Parenthood and marriage are intertwined.

As David Blankenorn wrote in The Future of Marriage:

To understand marriage and the family, we begin with sex and birth — with the mother and her infant, and through her the possiblity of social fatherhood, and with fatherhood the possibility of expanded family relationships. These must be our starting points, because they are the baseline dimensions of human generativity and family life. They are the core biological and social facts that have led all human societies to institute marriage. Corporate kin groups are certainly important, but analytically they must come later, because ultimately they are more additive than foundational.

And:

[An apparent] exception to the rule does not prove there is no rule. A possible deviation from the pattern does not prove that no pattern exists. For it is *only* the discernment of an underlying pattern that permits us to see those spots where the pattern may be broken. Scholars who trot out one or several ambiguous cases to suggest that marriage in human affairs has no coherent meaning — that it does not exist as a definable cross-cultural institution — are engaging in an unserious activity.

Also:

[It] is possible for a human group — probaby not an entire society. but a subgroup within a society — to shrink and alter marriage to such a degree that it becomes essentially a simulacrum of marriage. This radical devaluation occurs because the group is corporately preoccupied with other activities that conflict with full-bodied marriage and may be positively served by shadow-marriage.

* * *

It takes a family to raise a village. Hillary Clinton’s assertion, “It takes a village to raise a child,” has been recycled more times than Al Gore’s garden waste, but few admirers have inquired how the village got there in the first place. Without the family, the village itself cannot function. If the family breaks down, or fails to form in the first place, the “village” can not possibly provide adequate help to repair the damage. The family does something the village cannot do for itself, namely bring the next generation into being, and socialise them into the kind of people who can participate in a free society. Without the family doing its job, the state will necessarily grow larger, more expensive and more intrusive.

– Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. is the Senior Research Fellow in Economics at the Acton Institute:

These are some of the themes of her book, Love and Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/it_takes_a_family/

The range of studies I am familiar with does not posit the simplistic two choices Professor Williams asserts. Indeed the range of social science corrects for income, race, and education indeed a litany of family forms. More importantly it has cross studied not just one and two parent families but all adequately studied family structures- including single parent families, adopted families, step families, divorced families, divorced & remarried families and the like.

This is of course on the subject of the broader and more accurate social science not on the relatively new and limited studies on gay parenting alone. I would like to know what comments are “made out of pure ignorance.” If there is a flaw in my understanding of the social science, it would need to be corrected for.

As to Professor Williams account of the anthropological record, he seems to have an affinity for large extended kinship networks over nuclear family models. Since we live in post industrial modernity and not small hunter and gathering societies would makes application of this knowledge exceedingly difficult.

Welcome! Your comments about the Cherokee were very interesting. Could you share with us what the anthropological evidence is of whether children need a male parent whenever possible, or whether female parents can raise children exactly as well?

You referred to the anthropological record, not to the social-scientific evidence, and then you offered three points.

It is notable that you gender-neutralized those points — which contradicts the very wide and deep consensus that recognizes the integration of fatherhood and motherhood as superior, based on outcomes for children.

Your account of the Cherokee also appears to be ahistorical and highly speculative. No matter, do you assert a wide and deep consensus on the account you presented? Note that extended families are not sex-segregative nor do they disunited fatherhood from child-raising.

When children grow up in a society that is continually stressing the importance of fathers, of course it is not surprising that some will want to know who contributed the sperm. But in a society like the Cherokee, and many other extended family matrilineages, surrounded by a number of loving adults (mother, mother’s sisters, mother’s brothers, mother’s mother, mother’s mother’s brothers and sisters, and their children, and cousins of all age grades) it is not surprising that they would think very little about whose sperm fertilized the egg from which they grew.

In short, what the research shows is that:
1. single parent rearing is not as good as double parent rearing, when both parents are loving and supportive
2. single parent rearing by one loving parent is better than dual parent rearing, when one or both of the parents is not loving and supportive
3. neither single parent rearing or double parent rearing are as good as multiple adult rearing

The crucial element is a stable household with loving and supportive adults, and the anthropological research suggests the more adults (and adolescents) that are in close intimate bonds with a child, the better.

For adolescents, having one or more mentors, who are separate from parents, are also extremely important at that stage.

The implication is that the mother of a child should strive to have as many loving and supportive adults as possible, of all genders, to become involved in the rearing of her children. If your concern is truly about the welfare of the child, it really makes no difference if one or more of the males involved has sex with the mother. What is important is love and support.

Well, allot of them have been exposed as rubbish. Something you should expect given the heated politics of it all.

And yes: They do deserve the “No Basis” label not because it’s ALL rubbish, but rather because it is in it’s infancy. So much so that even gay parenting advocates admit that the studies are not numerous enough and long range enough to have generated a social scientific consensus.

Most importantly – all this stands in marked contrast to the very real and substantial social scientific consensus that has developed around the fact that measured against all indicators the family form that is by far the best predictor of postive child outcomes is the married natural family.

They’re not perfect, but neither are they rubbish, and they certainly don’t merit the “No Basis” label. They could have turned up all sorts of problems and to my knowledge they did not. That’s important.

CO: “Contrary to your reply, this is not a finding of “non-conformity to traditional gender roles”. Or perhaps I misunderstood you and you will clarify what you meant to say.”

And perhaps I misunderstood. If you think it was important, please elaborate.

This is not just a marriage issue. Of course there are obvious tie-ins (man and woman – loving/committing to each other and taking responsibility for their own sperm/egg when combined to create a new life).

BUT I think the bigger issue is a taboo word that is NEVER spoken during these debates (on various discussion boards/the media etc.) on ‘donor/vendor/surrogacy’ conception and that word is ACCEPTANCE.

A child OR a parent/bio-father/bio-mother/bio-family – cannot do for you what you cannot do for yourself. Go to any infertility blog (or any of the donor conceived blog) and say that word and see what kind of responses you get.

That being said, I do STRONGLY believe that the chicken (the WANTING of the parent(s)) are NOT more important than the egg (the NEEDS of the children who have been INTENTIONALLY disconnected from one or both of the biological/genetic parent(s) and extended family to fill their parent(s) WANT).

I do believe that the children’s wants are also NEEDS (for identity and acceptance and love from ALL the people we come from and belong to. In order to give us meaning in life, a connection to a past/history, and feelings of self worth, pride, belonging, for ourselves and our own children and their children etc. To not feel we were simply a transaction, a commodity, a means to an end. There is a strong spiritual element.). This is not a matter of WANT, this is a NEED that (the children – the adults they grow to be and their own children), should absolutely be given priority over an adults want to fill a void they are unable to fill on their own.

If you are without a partner who wants to co-create with you, if your significant other cannot co-create with you – stop the WANTING and ACCEPT. It may happen naturally or it might not. But the WANTING is what creates the pain. Rise above it and as my mother’s doctor said to me “Count your blessings”. Wise words.

I said: “But data does suggest a difference in what has been called gender dissatisfaction. Also in psycho-sexual development and behavior during adolescence.”

Contrary to your reply, this is not a finding of “non-conformity to traditional gender roles”. Or perhaps I misunderstood you and you will clarify what you meant to say.

For a starter, gender dissatisfaction denotes unhappiness with one’s sex.

This is profoundly important to the well-being — and yes to the education — of children. Parents are directly responsible for both and I don’t know of any reason for parents to be happy that their child experiences gender dissatisfaction.

In fact, ask adults who have lived through it and I doubt you’d hear them expressing appreciation for their unhappiness with their “assigned sex”. It is generally not something that one’s desires for one’s children. I think even a “transgendered” parent would sayso.

It appears there is some evidence that there are differences on this score when same-sex sexualized duos have been compared with husband-wife duos.

In any case, it is understandable that you would reply dismissively, if you are not familiar with the study of normal and abnormal psycho-sexual development and behavior during adolescence. It just means that your opinion is not an informed opinion, on that topic.

So you might reconsider your previous remark. You have, afterall, expressed interest in evidence rather than mere assertion of goodness and badness. David has asserted a moral view rather than social-scientific view but you challenged him for evidence other than moral reasoning. So when it comes to gender dissatisfaction, for example, you might seek evidence rather than depend on an uninformed opinion hastily made by yourself.