July saw the launch of a mobile billboard campaign that drew attention to the apparent lack of concern for children in the same-sex marriage debate.
The billboard was to be driven around central London for two days, highlighting research which shows that, compared with all other domestic arrangements, including those of gay couples, children flourish best when raised by their married birth parents. The evidence can be found on the website www.GayMarriageNoThanks.com
However, after the driver received abuse and the truck carrying the billboard was vandalised, the advertising company, Adtrailers Ltd., informed the group sponsoring the billboard that they were unable to send out the truck for a second day. A company representative said that people had made personal threats by email and over the phone which were ‘horrific’ and ‘the worst I have known’.
Gay parents do not ‘do better’
Government equalities spokeswoman, Baroness Stowell, and Lord Winston had claimed in the House of Lords that research shows that children raised by gay parents ‘do better’ than those raised by opposite sex couples. This assertion was apparently based on the limited survey by Professor Susan Golombok of Cambridge. The GayMarriageNoThanks group, including Dr. Peter May, handed a letter in at Downing Street enclosing a copy of the far more rigorous, inclusive and extensive New Family Structures Study research by US Professor Mark Regnerus, published last year, which used a sample of nearly 3,000 respondents. This shows emphatically that children are ‘most apt to succeed as adults — on multiple counts and across a variety of domains — when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father’.
