Of Gay Parents and Easter Eggs
By Robert-Jay Green, Ph.D.
April 10, 2007

On the day after Easter, hundreds of families brought their children to the annual Easter Egg event at the White House. Among them were dozens of gay or lesbian-headed families. Their participation has drawn intense controversy and highlighted a need for public education about families with gay or lesbian parents.

The Family Pride Coalition has encouraged these families to participate in the annual Easter event. According to Jennifer Chrisler, Executive Director, “the message is that gay and lesbian families are everywhere in this country. We care about the same things that all parents care about: providing our children with every opportunity and every experience possible.” In 2006, right-wing groups accused Family Pride of trying to politicize the event. Chrisler responded that by attending this event, the families were helping President Bush “understand that gay families exist in this country and deserve the rights and protections that all families need.” 

The President has a lot to learn. In a 2005 interview with The New York Times, he said that while “children can receive love from gay couples,” he believed that “studies have shown that the ideal is where a child is raised in a married family with a man and a woman.”  That is not correct, and this popular misunderstanding is fundamental to efforts to prohibit same-sex couples from adopting children, becoming foster parents, or legally establishing parental rights with their partner’s biological children.

Current research shows no deficits in the development of children raised by gay/lesbian parents versus heterosexual parents.  In multiple studies by many different investigators, the children of lesbian and gay parents are just as happy and emotionally well-adjusted as their counterparts from “Mom and Dad” households. They do just as well in school, have friends, and perform like their peers academically. The research also finds that children from both types of families who have stronger, closer relationships with their parents are less likely to experience adjustment problems. Sounds pretty conventional, doesn’t it?

The research President Bush apparently is referring to is on an entirely different topic – it compares children in single parent households to those with two parents. That research does not compare “Mom and Dad” parenting to “Two Mom” or “Two Dad” parenting. Furthermore, many of the differences for children raised by one versus two heterosexual parents are related to the comparatively reduced economic circumstances of one-income as opposed to two-income households. These research results, which are entirely about heterosexual parents, are frequently misrepresented by right-wing groups as applying to lesbian and gay parents. 

More important, it’s not only right-wing extremists who are prone to believing this fallacy.  This same argument has been used in states like Arkansas, where an effort continues to prohibit adoption or foster parenting by same-sex couples, even when the lesbians/gays involved are close relatives. Nor is it just the red states.  In justifying their ruling against same-sex marriage last year, the majority opinion in New York State’s highest court stated: “Intuition and experience suggest that a child benefits from having before his or her eyes, every day, living models of what both a man and a woman are like.” Unfortunately, these judges’ collective “intuition and experience” simply doesn’t match up with reality, as represented in the more rigorous observations of researchers.  Sometimes our most convincing intuitions arise from our most unconscious stereotypes, and our personal life experience may be far too limited for those stereotypes to be questioned and corrected.

This year and last, the White House timed admissions to prevent lesbian/gay parents being photographed with First Lady Laura Bush at the Easter egg event. Such are the lengths to which the White House will go to avoid any trace of support or even tolerance for same-sex families. In such a symbolic national event, there should be room to welcome all types of parents and children in America. One can only hope that the First Family and other families found more knowledge and understanding along with their Easter eggs this year.

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Robert-Jay Green is executive director of the Rockway Institute, a think tank for GLBT research and public policy, and Distinguished Professor at the California School of Professional Psychology, a graduate division of Alliant International University.

Contact by telephone at 415-955-2121. Contact by email at rjgreen@alliant.edu