Karen and Rick Santorum via Getty ImagesRepublican presidential candidate Rick Santorum pontificated pre-primary in New Hampshire about the evils of gay marriage and even worse, gay parenthood. Santorum quoted an unnamed ‘anti-poverty expert’ (let’s hope it’s not George Rekers) who allegedly claims that children are better off having a parent in prison who has abandoned them than having two same-sex parents.

This assertion came as crushing news to three of the children in his boarding school audience who had gay parents.The LA Times reported then:

Allowing gays to marry and raise children, Santorum said, amounts to “robbing children of something they need, they deserve, they have a right to. You may rationalize that that isn’t true, but in your own life and in your own heart, you know it’s true.”

Rick Santorum’s views on gay marriage are well known, post his 2003 interview with the Associated Press in which the Republican candidate for president described gay marriage as no different from “man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.”

While we wait for Santorum to cough up his sources for a ‘research position’ undocumented to professionals who track research studies on homosexuals, the Washington Post refers us to a study published in this month’s Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.

“Quality of Life of Adolescents Raised From Birth by Lesbian Mothers,” is part of a long-term study of American lesbian families called the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, which is supported by The Williams Institute at UCLA Law, a research center specializing in sexual orientation law and public policy.

This study had a completely different conclusion than Santorum’s unnamed research guru.

In 2006, the LA Times concluded that there was no research that confirmed any negatives to the children of gay parents, while also stressing that the research field is still young.

In 2001, Judith Stacey and Timothy J. Biblarz, then sociologists at the University of Southern California, published a review of 21 previous studies of the children of homosexual parents (most of them lesbians). Almost uniformly, they wrote, the research found no systematic differences between children reared by a mother and father and those raised by same-sex parents.

The researchers expressed an observation that “The boys may be less aggressive. There’s some indication the girls will have a wider array of career aspirations.” The duo also concluded — not that the children are more likely to become lifestyle choice homosexuals themselves — but that they are inclined to be more experimental sexually.