Science Reconfirms Two-Parent Home is Better for Children than Same-Sex Options

“It is dangerous to be right when everyone else wants so badly to be wrong.”

The phrase certainly applies to anyone who expresses traditional sexual values in an American university.

A case in point is Dr. Mark Regnerus, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2012, Dr. Regnerus published the “New Family Structures Study“ (NFSS). The study compared the effects of being raised in homes in which the parental figures were two same-sex partners to those in homes in which the parental relationship was that of intact two-parent married heterosexuals.

Poorly Done Studies

In researching his study, Dr. Regnerus dared to point out that most studies were based on very small samples. He also noticed that many of their participants were “convenience samples,” who could be easily contacted and cared about the survey’s outcome.

Order Today: Return to Order: From a Frenzied Economy to an Organic Christian Society—Where We’ve Been, How We Got Here, and Where We Need to Go

 

For instance, one study frequently referred to by the news media in 2011, the “National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study,” collected its responses from people who found out about the study through notices posted “at lesbian events, in women’s bookstores, and in lesbian newspapers.” Furthermore, most came from the cities of San Francisco, Boston and Washington, D.C., all of which are known to have unusually high homosexual populations.

Therefore, it was no surprise that most studies used by academics tended to back up the homosexual agenda.

A Pro-Traditional Family Survey

Dr. Regnerus used different methods to measure the impact of same-sex partners as parental figures upon children. His conclusion reinforced the value of traditional families.

“But the NFSS also clearly reveals that children appear most apt to succeed well as adults—on multiple counts and across a variety of domains—when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father, and especially when the parents remain married to the present day.”

Why America Must Reject Isolationism and Its Dangers

Dr. Regnerus thoroughly punctured the illusion that children raised by homosexuals were just as well off as those raised in conventional families. His conclusions also flew in the face of those who wanted to assert that cohabiting and divorced parents were just as good as married ones.

In other words, Dr. Regnerus destroyed several of the favorite delusions of the sexual revolution. He did not emerge unscathed from the liberal establishment crew or its sharp knives.

Scathing Reactions

The pro-homosexual lobby could not let this stand. It unloaded both barrels, criticizing Dr. Regnerus’s motives and methodology.

In Huffpost, Walter Olson of the Cato Institute, noted that “LGBT advocates point out that sociologist Mark Regnerus accepted $695,000 from the anti-gay Witherspoon Institute to carry out the study.”

Help Remove Jesus Bath Mat on Amazon

The New Yorker was appalled. “[The study] purports to show the very harmful effects of having gay and lesbian parents…. But, in this case, the way it was conducted is so breathtakingly sloppy that it is useful only as an illustration of how you can play fast and loose with statistics.”

CBS News adopted the LGBT line. “In a joint statement from the Family Equality Council, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Freedom to Marry, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation (GLAAD), advocates called the study a ‘flawed, misleading, and scientifically unsound paper that seeks to disparage lesbian and gay parents.’”

Classification Errors?

Below the surface, many criticisms came from the way Dr. Regnerus classified his study’s subjects. Critics nitpicked on some details while ignoring the big picture.

For example, one small subset of those polled might include a man who lived with both natural parents until he was eight. At that point, the boy’s parents divorced. He remained in the family home with his mother. Two years later, the mother began a ten-year cohabitation with another woman. By the time he grew to adulthood, he was severely depressed.

Satanic Christ Porn-blasphemy at Walmart — Sign Petition

Should this child be classified as being raised by both parents, a single mother or a lesbian couple? At various points in his childhood, he fit all three descriptions. It is impossible to determine during which phase of the child’s life his depression arose. Dr. Regnerus’s study classified the child as one raised by a same sex couple. Did that classification invalidate his whole study? Many of his detractors made just such arguments.

A Reappraisal

A recent reevaluation of Dr. Regnerus’s study has vindicated his methods and classifications. The support comes from an unlikely source.

In 2025, two statisticians from Cornell University, Cristobal Young and Erin Cumberworth, wrote a college-level textbook titled Multiverse Analysis. The book’s publisher, Cambridge University Press, wrote a description that attempts to explain its importance.

“Multiverse Analysis reveals the full range of estimates that the data can support and uncovers insights that single-path analyses often miss.”

How Panera’s Socialist Bread Ruined Company

In other words, this method re-analyzes a study’s raw evidence, classifying the data in several different ways. It then re-runs the study to see if the results change. In the book, Drs. Young and Cumberworth practiced their methods on Dr. Regnerus’s data. Given the sample size, over two million variables had to be reconsidered.

Dr. Paul Sullins, a Sociology professor at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., reviewed Metaverse Analysis and described its startling conclusion.

“Initially anticipating that ‘a comprehensive multiverse analysis would drive [the study’s many critics’] point home in a powerfully conclusive way,’ Young and Cumberworth instead found something unexpected and remarkable…, every analysis confirmed the Regnerus study’s central finding that children turned out better with intact biological parents than with LGBT parents.” (Emphasis added.)

A Settled Conclusion?

No one should assume that Dr. Sullins’s essay or Drs. Young and Cumberworth’s book will be the last word on Dr. Regnerus’s study and its conclusions. The sexual revolutionaries have far too much time, money and energy invested in the myth that a “family” is whatever a group of people decides that it is. They have lots of practice defending their destructive theories.

What Does Saint Thomas Aquinas Say About Marriage?

Radicals love to run a few biased studies and then declare that “the science is settled.” Nothing could be less accurate. Since Karl Marx, revolutionaries wanted to tear down the biological and emotional links between a man, his wife, and their children. This new examination is intriguing evidence that they have failed yet again.

The post Science Reconfirms Two-Parent Home is Better for Children than Same-Sex Options appeared first on Return to Order.