April
12, 2002, 10:00 a.m. Another
Divorce?
The
gay-adoption movement has a familiar ring.
ay
adoption received a huge boost when Rosie O'Donnell, recently exited from
the closet, highlighted her own struggle to adopt her foster daughter.
She lives in Florida, where laws prohibit homosexuals from adopting. (Mississippi
and Utah are the only other states that do.)
A string of sometimes
heartbreaking features on ABC's Primetime Live focused on this
new issue, as did stories in O'Donnell's own magazine, Rosie. The
tone of the features was compassionate — if you are a compassionate
American, the reasoning goes, you will not question the desire for a homosexual
mother to adopt.
But the truth is,
there's still a long learning curve ahead. And that curve may lead us
to regions that are not quite so warm and fuzzy.
We "may have
already repeated the mistake we made concerning divorce," warns Robert
Lerner, a social-science researcher and coauthor of a book on same-sex
parenting, in an interview
with NRO.
Lerner sees a distinct
link between the lack of data at the front-end of the divorce movement
and the information deficit that now surrounds gay adoption. Lerner cautions,
When the divorce
laws were liberalized (beginning during the late '60s early '70s and
extending through the next decade or so), it was claimed that scientific
research showed that the children would not be harmed and therefore
a high divorce rate would not be a problem but would free adults to
self-actualize.
When the findings
from technically proficient studies began to appear, however, it appeared
that the earlier results, which were in fact very sketchy, were totally
wrong. Divorce can and does cause a good deal of harm for children caught
up in it. Although this finding is now widely accepted, the new conventional
wisdom does not help the many children who suffered because their parents
were told that divorce was perfectly okay. Damage occurred that was
not necessary and would not have occurred except for the acceptance
of wishful thinking disguised as social-science evidence. In fact, the
issue had never been properly studied, especially when the earlier guesstimates
and summaries are compared with today's rigorous studies. If we are
not careful, the same results are likely to ensue.
So far, the most-cited
studies on gay adoption are filled with procedural flaws, as Lerner points
out extensively in his coauthored book, No
Basis: What the Studies Don't Tell Us About Same Sex Parenting
.
"The available research is so poor," says Lerner, "that
it would be dangerous to draw any conclusions from it."
Despite the rush
to compassion on the issue of gay adoption, there are enough concerns
about instability, sexual-orientation confusion, and emotional problems
to at least strongly advise caution. Lerner notes, "If the
first rule of public policy is to do no harm, then rushing in without
any real knowledge is foolhardy."
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ay
adoption received a huge boost when Rosie O'Donnell, recently exited from
the closet, highlighted her own struggle to adopt her foster daughter.
She lives in Florida, where laws prohibit homosexuals from adopting. (Mississippi
and Utah are the only other states that do.)
