Return prejudice to closet when it comes to same-sex marriage and parenting

I recently learned some very confronting, horrible things about Zoe’s children’s prospects as adults compared with those of the average child. Zoe’s children are likely to have low educational attainment, they will feel less safe and secure, and they’re much likelier to be unemployed and end up as welfare recipients.

It gets worse: they’re likelier to experience depression, report a “negative impact” from their original family, smoke marijuana and be arrested more often. To complete this glum picture of the adulthood awaiting them, they’re likelier to be forced to have sex and, worst of all, 10 times likelier to be sexually touched by a parent or care giver.

How could the children of a mother so determined to rear them to become upstanding citizens have such bleak prospects, far worse than those of my own child?

The reason was spelled out in these pages last Saturday by Christopher Pearson, citing research by sociologist and author Mark Regnerus that was published last year in Social Science Research and a tandem paper by human ecology associate professor Loren Marks. Zoe’s children face this troubled life because Zoe is gay.

Pearson argued that the findings raised the question whether Australians wanted gay people to be granted the right to marry. Given the research concluded that the children of gay couples were up to four times likelier to identify as something other than heterosexual, allowing gay marriage would open the way for an increase in the proportion of the population whose primary attraction was to people of their own sex.

By extension, Pearson’s argument is this would lead to an increase in the proportion of the population with the multitude of problems outlined above.

Pearson called for debate about the ways in which same-sex couples’ parenting “often compromises children’s development and leads to sub-optimal outcomes” – a claim at odds with the findings of the Australian Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association.

With one sentence, Pearson labelled an entire demographic segment of the parent population as being more than likely to consign their children to a lifetime of delinquency and personal problems because of their sexuality.

Sadly, such parents exist – be they heterosexual, homosexual, high-income earners, low-income earners, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, non-religious, in their 20s, 30s, 40s or 50s. But looking for a demographic cause for troubled children goes beyond the far simpler explanations: their parents’ character, skill in relating to children and own upbringing.

When considering the findings of the Regnerus piece, it is worth noting that it received funding from the Witherspoon Institute, an American conservative think tank that is openly opposed to same-sex marriage, and Witherspoon’s director of the Program on Marriage, Family and Democracy was on the Social Science Research peer review board that fast-tracked its assessment of Regnerus’s paper.

Furthermore, Regnerus’s colleague at the University of Texas, sociology professor Debra Umberson wrote a scathing critique of his work in the Huffington Post.

“As a family sociologist at the University of Texas, I am disturbed by his irresponsible and reckless representation of social science research, and furious that he is besmirching my university to lend credibility to his ‘findings’,” Umberson wrote.

One of Umberson’s criticisms centred on Regnerus’s sampling methods, which she said drew on children who had experienced hardship for reasons unrelated to the sexual orientation of their parents.

Regnerus rejected suggestions there were problems with his methodology and said his paper’s findings highlighted different outcomes for children from different family structures but did not make any claims about what caused them.

Pearson did not share Regnerus’s reluctance to make a claim about causation and used it as an argument in the debate about same-sex marriage that has run throughout the current parliament. A claim such as Pearson’s – putting aside its face-value insult to same-sex parents devoted to raising their children – has a powerful resonance with people unsettled by, some even fearful of, those who are different from them.

The push for same-sex marriage has met some frightening responses, most recently in France, where rioters took to the streets denouncing parliament’s passage of legislation to allow gay people to marry as a threat to civilisation. France’s move to become the 13th country to support same-sex marriage even prompted far-right author Dominique Venner to commit a very public suicide at the altar of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral in protest.

In the same pages as Pearson, Angela Shanahan argued that Kevin Rudd’s recent shift to backing same-sex marriage meant he had joined proponents of a cause that defied natural order – a movement that was akin to trying to change gravity. Only men and women can produce children, so we have legal marriage to protect that pairing. Shanahan further suggests there is “no question of inequality” around marriage, yet Zoe is unable to say she is married to the woman she loves in the same way I can.

The push for same-sex marriage in Australia has not raised the same vitriol as it has in France and Britain, and, for much of middle Australia, it fails to register as a high-priority issue when cost-of-living pressures dominate their lives. But it is worth considering this question: why would you deny happiness to people if there are no adverse societal consequences? Pearson claims that there are adverse consequences; his claim deserves sceptical scrutiny.

David Tanner is the night editor of The Australian.