AAP says Gay Marriage good for kids, but is it really?

The American Academy of Pediatrics made news this week by coming out in support of Gay Marriage, stating that it is fine for children to grow up in a home with a same sex couples. Their reasoning? "'On the basis of a review of extensive scientific literature.'" In other words, they found "scientific" literature that backed up their already formed belief and used that as proof that their belief is right. This is what passes for "science" nowadays.

But the "literature" they based their outcome on only took into account things like small children not caring who gives them food, as long as someone gives them food. And that seems to be pretty much common sense. But what about older children; teenagers; young adults? Those people still considered "children" yet developing adult tendencies based on their lifestyle. Did anyone actually bother to question adults who became fully grown as children of two same sex parents? Well I'm glad you asked, because someone did!

While most studies of children's well being inside same sex households focuses on young children, there are studies that have focused on the now adult children raised by same sex couples. And those studies conclude that:

"Taken together, the findings of the NFSS disprove the claim that there are no differences between children raised by parents who have same-sex relationships and children raised in intact, biological, married families when it comes to the social, emotional, and relational outcomes of their children...to be raised in an intact biological family presents clear advantages for children over other forms of parenting. In particular, the NFSS provides evidence that previous generations of social scientists were unable to gather: that children from intact, biological families also out-perform peers who were raised in homes of a parent who had same-sex relationships. Therefore, these two new studies reaffirm—and strengthen—the conviction that the gold standard for raising children is still the intact, biological family."

But of course, I could be doing exactly what I accused the AAP of doing: choosing a study purely because it validates my belief. Well, don't take my word that this study (actually two studies) is legit. Take Robert Oscar Lopez's. Mr. Lopez was raised by a lesbian couple, so he has firsthand knowledge of what it's like to be raised in a homosexual household.

Mr. Lopez described his childhood like this:

"To most outside observers, I was a well-raised, high-achieving child, finishing high school with straight A's.

Inside, however, I was confused. When your home life is so drastically different from everyone around you, in a fundamental way striking at basic physical relations, you grow up weird. I have no mental health disorders or biological conditions. I just grew up in a house so unusual that I was destined to exist as a social outcast.

My peers learned all the unwritten rules of decorum and body language in their homes; they understood what was appropriate to say in certain settings and what wasn’t; they learned both traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine social mechanisms.

Even if my peers’ parents were divorced, and many of them were, they still grew up seeing male and female social models. They learned, typically, how to be bold and unflinching from male figures and how to write thank-you cards and be sensitive from female figures. These are stereotypes, of course, but stereotypes come in handy when you inevitably leave the safety of your lesbian mom’s trailer and have to work and survive in a world where everybody thinks in stereotypical terms, even gays."

Mr. Lopez goes on to explain how he (along with the majority of children raised by homosexual couples) considered himself to be bisexual...yet in the gay community bisexuals are met with "a mixture of disgust and envy" and are even seen by some as a threat to the "gay narrative" since they can choose to be gay or straight. And so the children of gay couples grow up alienated and shunned from both the straight and gay communities...in essence making them total outcasts.

Mr. Lopez says that after his mother died he dropped out of college (where the LGBT community told him that he was lying by saying he was bisexual instead of gay) and became involved in the underground gay scene where he says "terrible things" happened to him.

Mr. Lopez's view of the aforementioned studies, which surely holds more weight than my own, is summed up like this: "Offered a chance to provide frank responses with the hindsight of adulthood, they [children raised by homosexual couples] gave reports unfavorable to the gay marriage equality agenda. Yet the results are backed up by an important thing in life called common sense: Growing up different from other people is difficult and the difficulties raise the risk that children will develop maladjustments or self-medicate with alcohol and other dangerous behaviors."

Mr. Lopez believes these studies are important for the welfare of children being raised in homosexual households, as do I. Yet he also acknowledges that the "gay movement" is doing all it can to suppress such findings. And so today we hear about the AAP and any number of other groups coming out in support of gay marriage based on their own findings, but we never hear about the studies like these that form a different conclusion.

We say we all care about the safety of our children...but when it comes to gay marriage, our society seems to choose political correctness over sincere research into how it may actually affect them in the long term. I admit that true scientific research may indeed show that being raised by a gay couple doesn't affect kids any differently...but at this point we seem very far from true and honest research. Without an open discussion with scientific findings from both sides, we never will really know if we are condemning certain children to a life of misery. And isn't determining that far more important than personal beliefs or political correctness?