What Kind of Family Is the Basic Unit of Civilization?

Yesterday there was an exchange (fairly brief and respectful) on Facebook I promised to respond to, after having given myself time to think and be somewhat thorough. And this is among people I think will be respectful, so it is worth responding.

This is going to be long. I probably ought to have split it into two or three posts. Nevertheless, here it is.

The post I’m quoting below is in response to a notice about a pro-family rally off campus near BYU-Idaho. It’s honoring “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” which declares our Church’s basic beliefs related to family. You can read that proclamation here. This came out in 1995, when such beliefs were so widely held, it seemed like they should go without saying, but when you read the proclamation today you can see the prophetic wisdom in declaring these beliefs ahead of the cultural shift.

So here’s the central part of BG’s Facebook post:

When you think of the family being defended here, what kind of family do you imagine? Would I be safe to assume you imagine the nuclear family relationship?

I ask because there is so much emphasis on the nuclear family as though it's what holds civilization up. But honestly, it's the nuclear family TOGETHER with all the other types of family that really hold civilization up. Single parent family, friends, extended family, work family, adopted family, national family, international family etc. The point is, the family is so much more than an isolated nuclear family setup.

I am forever grateful for everyone outside of my nuclear family that has kept us going when times have been tough.

Two individuals of the same sex that are together does not threaten any type of family. If anything it strengthens all types of families because there is more trust and acceptance with each other to help support one another. We become a bigger, stronger family.

The real threat to families in my opinion is our inability to listen and understand other family that might be different than we're used to.

And now my long response.

Family is the basic unit of civilization. To understand that, we need to know what family is and what civilization is.

Let’s start with defining civilization, because then we can see whether whatever family we’re looking at has what is necessary for civilization.

Definition of Civilization

I’m using definitions I’ve written before, on the Spherical Model website:

I will be using the terms Civilized and Savage somewhat more specifically than the usual dictionary definitions. Civilized will be more than a society where people write records, have a certain amount of technology, and live together in cities. I think it is clearly possible for all of those things to exist in societies that have sunk into savagery. Nazi Germany is the most obvious example from recent history. And it is also possible, though not really seen in today’s world, for innocent but unrefined people to live in harmonious civilization. Many families that settled the American West exemplify civilization at a micro level….

In the northern circle of the Spherical Model that is the goal—Civilization—families typically remain intact, and children are raised in loving homes, with caring parents who guide their education and training, dedicating somewhere between 18 and 25 years for that child to reach adulthood, and who then remain interested in their children’s success for the rest of their lives.

Civilized people live peaceably among their neighbors, helping rather than taking advantage of one another, abiding by laws enacted to protect property and safety—with honesty and honor. Civilized people live in peace with other civilized people; countries and cultures coexist in appreciation, without fear.

There is a thriving free-enterprise economy. Poverty is meaningless; even though there will always be a lowest earning 10% defined as poor, in a civilized society these lowest earners have comfortable shelter and adequate food and clothing—and there’s the possibility of rising, or at least for future generations to rise.

Creativity abounds; enlightening arts and literature exceed expectations. Architecture and infrastructure improve; innovation and invention are the rule.

People feel free to choose their work, their home, their family practices, their friendships and associations. And they generally self-restrain before they infringe on the rights and freedoms of others. Where there are questions about those limits, laws are in place to help clarify boundaries of civilized behavior. When someone willingly infringes on the rights or safety of another, the law functions to protect that victim as well as society from further uncivilized behavior from the offender.

Much of this describes the societal goods you get from civilization. But, in short, civilized people have a critical mass of people who honor God, life, family, truth, and property ownership.

Definition of Family

Before I go any further, let me say something very direct: While there is a necessary preferred family form, that does not mean that other family forms have no value and make no contribution. I’ll go into that in more detail later.

Here’s what families do for civilization, also from the Spherical Model website:

Families have the responsibility to safeguard women and children for the greatest benefit of both current and future generations. Families provide food, shelter, clothing, education, spiritual guidance, and training in how to live a civilized life in a civilized society. Elderly are honored for their wisdom. Youth are honored for their potential. Women are honored for giving and nurturing life, among their other abilities. Men are honored for providing and protecting, among their other abilities. Families are the main economic force, as well as the very means whereby civilization can perpetuate. Civilized societies therefore protect The Family as sacred.

But family can mean so many things, and can look very different from one another. What do we mean? We mean a married mother and father raising their own children. That is the ideal. That is what there needs to be a critical mass of—which is probably quantifiable, but I would estimate well north of 50%.

Stronger extended families are a great support to the nuclear family. The more we have of that in a society, the better. But,

It is possible to have a civilization one family in size.

This is true—if that family is a married father and mother caring for their own children.

Here is our traditional family,
being a basic unit of civilization,
during our growth years, 1996.

It is not true if that family is missing an essential ingredient—namely, a mother or a father. A well-functioning traditional family is a civilization, in and of itself. And it contributes to an ever larger civilization. Any other family form might contribute to civilization, not because of what it is, but in spite of what it lacks.

Historically, this has been known by every civilization for millennia, and we shouldn’t assume people didn’t know certain things by observation and experience over long periods of time simply because a social science database hadn’t been invented. But, it turns out, the more social science data we gather, the more we see that mothers and fathers—both—are essential ingredients for raising the subsequent civilized generation.

Other Family Forms

While we know what is the best family form, that does not preclude success by other family forms.

Married mother and father of adopted children do very nearly as well as parents of biological children. Challenges faced by adopted children are often mitigated by the knowledge that a devoted mother and father love them.

Stepfamilies can bring about mixed results. The most likely to succeed (but certainly not the only ones) are those who can come together entirely, without having to share with absent other fathers or mothers. For example, if a parent has died and the remaining parent eventually remarries, full integration of the new parent can create outcomes very similar to original biological parents. But otherwise stepparents can put children at higher risk of abuse than even single parenting.[i]

Single parents generally have a harder time. But among these, those with a parent who has died fare better[ii] than those who are single because of divorce or never marrying. The reason is that the parent who has died can be talked about as a positive force—a person with principles that would have been taught, a person with love for the surviving parent and the children. The deceased parent’s legacy is better than simple absence of parent from the home.

Single parents have a tough row to hoe. Children need influence from both a male and a female parent; that is critical. That does not mean that no single parent can succeed; it means that the task is likely to be harder. The parent needs to find outside resources to help—maybe grandparents, maybe aunts or uncles or other extended family, maybe coaches or youth program leaders. But the parent will need to find that additional input. And the parent will have to do it while being the sole provider for the family, however much extra time that takes, and then do the daily boots-on-the-ground parenting that would have been divided among two adults, giving them each occasional rest and recharge time.

Single parents have a more likely chance of success—if they are surrounded by fully functional two-parent nuclear families. Because those neighboring basic units of civilization may have social capital to spare.

It takes social capital to make up for the deficits of a family without both mother and father. The more families that can’t bring that to the table, the heavier the toll on civilization.

You can see the outcomes in social science data. One collection I use is Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-One Conclusions from the Social Sciences. Mine is a 2005 version, from the Institute for American Values. I have picked a few, and mostly I have paraphrased. The footnotes are theirs:

·         Cohabiting parents—even biological parents—report relationships of lower quality than do married couples: more conflict, more violence, and lower levels of satisfaction and commitment, resulting in children less likely to know how to live in a committed marriage for the next generation.[iii]

·         Divorce, as well as unmarried childrearing, increases poverty for both children and mothers.[iv]

·         Married parents build more wealth than either singles or cohabiting couples, thus benefiting their children.[v]

·         Parental divorce is a major contributor to children’s school failure[vi] and reduces the likelihood that children will graduate from college and achieve high-status jobs.[vii]

·         Children living with their married parents tend to have better health than children in other family forms.[viii] Divorce has been shown to lower children’s life expectancy by four years.[ix]

·         Marriage leads to reduced alcohol and substance abuse for both teens and adults.[x]

·         Marriage leads to better health and longer lives for both women and men, compared to singles controlled for other variables.[xi]

·         Children of divorced parents have higher rates of psychological problems[xii] and significantly higher rates of suicide.[xiii] Meanwhile married mothers have lower rates of depression than do single or cohabiting mothers.[xiv]

·         Boys raised in single-parent families are more likely to engage in delinquent and criminal behavior. Even after controlling for factors such as race, mother’s education, neighborhood quality, and cognitive ability, boys raised in single-parent homes are about twice as likely (and boys raised in stepfamilies are three times as likely) to have committed a crime that leads to incarceration by the time they reach their early thirties.[xv]

·         Marriage appears to reduce the risk that adults will be either perpetrators or victims of crime.[xvi]

·         Married women appear to have a lower risk of experiencing domestic violence than do cohabiting or dating women.[xvii] Cohabitors engage in more violence than do spouses.”[xviii]

·         Children living with single mothers, stepfathers, or mother’s boyfriends are more likely to become victims of child abuse.[xix]

The conclusion of Why Marriage Matters is this:

Marriage is more than a private emotional relationship. It is also a social good. Not every person can or should marry. And not every child raised outside of marriage is damaged as a result. But communities where good-enough marriages are common have better outcomes for children, women, and men than do communities suffering from high rates of divorce, unmarried childbearing, and high-conflict or violent marriages.

What I and the social scientists are saying is, marriage—man and woman “good enough” marriage—is essential for civilization. The odds are better for children as well as the adults when we start with the traditional nuclear family.

UFI logo

Let’s add some data from “The Fatherhood Study Fact Sheet” from United Families International:

·         A study of incarcerated women showed 41% grew up with a mother as sole provider.[xx]

·         Youths in father-absent households had significantly higher odds of incarceration than those in mother-father families. Youths who never had a father in the household experienced the highest odds.[xxi]

·         A 2002 DOJ survey of 7,000 inmates showed that 39% of jail inmates had lived in mother-only households. Approximately 46% of jail inmates in 2002 had a previously incarcerated family member; 20% experienced a father in prison or jail.[xxii]

·         Among adolescents charged with murder, 72% grew-up without their fathers.[xxiii] 

·         High-crime neighborhoods are characterized by high concentrations of families abandoned by fathers.[xxiv]

·         Fatherlessness is a primary generator of violence among young men.[xxv] 

·         Of children with highly involved fathers in two-parent families, 50% reported getting mostly A’s through 12th grade, compared to 35.2% of children of nonresident father families.[xxvi]

·         What fathers provide includes protecting daughters from sexual overtures of other men, and providing models for the kinds of nonsexual relationships with men that daughters need to develop if they are to avoid the ploys of sexual abusers.  Daughters who grow up without fathers do not enjoy such protections from sexual abuse perpetrators.[xxvii]  

·         Teens without fathers were twice as likely to be involved in early sexual activity and seven times more likely to get pregnant as an adolescent.[xxviii]

Same-Sex Parents

We haven’t yet touched on same-sex parenting. The data is only beginning to appear, since this is a relatively new family form. Early reports were that there were relatively few differences. However, a closer look showed that comparisons were between homosexual parents and heterosexual parents, including all single parents—not between homosexual parents and married biological parents. Even so, the data was showing that gender identity and confusion, and other sexual related markers of adolescent health, were inferior in same-sex parented families.[xxix]

There are a couple of basic facts we can’t get around. 1. Children need the influence of a father and a mother; same-sex families do not provide that. Period. Full stop.

And 2. Same-sex parents do not engage in reproductive behavior. It is not as if they are equivalent to a heterosexual couple experiencing infertility. They are not typically infertile—with someone of the opposite sex. The coupling is infertile because together they biologically cannot engage in reproductive activity. Under some circumstances (previous heterosexual marriage, invitro fertilization) one of the parents might be biologically related to a child, but in no circumstances can both be related.

We know from adoption in married heterosexual couples that biology isn’t an absolute necessity. But to purposely place a nonbiological child into a family that cannot provide both a mother and a father is to deprive that child of what is necessary for healthy growth.

Some argue that having two loving parents must be better. But better than what? Better than a single mother, perhaps. There are possibly two incomes, and two parents to share the parenting work. But there are not both male and female role models.

Unfortunately, more recent data is coming out with more troubling outcomes. Much of this comes from adult children raised by homosexual parents, which started coming out around 2015, in testimony before the Supreme Court in the Obergefell decision. For example, Dawn Stefanowicz testified graphically of her childhood with a homosexual father who later died of AIDS.

It is quite difficult to discuss the implications of growing up in a gay household until later in adulthood when we have developed a measure of personal identity and independence apart from our GLBT parent, partners and the subcultures. We are often forced to approve and tolerate all forms of expressed sexuality, including various sexual and gender identity preferences.

And this from Robert Oscar Lopez, the son of a lesbian woman, who told how homosexual activists had harassed his employers and spread lies about him on the internet following his coming forward about his childhood experiences:

Children raised by same-sex couples face a gauntlet if they break the silence about the “no disadvantages” consensus…. In such a climate, I must conclude that placing children in same-sex couples’ homes is dangerous, because they have no space or latitude to express negative feelings about losing a mom or dad, and in fact they have much to fear if they do.

There’s a fairly recent memoir written by the daughter of fantasy fiction writer Marion Zimmer Bradley, who was a lesbian, and the author’s father was gay—and both were pedophiles. Moira Greyland’s account, The Last Closet, The Dark Side of Avalon, is both frightening and horrifying, also well documented, since it was her testimony that convicted her father. But it isn’t just her personal experience with these particular parents that is at issue. It is this more general conclusion:

Moira Greyland, image from moiragreyland.net
found here

Every single child of gay parents with whom I spoke had certain things in common. Those with only same-sex parents in the home ached for their missing parent and longed for a real father, and nearly all of us had been sexualized far too young.

That brings us to the difficult issue related to same-sex parenting. We tend to look at others with the assumption that they are like us. I’ve coined the word “heteromorphism” to mean looking at same-sex relationships and attributing to them what we see in our own heterosexual relationships, things like permanence and fidelity. It’s hard to look at what we see on the surface and assume differently. We don’t want to assume differently. And most of us don’t know any of these couples—particularly long-term same-sex couples—well enough to feel comfortable asking some pertinent questions, such as, “What does fidelity in your marriage mean to you? Is it a complete physical/sexual fidelity, or more of an emotional fidelity?”[xxx]

Because the data shows—and has shown for already a couple of decades—that committed “married” same-sex couples have on average 8 sexual partners a year.[xxxi] Lesbians are slightly less promiscuous but still much more than heterosexual women.[xxxii] Single lesbians, by the way, tend to have at least one male sexual partner per year, in addition to their homosexual partner(s).[xxxiii] Oddly, homosexual teens, whether bisexual or not, are four times more likely to have gotten pregnant or gotten someone pregnant than an equivalent aged heterosexual teen.[xxxiv]

Committed heterosexual couples—particularly religious couples—tend to go through life with complete fidelity. Overall, heterosexual marriages have 75-80% of husbands and 88-90% of wives remain faithful throughout the marriage.[xxxv]

A typical heterosexual non-religious male averages 14 sexual partners in a lifetime, a female averages 7.[xxxvi] A typical homosexual is likely to have hundreds, some even thousands.[xxxvii] Their sex isn’t about love and commitment; it is about trying (apparently unsuccessfully) to satisfy personal lust. It appears much more like sexual addiction than heterosexual family loyalty and fidelity.

Fidelity translates as security. Infidelity translates as upheaval. For a child being raised in a home of upheaval, that is significant.

Summary

The data I’m providing today is not unknown. Most of it I’ve had in my possession for a couple of decades, with more coming in over time simply because I’m attuned to it. But it is practically forbidden to mention in mainstream media. Just citing data is enough to get a person cancelled in today’s culture.

If it were true that the family forms were equivalent, then it would be safe to reveal the basic data about them and find ways to improve them all.

Again, none of this is to say that any particular family, regardless of its form, is destined for success or doomed to failure. Those who currently find themselves in an other-than-ideal family form should still keep earnestly striving to love and give all that they can muster for the sake of their family members. That will always be better than succumbing to the opposite of civilization, which is savagery.

But they really ought to increase their odds of success by surrounding themselves with a critical mass of most-likely-to-succeed traditional families. Because that means they’re surrounding themselves with thriving civilization, and they’re going to need that.

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[i] Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, 1996. “Evolutionary Psychology and Marital Conflict: The Relevance of Stepchildren,” in Sex, Power, Conflict: Evolutionary and Feminist Perspectives, eds. David M. Buss and Neil M. Malamuth (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 9-28.

[ii] Timothy J. Biblarz and Greg Gottainer, 2000. “Family Structure and Children’s Success: A Comparison of Widowed and Divorced Single-Mother Families,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 62(2) (May): 533.

[iii] William H. Jeynes, 2000. “The Effects of Several of the Most Common Family Structures on the Academic Achievement of Eighth Graders,” Marriage and Family Review 30(1/2): 73-97; Donna Ruane Morrison and Amy Ritualo, 2000. “Routes to Children’s Economic Recovery After Divorce: Are Cohabitation and Remarriage Equivalent?” American Sociological Review 65 (August): 560-580; Lingxin Hao, 1996. “Family Structure, Private Transfers, and the Economic Well-Being of Families with Children,” Social Forces 75: 269-292; Wendy D. Manning and Daniel T. Lichter, 1996. “Parental Cohabitation and Children’s Economic Well-Being,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 58: 998-1010.

[iv] See, for example, Pamela J. Smock, et al., 1999. “The Effect of Marriage and Divorce on Women’s Economic Well-Being,” American Sociological Review 64: 794-812; Ross Finie, 1993. “Women, Men and the Economic Consequences of Divorce: Evidence from Canadian Longitudinal Data,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 30(2): 205ff. Teresa A. Mauldin, 1990. “Women Who Remain Above the Poverty Level in Divorce: Implications for Family Policy,” Family Relations 39(2): 141ff. See also Sara McLanahan, 2000. “Family, State, and Child Well-Being,” Annual Review of Sociology 26(1): 703ff; I. Sawhill, 1999. “Families at Risk,” in H. H. Aaron and R.D. Reischauer (eds.) Setting National Priorities (Washington, D.C.: Brookings): 97-135.

[v] Lingxin Hao, 1996. “Family Structure, Private Transfers, and the Economic WellBeing of Families with Children,” Social Forces 75: 269-292; Kermit Daniel, 1995. “The Marriage Premium,” in Mariano Tommasi and Kathryn Ierullli (eds.) The New Economics of Human Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 113-25. See also Rebecca M. Blank, 1997. It Takes a Nation: A New Agenda for Fighting Poverty (New York: Russell Sage Foundation).

[vi] Timothy J. Biblarz and Greg Gottainer, 2000. “Family Structure and Children’s Success: A Comparison of Widowed and Divorced Single-Mother Families,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 62(2) (May): 533.

[vii] Zeng-Yin Cheng and Howard B. Kaplan, 1999. “Explaining the Impact of Family Structure During Adolescence on Adult Educational Attainment,” Applied Behavioral Science Review 7(1): 23ff; Jan O. Johnsson and Michael Gahler, 1997. “Family Dissolution, Family Reconstitution, and Children’s Educational Careers: Recent Evidence From Sweden,” Demography 34(2): 277-293; Dean Lillard and Jennifer Gerner, 1996. “Getting to the Ivy League,” Journal of Higher Education 70(6): 706ff.

[viii] Ronald Angel and Jacqueline Worobey, 1988. “Single Motherhood and Children’s Health,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 29: 38-52.

[ix] J. E. Schwartz et al., 1995. “Childhood Sociodemographic and Psychosocial Factors as Predictors of Mortality Across the Life-Span,” American Journal of Public Health 85: 1237-1245.

[x] Jerald G. Bachman, et al., 1997. Smoking, Drinking and Drug Use in Young Adulthood (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates); Carol Miller-Tutzauer et al., 1991. “Marriage and Alcohol Use: A Longitudinal Study of Maturing Out,” Journal of Studies on Alcohol 52: 434-440.

[xi] Lee A. Lillard and Linda J. Waite, 1995. “’Til Death Do Us Part: Marital Disruption and Mortality,” American Journal of Sociology 100: 1131-56; Catherine E. Ross et al., 1990. “The Impact of the Family on Health: Decade in Review,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 52: 1059-1078.

[xii] E. Mavis Hetherington and John Kelly, 2002. For Better or For Worse: Divorce Reconsidered (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.); Paul R. Amato, 2001. “Children of Divorce in the 1990s: An Update of the Amato and Keith (1991) Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Family Psychology 15(3): 355-370; Judith S. Wallerstein et al., 2000. The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study (New York: Hyperion); Paul R. Amato, 2000. “The Consequences of Divorce for Adults and Children,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 62(4): 1269ff. Ronald L. Simons, et al., 1999. “Explaining the Higher Incidence of Adjustment Problems Among Children of Divorce Compared with Those in Two-Parent Families,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 61(4) (November): 1020ff.; Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, 1989. Second Chances: Men, Women and Children a Decade After Divorce (New York: Ticknor and Fields).

[xiii] Gregory R. Johnson et al., 2000. “Suicide Among Adolescents and Young Adults: A Cross-National Comparison of 34 Countries,” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 30(1): 74-82; David Lester, 1994. “Domestic Integration and Suicide in 21 Nations, 19501985,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology XXXV (1-2): 131-137.

[xiv] Susan L. Brown, 2000. “The Effect of Union Type on Psychological Well-Being: Depression Among Cohabitors versus Marrieds,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 41 (September): 241-255.

[xv] Cynthia Harper and Sara McLanahan, 1998. “Father Absence and Youth Incarceration.” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association) (San Francisco) (August).

[xvi] Ronet Bachman, 1994. “Violence Against Women,” A National Crime Victimization Survey Report NCK-145325 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics) (January): See Table 2 and 3.

[xvii] Margo I. Wilson and Martin Daly, 1992. “Who Kills Whom in Spouse Killings? On the Exceptional Sex Ratio of Spousal Homicides in the United States,” Criminology 30(2): 189-215; J.E. Straus and M.A. Stets, 1989. “The Marriage License as Hitting License: A Comparison of Assaults in Dating, Cohabiting and Married Couples,” Journal of Family Violence 4(2): 161-180.

[xviii] Nicky Ali Jackson, 1996. “Observational Experiences of Intrapersonal Conflict and Teenage Victimization: A Comparative Study among Spouses and Cohabitors,” Journal of Family Violence 11: 191-203.

[xix] C.D. Siegel et al., 1996. “Mortality from Intentional and Unintentional Injury Among Infants of Young Mothers in Colorado, 1982 to 1992,” Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 150(10) (October): 1077-1083.

[xx] Thomas E. Hanlon et al., “Incarcerated Drug-Abusing Mothers:  Their Characteristics and Vulnerability,” The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse 1 (2005):  59-77. 

[xxi] Cynthia Harper, and Sara S. McLanahan, “Father Absence and Youth Incarceration,” Journal of Research on Adolescence 14 (September 2004): 369-397.

[xxii] Doris J.James, “Profile of Jail Inmates, 2002,”  (NCJ 201932). Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, July 2004.

[xxiii] Dewey Cornell “Characteristics of Adolescents Charged with Homicide” Behavior Sciences and the Law 5 (1987): 11-23.

[xxiv] The Real Root Causes of Violent Crime: The Breakdown of Marriage, Family, and Community by Patrick F. Fagan Backgrounder #1026 March 17, 1995.

[xxv] David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America (New York:  BasicBooks, 1995): 31.

[xxvi] National Center for Education Statistics. The Condition of Education. NCES 1999022. Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Education, 1999: 76.

[xxvii] David Popenoe, Life Without Father:  Compelling New Evidence that Fatherhood and Marriage are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society, (Harvard University Press:  Cambridge Massachusetts, 1996): 67-68. 

[xxviii] Bruce J. Ellis, John E. Bates, Kenneth A. Dodge, David M. Ferguson, L. John Horwood, Gregory S. Pettit, and Lianne Woodward. “Does Father Absence Place Daughters at Special Risk for Early Sexual Activity and Teenage Pregnancy,” Child Development 74 (May/June 2003): 801-821.

[xxix] Loren Marks, “Same-sex parenting and children’s outcomes: A closer examination of the American psychological association’s brief on lesbian and gay parenting,” Social Science Research, Volume 4, Issue 4, July 2012, pp. 735-751. See also Ana Samuel, “The Kids Aren’t All Right: New Family Structures and the ‘No Differences’ Claim,” The Witherspoon Institute, June 14, 2012, http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/06/5640/#_edn1 . [See the footnotes.]

[xxx] Consider, for example, the research of McWhirter and Mattison. They interviewed 156 male couples and concluded that in these relationships "fidelity is not defined in terms of sexual behavior, but rather by their emotional commitment to one another" (The Male Couple; David P. McWhirter, M.D., and Andrew M. Mattison, M.S.W., Ph.D.; Prentice-Hall, 1984; p 252, 3).  The researchers—a gay couple themselves—reported that two-thirds of the couples began their relationship with the expectation of sexual exclusivity, but that the partners became more permissive with time. They found that ALL the couples who had been together at least 5 years had incorporated some provision for outside sexual activity in their relationships. In fact, the authors concluded that "the single most important factor that keeps couples together past the ten-year mark is the lack of possessiveness they feel. Many couples learn very early in their relationship that ownership of each other sexually can become the greatest internal threat to their staying together."  See also After the Ball; Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen; Doubleday, 1989. The book acknowledges that "the cheating ratio of 'married' gay males, given enough time, approaches 100%.... Many gay lovers, bowing to the inevitable, agree to an 'open relationship,' for which there are as many sets of ground rules as there are couples" (p 330). 

[xxxi] Xiridou, Maria, et al, “The Contribution of Steady and Casual Partnerships to the Incidence of HIV infection among Homosexual Men in Amsterdam,” 1029-1038 AIDS, 17 (7) May 2, 2003. “Those with a steady partner and those without reported having an average of 8 and 22 casual partners per year, respectively.”

[xxxii] Fethers, Katherine, et al., “Sexually Transmitted Infections and Risk Behaviors in Women Who Have Sex with Women,” Sexually Transmitted Infections 76 (2000): 348.

[xxxiii] Zipter, Yvonne, “The Disposable Lesbian Relationship,” Windy City Times, (December 15, 1986), p. 18, and see Zipter, a lesbian, in an article in Chicago’s gay journal for the quote.

[xxxiv] Allie Shah, “Gay Teens Have Higher Pregnancy Rates than Their Straight Peers,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 6, 2015: http://www.startribune.com/gay-teens-have-higher-pregnancy-rates-than-their-straight-peers/320842991/

[xxxv] Robert T. Michael et al., Sex in America: A Definitive Survey (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1994). See also Michael W. Widerman, "Extramarital Sex: Prevalence and Correlated in a National Survey," Journal of Sex Research 34 (1997): 2.

[xxxvi] Derek Beres, “Men claim they have more sexual partners than women. But is it true?” Big Think, July 30, 2018, https://bigthink.com/21st-century-spirituality/men-claim-they-have-more-sex-partners-than-women-but-is-it-true

[xxxvii] G. Rotell, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (New York, Dutton, 1997).