Last week I blogged about a new document called ‘Building Character’ from the left-of-centre think tank, Demos. It did its very best to explain away the beneficial effects of marriage and to suggest that family structure doesn’t really matter at all. But now we are led to believe that it does matter, and that the family structure which benefits children the most is not marriage, but a family led by a lesbian couple.

So said Stephen Scott, an adviser to the British government, at the launch of Building Character. I wonder what he bases his conclusion on? We can be 100 percent sure the studies he is using are very small. They always are. Scott speculates that one reason children raised by lesbian couples do better than children raised by mothers and fathers (as he claims) is that they have often been brought into the world via IVF or some other form of assisted human reproduction and therefore they are more motivated than people who have brought their children into the world the natural way. 

But if this is so, then the studies Scott bases his conclusions on are measuring the effects of motivation rather than lesbian parenting per se. Maybe these lesbian parents should be compared with other parents, including heterosexuals, who have had their children through IVF?

However, if Scott is correct, then it appears we fathers are doing our children a disservice by remaining present and active in their lives. We should encourage our wives to leave us in favour of other women and our children can only benefit. Who, but those tragically influential people who have subscribed to the most extreme tenets of political correctness, could believe such a thing?