Oh, hey! It's the Marks and Regnerus studies again. I suppose
being audited by the journal they were published in wasn't enough to keep them buried, people (read: FRC, FOTF, et al.) do insist on pulling them out, and I don't blame them. On the surface the Regnerus study makes gay parents look terrible, and Marks is challenging every study the APA cites in their decision on gay parenting.
However, the problem is that Mark's study itself is being criticized for only doing an analysis of the summaries instead of doing an in depth analysis. If you're going to try to dismiss decades of studies just because the sample size is small, I suppose you'd better do your homework.
The fact of the matter is that the population of gays and lesbians is only a fraction of the population, and because gay marriage is only allowed in certain states, and was completely illegal before 2004, gays and lesbians are still in an environment where they aren't encouraged to settle down and have kids. These studies that Marks criticizes, they had to fight to find enough people to achieve a passable sample size.
Oddly, this isn't a problem that Regnerus's study had, as apparently his study had a great sample size, and upon closer inspection you can see why. The way the study sought to determine whether or not the subject grew up with gay or lesbian parents was to ask them whether or not either of their parents had had sex with someone of the same gender, instead of whether or not the parents who raised them were of the same gender.
In Regnerus' study, he essentially makes no distinction between a committed gay couple raising a child and straight biological parents who cheated on each other regularly, perhaps once or twice with the same gender. There aren't a lot of children who are raised by two loving gay parents in this country, but there are plenty of children who come from broken homes where their biological parents regularly cheat on each other, and they vastly outnumber the kids raised in stable gay parent families.
But yeah, I wouldn't take these two studies seriously.
Ha! I definitely want to check out this one. xD