1st Blog!

 This is my first blog for my Family Relations class.  We learned so much in the first two weeks of classes.  Family Relations can affect so many parts of the world just by one person’s idea of what a family means to a group, entity, and culture.

We discussed gay and lesbian marriage and how Californians had to vote if marriage between two men or two women was unconstitutional, called proposition 8.  It was voted down by most of the people, but some voters did not agree with the decision, and it was taken to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

There are nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court and four decided to vote it was unconstitutional to not allow gays and lesbians to marry and four voted that it is constitutional for them not to allow them to get married, but there was one justice who was undecided.  Justice Kennedy wanted to know if gays and lesbians married how would it affect the children in their marital bond?

There was a brief written by the American Psychological Association in 2005 stating that there were 59 research studies on the idea of how it affected the children of gay and lesbian families.  The studies were to compare heterosexual parents to gay and lesbian parents.

The research was supposed to be on the long-term effect on adolescence and adults in gay and lesbian families, but the APA noticed in the research studies that most of the comparison data were done with some form of bias on the researcher’s part and a lack of children in the study. 

Most of this research was done between 1979 and 2003. Out of 59 studies, 10 studies were done with single mothers.  They compared these single mothers to lesbian white women who were executive secretaries, I say secretaries because in those days women were not high-ranking executives.  Women’s rights had a long way to go.   

When I saw the comparison of the two categories I realized there could not be a comparison between them, or the researchers did not see lesbians as married only single and would only compare them to single women with children. In the 80s and 90s, most women were categorized as single or married, whether they were lesbian or heterosexual.  Most researchers were probably white men speaking with white women executives about lesbian marriage.

My main thought was the single mother, who did they speak with?  In the 80s and 90s, most single mothers were African American, how did they go about speaking with these women about their children?  Did they go to welfare offices, doctors’ offices, or unemployment offices?  Did the researchers use their own bias to report on single mothers?  In the 80s and 90s, it was frowned upon to be a single white woman with a child, who did these men speak with?  We may never know the answer to this question.

Comparing a single mother to an executive woman was not in the best interest of the child. When you look closely at the APA brief you see that most of the studies between the executive and the single mother were about the psychosexual development of a child.  There was no discussion about emotional development, social development, health development, education development, or self-esteem development of the child.  There is more to family life than sex.

At the end of this brief, the American Psychological Association issued an official assertion: “Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents.”

How could these researchers have these two categories of a single mother and white executive woman and expect to have a positive outcome, they didn’t want a positive outcome.  These comparisons were done on purpose to make sure that gays and lesbians stay where they belong, in the closet, and never come out.

In the end, Justice Kennedy decided it was unconditional not to allow gays and lesbians to marry. It would make no difference between heterosexual parents and gay and lesbian parents how the outcome of the child would be. 

Nowadays families are so different they can’t just be called Mother, Father, Sister, and Brother.