This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2013, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Last week, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said that "there's considerable disagreement among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not."
It reminded me of Mormon apostle Dallin Oaks' recent statement that "The social science literature is controversial and politically charged on the long-term effect of" same-sex parents on children.
Not so. The American Academy of Pediatrics stated that 25 years of research has found that "many factors confer risk to children's healthy development and adult outcomes, such as poverty, parental depression, parental substance abuse, divorce, and domestic violence. … But the sexual orientation of their parents is not among them."
Similarly, the American Sociological Association told the court: "Decades of methodologically sound social science research … confirm that positive child wellbeing is the product of stability in the relationship between the two parents, stability in the relationship between the parents and child, and greater parental socioeconomic resources. Whether a child is raised by same-sex or opposite-sex parents has no bearing."
If you care about children, you'd support same-sex marriage. Scalia and Oaks are intelligent, yet their statements imply otherwise. What are they smoking?
Thomas Gibson
Salt Lake City