"In fact, only a small proportion of its sample spent more than a few years living in a household headed by a same-sex couple," says Nathaniel Frank.

"Indeed, the study acknowledges that what it's really comparing with heterosexual families is not families headed by a same-sex couple but households in which parents broke up. 'A failed heterosexual union,'" he says.

Franks says it is not news to conclude "that when families endure a shattering separation, it is likely to shatter the lives of those in them."

"The trouble is that no scholarly research, including the Regnerus paper, has ever compared children of stable same-sex couples to children of stable different-sex couples, in part because an adequate sample size is hard to come by, " he says.

Read Nathaniel Frank's Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times

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Dr Nathaniel Franks is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an adjunct professor of history at New York University.

"The empirical claim that no notable differences exist must go," Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said in his study in Social Science Research.

Using a new, "gold standard" data set of nearly 3,000 randomly selected American young adults, Mr. Regnerus looked at their lives on 40 measures of social, emotional and relationship outcomes.

He found that, when compared with adults raised in married, mother-father families, adults raised by lesbian mothers had negative outcomes in 24 of 40 categories, while adults raised by gay fathers had negative outcomes in 19 categories.

Findings such as these do not support claims that there are "no differences" between gay parenting and heterosexual, married parents, said Mr. Regnerus, who helped develop the New Family Structures Study at the university.

Instead, "children appear most apt to succeed well as adults when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father, and especially when the parents remain married to the present day," he wrote.

Mr. Regnerus‘ study of 2,988 persons ages 18 to 39 — including 175 adults raised by lesbian mothers and 73 adults raised by gay fathers — marks the first research from the new dataset, which initially included some 15,000 persons.

The second study, also in Social Science Research, takes a critical look at the basis of an oft-cited American Psychological Association (APA) report on gay parenting.

The APA brief says, "Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents," said Loren Marks, associate professor at the School of Human Ecology at Louisiana State University.

However, after looking at the 59 studies that undergird this assertion, "the jury is still out," Mr. Marks said. "The lack of high-quality data leaves the most significant questions [about gay parenting] unaddressed and unanswered." Read more

Sources

• The Washington Times
• Image: Bigger Families