Children Of Same-Sex Parents Healthier And More Adjusted Than Their Peers, Says New Study

Inside the imaginary bubble of right-wing rhetoric, there are countless great reasons why gay couples should never be allowed to have kids.

First and foremost, just think of the children — those poor innocent souls, irreparably damaged by the moral and societal degradation of their parents’ same-sex sin, their successful futures almost certainly compromised.

Right-wing loonies love this line of logic. Reverend Franklin Graham suggested kids are better off in orphanages than with gay parents, as governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney blocked birth certificates to gay parents, and the always terrifying Family Research Council even justified kidnapping children of gay parents.

All of this in the name of putting children’s interests first.

Well, rhetoric can only get you so far, and luckily for us there are actual gay families proving these guys wrong every day.

And now this: the largest study to date on children with gay parents found them doing just as well if not better than their peers.

500 children from over 300 gay couples in Australia were subjected to a series of standardized measures to gauge health and well being in relation to the general population, and the results were overwhelmingly positive.

“We found that children from same-sex families scored, on average, 6 percent better on two key measures, general health and family cohesion, even when controlling for a number sociodemographic factors such as parent education and household income,” wrote lead researcher Simon Crouch. “But on most health measures, including emotional behaviour and physical functioning, there was no difference when compared with children from the general population.”

One advantage researches suggest is gay parents’ likelihood to stray from traditional gender role stereotypes, fostering a “more harmonious family unit and therefore feeding on to better health and well being.”

It’s just one more drop in the fact bucket to extinguish the sparks of nonsense the right loves to ignite their base with (and certainly not the first time a study has found gays to be great parents), but an important one nonetheless.

And really, after seeing these pictures of two gay dads meeting their newborn for the first time, its impossible not to feel the love.

h/t: Salon