Maggie Gallagher's War on Adoptive Parents

A new government study is out, and it has NOM president Maggie Gallagher singing a happy song.  In her Thursday blog post she writes:

Question: What kind of family structure best protects children from child abuse?

Answer: Married biological parents. (see page 5-25).

All the other family structures studied (which does not include same-sex parent families probably because these are such a small part of the population)…

Wait, hold on, back up a second.  What was that last bit?

All the other family structures studied (which does not include same-sex parent families…

You know where she’s going:  Gay families bad! But how on earth can she get there with a study that ignored gay families?  She sure tries:

Perhaps alone of all the family structures science has ever studied, children living with same-sex couples do just as well as children in intact married families…But does this study, which is one of hundreds with similar results favoring the natural family give [Prop 8 attorneys] Ted Olson and David Boies pause late at night as they assert the scientific irrationality of respect for the natural family at all I wonder?  Ted and David, I’m wondering: not even a little bit?

Ah.  This is typical Maggie and typical NOM.  Criticize same-sex parenting based on studies that have nothing to do with same-sex parenting.  Do this even though other studies have directly examined same-sex parenting.  In fact, ignore those other studies entirely.  Why?  Because they make it hard to diss families headed by gay or lesbian couples — and after all, that’s the real purpose of NOM.

Let’s see if we can do better.  Look at the study that has Maggie so excited.  It compares 6 type of family structure:

1. living with two married biological parents
2. living with other married parents (not both biological but both having a legal parental relationship to the child)
3. living with two unmarried parents (biological or other)
4. living with one parent who had an unmarried partner (not the child’s parent) in the household
5. living with one parent who had no partner in the household
6. living with no parent

The first structure indeed shows the lowest rates of abuse.  But look at structure 2.  It covers a lot of ground.  In fact, it lumps all the examples below into one big group:

• A man who marries a woman with a 13-year-old daughter but does not adopt the daughter (the step-parent scenario)
• A married couple that adopts an infant or child who is not biologically related to either parent (quite common among straight couples, and also among gay relationships in marriage equality states)
• A married couple with one partner as the biological parent and the other adopting the child at birth (also common in gay relationships)

Does that matter?  Yes.  Research indicates that children are at much greater risk from stepparents than from adoptive parents.  That big gap in risk means it’s a tremendous mistake to group all three of our examples into the same category when studying abuse.  So what does this study tell us about married biological parents compared to married parents who adopt the child at birth?  Nothing.  Nothing at all.

Maggie doesn’t seem to have noticed this.  She hasn’t looked at the study with a critical eye.  Like so many of our opponents, she’s seizing on whatever supports her animus against gay and lesbian families (even if she has twist and turn her logic to do so).  And she’s ignoring research that contradicts her bias.

In fact, you’ll notice that Maggie isn’t just denigrating gay and lesbian families.  She’s mounting an argument that insults all adoptive parents, even the straight ones.  It’s not the first time, either.  She’s gone on TV over and over to say that “traditional” marriage with biological parents is the only structure that allows children to “love and be loved by their own mother and father.”  Truly?  I’d love to see her look an adoptive mother in the eye and say she’s not her child’s “own mother.”  I have an adopted sibling, and I’d have paid money to watch her pull that crap with my Mom.  Maggie, your sad and sweet demeanor wouldn’t have gotten you out of that corner.

Still, if slandering adoptive parents is what Maggie has to do to keep gays in their place, that’s what she’ll do.

So what’s the basic message here?  It’s simple:

When our opponents talk about “research” saying same-sex parents aren’t as good as married biological parents…

…demand to know if their research actually looked at same-sex parents.

It almost certainly hasn’t.  Because the preponderance of that research is on our side.