Regnerus Discredited Again: Tough Transitions, Not Gay or Lesbian Parents, Are the Problem

Sociologist Mark Regnerus’ study of gay and lesbian parents has been thoroughly discredited, but here’s a nice new piece of empirical evidence against it.

Michael J. Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford University, has just published “Revisiting the Data from the New Family Structure Study: Taking Family Instability into Account,” and claims it is “the first empirical support for the argument by early critics … that Regnerus’s analysis was flawed by his failure to control for childhood family instability.” (Other research has looked at different errors in Regnerus’ work, such as his misclassification of respondents.)

Rosenfeld uses the same data that Regnerus used, from the New Family Structure Study (NFSS), but introduces “family transitions” (such as parental divorce or a change in child custody) as a control—a control that Regnerus did not use.

Rosenfeld shows, then, that having gay or lesbian parents and/or single mothers is “weakly or not at all associated with negative adult outcomes after childhood family transitions are taken into account.”

Where Regnerus erred, he says, was in not noting that many single mothers and gay and lesbian parents were formerly part of a different-sex breakup. It is that breakup, rather than the fact of having a queer and/or single parent, that has the negative impact on kids. Other academics have “Childhood family transitions are associated with negative children’s outcomes across every outcome type [such as lower educational achievement, higher unemployment, greater substance abuse, and greater mental health issues] into adulthood.”

But wait. What are we to make of Rosenfeld’s finding that “Adults who ever lived with same-sex couple parents experienced an average of 6.79 family transitions, while adults who never lived with same-sex couple parents experienced 1.84 childhood family transitions, a difference of almost five transitions between the two groups.” Are same-sex parents inherently more unstable?

No, says Rosenfeld. “The single largest contributor to the family transitions gap between children raised by same-sex couples and children not raised by same-sex couples is the difference in transitions resulting from a biological parent losing custody.” Add to that the fact that, not surprisingly (but disappointingly), “the chance of losing custody in any given year was less than one percent for mothers partnered with men (including the biological father of the child), and more than 11 percent for mothers partnered with women.” While the NFSS does not help explain why this is, Rosenfeld notes that “literature on family law documents a strong bias against gay and lesbian parents in judicial custody decisions in the past.”

Proving once again, of course, that equality benefits everyone, children included.