Vermont is the New California?

Via PageOneQ:

While Californians are floundering in and out of the social acceptance closet, the Vermont chapters of four professional organizations Monday endorsed same-sex marriage and dispelled hate-mongers' claims that children in single-sex families fare worse than their peers from traditional nuclear families. 

From a Burlington Free Press article:

Same-sex marriage rights got an endorsement Monday from four Vermont professional organizations who cited research findings that “children of lesbian and gay parents are as likely as those of heterosexual parents to flourish.”

They also said gay and lesbian parents are as likely as their heterosexual counterparts to provide healthy environments for children and that “there is no credible scientific evidence” relating parenting effectiveness to sexual orientation.

Their statement, which comes as the Vermont legislature prepares to consider same-sex marriage legislation, was released at a news conference called by the Vermont Psychological Association, the Vermont Psychiatric Association, the Vermont Association of Mental Health Counselors and the Vermont chapter of the National Association of Social Workers.

The professional organizations did acknowledge that relevant studies have drawn from small research samples. But the implication is not that the research is insufficient. Rather, more research needs to be done to prove the claims hold true on a larger scale. 

The article also points out that the claims touted by fear-mongering groups that children raised in single-sex households often suffer are actually based on research on the children of divorce and NOT on the children of gay parents. Of course organizations opposing pending gay-marriage legislation argue that the research cited by the professional organizations is inadequate and that research would have to include a generation of evidence and large numbers of children to be sufficient. 

Fine, psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health councilors, and social workers need to get going on that research. They need to prove once and for all that the argument against raising a "class of motherless or fatherless children" is just the fear and hate-mongering that it is.