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The new research,
which looked at 19,000 studies and articles related to same-sex
parenting from 1977 to 2013, was released last week, and comes
as the U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule by the end of this
month on whether same-sex marriage is legal.
“Consensus is overwhelming in terms of there being no difference
in children who are raised by same-sex or different- sex
parents,” University of Oregon sociology professor Ryan Light
said on Tuesday.
Light, who co-authored the study with Jimi Adams of the
University of Colorado at Denver, said the study may be too late
to affect the court’s ruling this month but he hopes it will
have an impact on future cases.
"I hope we’ll see acceptance of gay marriage of the courts and
by the public at large," he said.
The studies, Light said, showed some disagreement among
scientists on the outcome of same-sex parenting in the 1980s but
it largely subsided in the 1990s, and a clear consensus had
formed by 2000 that there is no difference between same-sex and
different-sex parenting in the psychological, behavioral or
educational outcomes of children.
“Across the board we find the iterative suggests there’s no
significant differences,” Light said. "To our knowledge this is
the most comprehensive analysis of this type on this issue.”
Gary Gates, Research Director at the Williams Institute, UCLA
School of Law, said although several review articles have made
arguments that there is a consensus that the gender of the
parents does not matter, he was not aware of any other in-depth
study of this nature.
“That to me actually sounds like a fairly novel approach and I'm
not sure that others have done it,” he said.
He said he believes the argument that same-sex parents are less
adequate than heterosexual parents has largely been taken out of
the legal debates. But he said it's always possible that it
could come up.
"We’ll see what happens in the Supreme Court argumentation," he
said.
(Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Eric Walsh)
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