Andrew links today to Jim Burroway at BTB. Jim makes essentially the same point I did about the results a 25-year study that found children with lesbian parents do better than children with straight parents. Here's Jim:

[It’s] easy to imagine one reason for this surprising finding. These parents were recruited because they were about to undergo artificial insemination. This means that in every case, these children were brought into the world because they were wanted and planned for. None of them are the product of a drunken tryst in the back seat of a Chevy. These mothers had to investigate options, invest money, and really want to become mothers. This alone can account for the difference.

Or as I wrote in The Kid: gay people can't get drunk and adopt one night.

It seems to me that it should be easy to do an apples-to-apples comparison: take the data researchers collected on children with lesbian parents—all conceived via artificial insemination—and compare it to data collected on children conceived the same way but born to straight parents.

Finally: some folks are asking why gay male parents weren't included in this study. That's an easy one: the study was initiated 25 years ago and gay men weren't having children or starting families of their own back then. Very few out gay men could see themselves as parents mid-Reagan, gay men had other shit to worry about 1985, and there weren't many-if-any adoption agencies willing to work with gay male couples twenty five years ago and surrogacy pretty much didn't exist then. There also weren't role models for gay male parents back in 1985. Of the very few gay men with children around in 1985, most had had their children while trapped in loveless heterosexual marriages, relationships they entered into under duress and fled when coming out, and almost all lost contact with their children as a consequence of coming out. Lesbians who wanted to be parents had a great deal more autonomy in 1985—hell, they still do. Lesbians don't need to line up the support of adoption/surrogacy agencies and social workers and judges and state legislators and governors before they can become parents. All they need a little bit of sperm.

And, frozen or fresh, sperm is pretty easy to come by.