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Queers as Folk
posted on June 12, 2012Examining the effects of gay parenting, the New Family Structures Study (NFSS) challenges a decade long trend of studies that suggest gay parents, when compared to straight parents, have “no differences.” At Slate, Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin and the study’s lead author, writes that children of same-sex parents were more likely to report “being unemployed, less healthy, more depressed, more likely to have cheated on a spouse or partner, smoke more pot, had trouble with the law.” Also at Slate, William Saletan rebuts the findings, noting the sample focused on children whose parents did not stay together. (He also points out that the study was funded by two conservative organizations, the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation.) “In short, these people aren’t the products of same-sex households,” Saletan notes. “They’re the products of broken homes.” He continues: “What the study shows, then, is that kids from broken homes headed by gay people develop the same problems as kids from broken homes headed by straight people.”