Press Release

Doctor group yields to politics in approving "gay" adoption

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Contact: Buddy Smith, Ext. 218 or Ed Vitagliano, Ext. 222

AMERICAN FAMILY ASSOCIATION
Dr. Donald E. Wildmon, President
P.O. Drawer 2440
Tupelo, Mississippi 38803
Phone 662/844-5036
Fax 662/842-7798
URL
E-mail

For immediate release: February 4, 2002

TUPELO, MS - American Family Association today criticized a new report issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) which insisted that new laws should be passed allowing homosexual couples to adopt children.

“This was not a decision based upon science, but instead reflects a growing tendency on the part of medical and mental health organizations to adopt the role of political advocacy groups,” said AFA President Don Wildmon.

The AAP said in a press release that “there is a considerable body of professional literature that suggests children with parents who are homosexual” grow up no differently than those with heterosexual parents. As a result of its report, the AAP called for “legal and legislative efforts that provide for the possibility of adoption of …children by the second parent or coparent in same-sex relationships.”

“I’m not sure what ‘professional literature’ the AAP looked at,” Wildmon said, “but as recently as last summer researchers were calling into question this whole idea that kids raised by homosexuals turn out exactly like those raised by a mom and dad.”

Wildmon referred to a report issued last July by University of Southern California sociology professors Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz, published in the American Sociological Review. While careful to say they believed that homosexuals suffered discrimination, Stacey and Biblarz also said political considerations had led researchers to downplay the fact that the sexual orientation of parents who were “gay” or lesbian did make a difference for children raised in such homes.

In reexamining these tainted studies, Stacey and Biblarz found that the research actually indicated that: young people raised in lesbian homes were much more likely to have had same-sex experiences; young girls raised by lesbian “mothers” were more likely to be sexually adventurous; and the boys raised by lesbians were less likely to behave in typically masculine ways.

Drs. Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai, partners in a social science research consulting firm, also examined 49 of the the studies most commonly used to defend same-sex parenting and adoption. Their report, issued in January 2001, indicated that the pair “found at least one fatal flaw in all 49 studies,” indicating that “no generalizations can
reliably be made based on any of these studies. For these reasons the studies are no basis for good science or good public policy.”

“Why didn’t the AAP ask the same hard questions as these other researchers?” Wildmon asked. “I can only conclude that the answers would not fit their agenda.”

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