Children are letting anti-LGBT groups know that they should “stop wasting your time. We are doing perfectly alright.”
With the ban on Gayby Baby being shown in NSW schools and headlines covering the controversial decision, same-sex parenting has not had the spotlight of public scrutiny removed.
The most popular argument being thrown around by anti-LGBT groups regarding families with same-sex parents is that there are inherent dangers in raising a child in any environment that does not involve a mother and a father. This argument deliberately omits the cases where a child grows up in a single-parent household due to death, divorce, or any other circumstance that would make a parent absent in a child’s life.
By distorting the Father’s Day holiday, one such group released a video on social media about the “dangers” children will face when growing up without a father. The group has urged its supporters on social media to share the clip because they do not believe any television stations will show it.
The video calls upon outdated American statistics, some from as early as 1978 to “support” the idea that same-sex parenting “promotes dysfunction and suffering for kids.”
These statements contradict numerous studies that have been done into same-sex parenting. The American Sociological Association concluded in 2014 that “American children living within same-sex parent households fare just as well as those children residing within different-sex parent households over a wide array of well-being measures.” These measures included academic performance, social development, substance abuse, cognitive development, psychological health, and early sexual activity.
Child Family Community Australia reached similar conclusions in a 2013 study, stating that “Children in such families do as well emotionally, socially and educationally as their peers from heterosexual couple families.”
No doubt, this message is dangerous. But children of same-sex couples are speaking out.
18-year-old Claudia Long, who was raised by her mother and her partner Jane, believes that the idea that she is “suddenly cut off from everything masculine is ridiculous.”
She went on to say that “Gay families an children have always existed and will continue to exist no matter what the conservative commentators or the Australian Christian lobby decides to print about us.” and the debate over same-sex parenting is “sort of like debating whether we breathe oxygen. I mean it happens.”
Long expressed frustration as she watched herself and other children of same-sex couples “used as pawns in the debate about same-sex marriage.”
She says that if given a chance to reply to all the negative messages she would say “stop wasting your time. You don’t really need to worry about us, we are doing perfectly all right. Just get over it.”
