A British family-court magistrate who says he was compelled to resign because his Christian convictions do not allow him to comply with the Sexual Orientation Regulations (SORs) has taken the Lord Chancellor to court.  An Employment Tribunal considering the case has received testimony from Professor of Medicine Dr Dean Byrd regarding the state of scientific research on same-sex parenting.  Here’s some of what he had to say.

Advocacy groups argue that there are no differences between children raised by same-sex and those raised by opposite-sex parents.  The studies on same-sex parenting are quite limited and quite limiting.  They are basically restricted to children who were conceived in a heterosexual relationship whose mothers later divorced and self-identified as lesbians.  It is these children who were compared to divorced, heterosexual, mother-headed families. A better comparison would have been with children in intact families because the research is clear that children in single parent families are at risk for a variety of difficulties including juvenile criminal offenses, mental illness and poverty.  The logical conclusion is that children from both of these family forms are at risk for a number of problems.

Studies of children raised by male couples are virtually non-existent.  The few available studies are either anecdotal in nature or so plagued by methodological flaws as to make them simply invalid from a scientific perspective.
. . .
The Stacey and Biblarz (2001) meta-analysis repudiated over 20 years of research which claimed to show no difference between children raised by homosexual parents and those raised by heterosexual parents.   This research clearly demonstrated that lesbian mothers had a feminizing effect on their sons and a masculinizing effect on their daughters. Boys raised by lesbian mothers behaved in less traditionally masculine ways, and girls, particularly “adolescent and young girls raised by lesbian mothers, appear to have been more sexually adventurous and less chaste.”  [footnotes omitted]

Dr Byrd discusses several scientific studies of children raised by same-sex parents and concludes that the research conducted thus far indicates that children raised by homosexual couples tend to fare no better than children raised by divorced heterosexual parents.

More studies are required but, in the meantime, the available evidence speaks against allowing homosexual couples to become adoptive parents.

The full text of Dr Byrd's testimony can be downloaded here as a Word document.

h/t: Anglican Mainstream

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