Last week Marriage Equality, an organisation campaigning for same-sex marriage, published a report to considerable fanfare that deals with the 
experiences of children raised by same-sex couples.
What was actually even more interesting than the report itself was who funded it and who turned up at the launch. It was funded by the Dutch government (maybe the Irish government should give money to a Dutch pro-life organisation), the EU, the State-funded British Council, and of course our own Equality Authority, which is also State-funded.
Among those speaking at the launch were family lawyer and children’s rights advocate, Geoffrey Shannon, as well as Bernardos chief, and would-be presidential candidate, Fergus Finlay.
It would seem that Fergus is pro-gay adoption, which is an interesting stance for him to take given that he heads up a child welfare organisation. Doesn’t he believe in child’s right to a mother and a father?
As for the study , well, it interviewed a grand total of 11 young adults who were raised by lesbian couples, although in several cases the children still had regular contact with their fathers, as was their right.
No study based on such a tiny sample can be a guide to social policy, much less an argument in favour of something so very radical as same-sex adoption.
There are now quite a number of studies of children raised by same-sex couples (almost invariably women) and they claim that these children do at least as well as children raised by their own mothers and fathers.
But these studies always suffer from one or more methodological flaws, e.g. the samples are very small, or they are not randomly selected, or we have only the subjective impression of the lesbian couples as to how well the children are doing, or the subjective impression of the children themselves, etc.
At the end of the day, these studies are an attack on something very fundamental, namely the aforementioned right of every child to be raised by their own mother and father where possible and unless there is a very good reason why they should be raised by someone else.
Unfortunately a growing number of our politicians are being taken in by the rhetoric of the gay rights movement, and are ignoring much more fundamental rights.
