Mom'n'Pop dems & marriage

I just read a commontary in the Washington Times describing the recent constitutional amendment in Kansas. It seems that the powers over there managed to get the question to come up on the Primary instead of the General ballot. This presumably would benefit the democratic position, as democrats cast more primary ballots.

Yet the measure failed by a sizable margin. Seventy something against, a lot like the Hawaii vote coming on ten years ago.

The author of this piece claimed that this is because a sizable (and presumably silent) majority of Democrats do not like the idea of same sex marriage enough to vote in a strict ban. The author then went on at length to detail the reasons why they are doing this, including the frequently-quoted line of "it is bad for the children." This particular challenge is untrue, even if 'common sense' seems to say otherwise.

Back in college when the first round of "gay marriage" legalization started with Hawaii, I did a paper on the topic of the children of such unions. This was in the mid 1990's, and there were several studies on this very topic. One of the big fears at the time (now seldom heard) was that children of such families would end up in same-sex relationships themselves. The actual incidence of homosexuality among such children was higher, though not markedly so (12% vs 9% for instance, JUST outside the margin of error). Another area of concern about such children was mental health and adjustment to society. Again, these children showed nominal or even better health when compared to the standard population. These studies were started in the early eighties, so research into this has been going on for a number of years already.

I haven't had a chance to look at current research. The children in the earlier studies would be hitting college and getting married now, so they would be very valuable research subjects. I want to actually dig up some citations, which I will post once I find them.