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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."

It's advice worth taking this time around.

Go to the NRO Q&A with Robert Lerner.