No, children of same-sex parents do not have lower graduation rates.

A new Canadian study reportedly found that children of same-sex parents have a lower graduation rate than opposite sex married families. It is currently doing the rounds on your usual anti-gay sites as proof that homosexuals are unable to raise children, are unnatural, the spawn of Satan, harbingers of death etc.

The study states that “children living with gay and lesbian families in 2006 were about 65% as likely to graduate compared to children living in opposite sex marriage families”. But a quick look at the data provided shows that this simply isn’t the case. The author of the study, Douglas W. Allen, makes a rather strange and glaringly obvious flaw: he includes children who are still in high school awaiting graduation. Allen analyses the 2006 Canadian census and focuses on 17-22 year olds. However, many 17-18 year olds would still be in High School so Allen will be misreporting them as not graduating instead of awaiting graduation. Such a flaw isn’t too problematic unless the average age of one group of parents is lower than the others, because if this is the case then the group with the lower average age will have a lower graduation rate because more of their children will still be awaiting graduation. So let’s see what affect this flaw has upon the results:

POPULATION AGE AVERAGE GRADUATION RATES

Opposite sex married: 19.26 Opposite sex married: .72

Gay parents: 18.96 Gay parents: .60

Opposite sex common law: 18.91 Opposite sex common law: .59

Lesbian parents: 18.79 Lesbian parents: .52

Yep, that’s right, it aligns perfectly. The lower the average age of the sample groups then the lower the graduation rate because many are still in school. So what Allen has cleverly discovered, I hope you are sitting down for this, is that the more children are still attending High School, the less likely they are to have graduated. Truly ground breaking stuff.