//I believe that same-sex couples should not be able to adopt because a child should have a mother and a father; anything less is unnatural. Anything else is against natural law, and no scientfic blah will change that.//

A brief thought experiment: take the fictional time machine of your choice (I prefer a flying DeLorean or a 1960's English police box), go back just a few short centuries to a time when medicine was somewhat less advanced than it is these days, run that idea up the flagpole and see if it will fly.

Childbirth is risky. Do you have any idea how many women it killed before we developed better medicine? It wasn't at all uncommon for children to grow up without their mothers, because their mothers weren't alive to care for them.

These days we have much better medical science. Women don't die from childbirth. But we do have a different social and legal attitude to divorce, so children are often raised by single parents. The pendulum does seem to have swung the other way, insofar as instead of the father providing for all his offspring regardless of their mother, it is now considered a mothers job to provide for their offspring regardless of their fatherhood.

I'm not sure that it matters. It's too late and I'm too tired to be looking up examples, but I'm sure that a few of the Isaac Newtons, Lord Nelsons, J.S. Mills etc. never got the chance to know their real mum and didn't suffer the worse for it. My late granddad was raised single-handedly by his mother; he fathered seven (7) children and twice as many grandchildren. And he didn't start till he was forty (40). Not a bad effort. We miss you granddad.

I think what really matters is having a parent - even if it is just the one - who cares. Because I've seen the result of children being raised by their biological Mum and Dad when neither cared more about their children than their own concerns, and the result is neglect.

Deleted for abuse.

Deleted for allowing self to be provoked by previous post.

AJ,

So emotions, beliefs, nature and being human count as nothing against science and "studies", right? And, you know more about my relationship with my family than I do; anything I say is "invalid".

The trouble with being like you - an emotionless robot, controlled by science and 'studies' -
is your lack of ability to discern the difference between real science and junk. Just because some tool puts 'studies' up on the internet, you take them as gospel. You would have made a good disciple of Kinsey, who came up with his sexual guff trying to legitamise his own madness and perversions. Well, each to his own, I suppose. And, I must thank you for increasing my self-esteem. The more I read the ravings of the weirdos and Lefties on OLO, the better and happier I feel about my own humanity, sanity and wayyof seeing things

A J Phillips, "There are weaknesses in every social science study and data-gathering method. But so what?...All studies have their weaknesses, which is why they need to be taken cumulatively"

What a load of bollocks. Garbage in, garbage out, as the IT professionals say.

What you are trying to do is pull the wool over the eyes of a public that trusts scientific research and mislead readers into believing that findings that are so fatally compromised by such severe restrictions as self-reporting are 'proving' what you infer. That is unethical.

If you and other activists had a shred of principle - which you obviously don't - you would not seek to mislead. You would be divulging the truth up front, that the conclusions you infer and prefer to be taken as fact are NOT supported at all by the 'studies'. What you hope is that the feckless tabloid pick up your slanted and unsupportable pitch and report it as fact, which regrettably some do.

Then you have the hide to swamp readers with links and posts, bullying as you do, pretending that there is a weight of evidence, which there isn't. You hope that people will not be bothered reading further to see for themselves.