same-sex parents experienced more distress than children of opposite-sex parents. The results were "clear, statistically significant," and "of substantial magnitude," after controlling for age, sex, race, education and income. For four of the measures of emotional and behavioral problems, children raised by same-sex parents were at least twice as likely to experience difficulties compared to children raised by opposite-sex parents.
While liberals might bring up the notion that kids of gay parents would be bullied, thus having lower emotional health scores, the study did not support this idea. In fact, these children were not more likely to be get picked on or bullied, they were slightly less likely to be picked on then children of opposite-sex parents (though that difference was within the margin of error.)
It will be interesting to see what the media says about this study, but it’s likely to be unreported, since it doesn’t support the gay agenda.
[H/T: Christian Post [8]/The Blaze [9]]
— Kristine Marsh is Staff Writer for MRC Culture at the Media Research Center. Follow Kristine Marsh on Twitter. [10]