Finally the pro-marriage debate has some evidence in the parenting department to defend marriage between a man and a women. A recent meta-analysis of research by Walter Schum from Kansas State University found that "gay and lesbian parents are far more likely to have children who become gay. 'I'm trying to prove that it's not 100 percent genetic," Schumm tells AOL News:
"His study is a meta-analysis of existing work. First, Schumm extrapolated data from 10 books on gay parenting; Cameron, for what it's worth, had only looked at three, and offered no statistical analysis in his paper. Schumm skewed his data so that only self-identified gay and lesbian children would be labeled as such.
"This is important because sometimes Schumm would come across a passage of children of gay parents who said they were "adamant about not declaring their sexual orientation at all." These people would be labeled straight, even though the passage's implication was that they were gay.
"Schumm concluded that children of lesbian parents identified themselves as gay 31 percent of the time; children of gay men had gay children 19 percent of the time, and children of a lesbian mother and gay father had at least one gay child 25 percent of the time.
"Furthermore, when the study restricted the results so that they included only children in their 20s -- presumably after they'd been able to work out any adolescent confusion or experimentation -- 58 percent of the children of lesbians called themselves gay, and 33 percent of the children of gay men called themselves gay. (About 5 to 10 percent of the children of straight parents call themselves gay, Schumm says.)
"Schumm next went macro, poring over an anthropological study of various cultures' acceptance of homosexuality. He found that when communities welcome gays and lesbians, "89 percent feature higher rates of homosexual behavior."
"Finally, Schumm looked at the existing academic studies, the ones used to pillory Cameron's work. In all there are 26 such studies. Schumm ran the numbers from them and concluded that, surprisingly, 20 percent of the kids of gay parents were gay themselves. When children only 17 or older were included in the analysis, 28 percent were gay.
Whether or not society approvse of homosexual behavior, it's becoming increasingly clear that a homosexual orientation is not 100% genetically predetermined, and therefore can be viewed as a behavior instead of an identity. At the very least we can stop pretending that a person's sexual orientation will have no effect on another's, particularly their own children.
Kix, Paul. "Study: Gay parents more likely to have gay kids." AOL News: Oct 17, 2010. Retrieved online from http://www.aolnews.com/2010/10/17/study-gay-parents-more-likely-to-have-gay-kids/
