A bunch of folks have sent me a link to this story about adoptive parents. New research gives the lie to one of the arguments the Washington State Supreme Court used to deny marriage rights to homosexuals. The WA Supremes claimed that reserving marriage for straight couples…

…furthers procreation, essential to the survival of the human race, and further the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by the children’s biological parents… [Children] tend to thrive in families consisting of a father, mother and their biological children.

Take that, gay and straight adoptive parents! Our children “tend to thrive” less optimally than children raised by their biological parents! Those lines were written—let us never forget—by Barbara Madsen, the lying sack of ape shit that intentionally misrepresented her position on gay marriage in order to get her lying-sack-of-ape-shit ass elected. A concurring opinion, written by a justice even more bigoted—if that’s possible—than Madsen herself, was even more disrespectful to adoptive parents: only biological parents are capable of “responsible child rearing.”

You know, like these biological parents. And these. And these.

Well, according to researchers the perceived superiority of biological parents is total bullshit:

Adoptive parents invest more time and financial resources in their children than biological parents, according to a new national study challenging arguments that have been used to oppose same-sex marriage and gay adoption.

The study, published in the new issue of the American Sociological Review, found that couples who adopt spend more money on their children and invest more time on such activities as reading to them, eating together and talking with them about their problems.

Why do adoptive parents do a better job? Well, isn’t it obvious?

“One of the reasons adoptive parents invest more is that they really want children, and they go to extraordinary means to have them,” Indiana University sociologist Brian Powell, one of the study’s three co-authors.

But while this new research knocks down the idiotic anti-gay marriage decision handed down by the WA Supremes—to say nothing of their appalling bias against adoptive parents, gay and straight—it actually supports the idiotic anti-gay marriage decision handed down by New York Court of Appeals, that state’s highest court. It’s worth quoting from the howlingly stupid NY decision at length. Watch as the court twists itself in knots trying to justify a rationale basis for denying same-sex couples the right to marry:

Heterosexual intercourse has a natural tendency to lead to the birth of children; homosexual intercourse does not. Despite the advances of science, it remains true that the vast majority of children are born as a result of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman, and the Legislature could find that this will continue to be true. The Legislature could also find that such relationships are all too often casual or temporary. It could find that an important function of marriage is to create more stability and permanence in the relationships that cause children to be born. It thus could choose to offer an inducement—in the form of marriage and its attendant benefits—to opposite-sex couples who make a solemn, long-term commitment to each other.

Oh, yeah. Those heterosexual relationships—so unstable! So fleeting! Why can’t those people settle down? Clearly without the inducement of marriage straight people would just fuck and fuck and fuck and abandoned babies would be scattered all over the place, like takeout menus. But what about those children adopted by same-sex couples? In Washington state they’re unlucky non-thrivers, irresponsibly reared. And in New York?

[Gay and lesbian] couples can become parents by adoption, or by artificial insemination or other technological marvels, but they do not become parents as a result of accident or impulse. The Legislature could find that unstable relationships between people of the opposite sex present a greater danger that children will be born into or grow up in unstable homes than is the case with same-sex couples, and thus that promoting stability in opposite-sex relationships will help children more.

So because opposite-sex couples do not become parents by accident or impulse—because we are better prepared to be parents, because our children are wanted, planned-for children, because we can’t get drunk and adopt one night—we don’t need an “inducement… to make a solemn, long-term commitment to each other.” And because so many straight people are so irresponsible that they need this inducement, my child’s life has to be made more insecure, his future more uncertain. Because if I could get married to my boyfriend that would somehow make marriage less enticing to straights in needing inducement. Or something.

So this study is welcome—even if it support the NY CoA’s homos-make-much-better-parents-than-heteros argument at the same time that it obliterates the WA Supremes’ bios-do-it-best argument. But it doesn’t really change the fundamentals of the gay marriage debate. When one state’s highest court argues that adoptive parents are more fit than biological parents in order to deny marriage rights to gays and lesbians, and another state’s highest court turns a few weeks later and argues that adoptive parents are less fit than biological parents, it can only mean this: Opponents of same-sex marriage are motivated by animus, pure and simple, and they will make any argument, however shameless, to support their bigotry and excuse discrimination.

And no single study will sway them.