Bernardi's views backed by the facts

Indeed, that simply happens to be the clear findings of the international social science data from some five decades now. To point out these basic truths is of course not about attacking single mums. The truth is, as Cory and other social conservatives certainly recognise, single mums - or dads - of course need all the help they can get.

They are obviously dealing with a double load of responsibilities while having only half the resources. So all the pro-family organisations around have plenty of help and resources available for single parents and single families. James Dobson's Focus on the Family is one such example.

So no one is bagging single parents here. They need our help. But the point that Cory, I and others are making is rather different. It has to do with public policy and the like. What are the ideal policies when it comes to families that governments should seek to implement here?

It is one thing to find yourself a single parent through no fault of your own (because of the desertion of a spouse, the death of a spouse, etc). It is quite another thing to deliberately become a single mum, and deprive kids of one of the two most important people in their lives.

If it is true that children thrive, generally speaking, in a married household with their own mother and father, then anyone who really loves children will seek to see that outcome replicated as much as possible. We should make it part of our social policy to encourage things so that as many children as possible are raised in this ideal environment – the "gold standard" as Bernardi calls the married, two-parent home.

So we should not foolishly shoot the messenger here. What Bernardi is saying is 100 per cent correct. Any household – whether homosexual, or one with live-in boyfriends, etc. – should be at the very least frowned upon and not encouraged, given the very real impact such structures have on the wellbeing of children.

Pointing these truths out is not being intolerant, hateful, or narrow-minded. It is called following the evidence where it leads, and putting the wellbeing and priority of children ahead of trendy social experiments and radical alternative lifestyles.

To repeat, the simple and vital pointCory Bernardi is trying to make here is that children have a fundamental right to be raised by two, married, biological parents as much as possible. This is being denied them in so many cases nowadays: homosexual households, deliberate single-parent households, blended families, live-ins, etc.

The truth is, from a public policy point of view, we should seek to so arrange things so as to have as many children as possible raised in intact two-parent homes, and discourage these alternative lifestyle homes which so often can disadvantage if not damage children in so many ways.

Cory is quite right to put the interests of children ahead of various activist minority groups and social engineering schemes. Let me conclude with threesummaries of the evidence just mentioned. The first comes from Sara McLanahan (herself a single mother) and Gary Sandefur:

We reject the claim that children raised by only one parent do just as well as children raised by both parents. We have been studying this question for ten years, and in our opinion the evidence is quite clear: Children who grow up in a household with only one biological parent are worse off, on average, than children who grow up in a household with both of their biological parents, regardless of the parents' race or educational background, regardless of whether the parents are married when the child is born, and regardless of whether the resident parent remarries.

The second is from William Galston of the University of Maryland: