For the past decade, a cadre of social scientists has claimed that kids raised by homosexuals show “no differences” from kids raised by opposite-sex couples.
Now, a large national study of the well-being of young adults reared in different types of families challenges this widely circulated “no differences” thesis.
In this month’s Social Science Research, University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus reports that Americans ages 18 to 39 who grew up in families where either parent had a same-sex romance fared significantly worse on 25 of 40 measures. They were three and a half times likelier to be unemployed and almost four times likelier to be on public assistance than children raised in biological, intact mom-and-dad marriages. Children reared by same-sex-wooing adults were also more likely to have been arrested, to have pled guilty to a minor criminal offense, to smoke marijuana, and to have thought about suicide during the previous year.
Regnerus’s “New Family Structures Study,” which screened more than 15,000 Americans and interviewed nearly 3,000, radically challenges the previous scientific consensus.
