"Young Americans are more likely than the general public to favor a government-run universal health care insurance system, an open-door policy on immigration and the legalization of gay marriage, according to a New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll.

... Forty-four percent said they believed that same-sex couples should be permitted to get married, compared with 28 percent of the public at large. They are more likely than their elders to support the legalization of possession of small amounts of marijuana.

The findings on gay marriage were reminiscent of an exit poll on Election Day 2004: 41 percent of 18-to-29-year-old voters said gay couples should be permitted to legally marry, according to the exit poll.

...Their views on abortion mirror those of the public at large: 24 percent said it should not be permitted at all, while 38 percent said it should be made available but with greater restrictions. Thirty-seven percent said it should be generally available.

In one potential sign of shifting attitudes, respondents, by overwhelming margins, said they believed that the nation was prepared to elect as president a woman, a black person or someone who admitted to having used marijuana. But they said that they did not believe Americans would elect someone who had used cocaine or someone who was a Mormon."

"Sometimes when the earth shudders it doesn't make a sound. That's what happened in Harrisburg, Pa., recently.

On April 30, a state Superior Court panel ruled that a child can have three legal parents. The case, Jacob v. Shultz-Jacob, involved two lesbians who were the legal co-parents of two children conceived with sperm donated by a friend. The panel held that the sperm donor and both women were all liable for child support.

...The case follows a similar decision handed down by a provincial court in Ontario in January. In what appeared to be the first such ruling in any Western nation, the court ruled that a boy can legally have three parents. In that case the biological mother and father had parental rights and wished for the biological mother's lesbian partner, who functions as the boy's second mother, to have such rights as well.

The idea of assigning children three legal parents is not limited to North America. In 2005, expert commissions in Australia and New Zealand proposed that sperm or egg donors be allowed to "opt in" as a child's third parent. That same year, scientists in Britain received state permission to create an embryo from the DNA of three adults, raising the real possibility that they all could be granted equal legal claims to the child if the embryo developed to term.

...Fortunate children have many people who love them as much as their parents do. But in the best interests of children, no court should break open the rule of two when assigning legal parenthood."

The Mysterious Marriage Advantage  

Children living with married parents do better than children living with single or cohabiting parents.  Virtually all sociologists acknowledge this simple truth.  However, under the ubiquitous campus pressures to be politically correct, many social scientists try very hard to explain away this marital advantage as an artifact of socioeconomic characteristics other than marital status per se.

Both the advantage children experience by living with married parents and the urge progressive scholars feel to explain away that advantage are on full display in a study of children's economic well-being recently published in the Journal of Marriage and Family by sociologists at Bowling Green State University. 

Scrutinizing nationally representative data collected in 1999 from 42,000 households, the Bowling Green researchers outline a familiar and predictable pattern of marital advantage:  Children living with married biological parents enjoy a decided economic advantage over those living with cohabiting biological parents, with single mothers, with married-couple stepfamilies, and with cohabiting stepfamilies.  The official poverty level for children living with married biological parents runs less than 8%, compared with 23% for children living with cohabiting biological parents, 43% for those living with single mothers, 10% for those living with married stepfamilies, and 19% for those living with cohabiting stepfamilies.  A similar pattern emerges in data for food and housing insecurity.

By using multivariable statistical analyses, the authors of the new study establish that for their overall sample "child and parent characteristics account for at least 70% of the difference in the well-being of children living in married and cohabiting two biological parent families."   The researchers consequently use such analyses to assert that "the benefits of marriage may be a result of parents' education and race and ethnic group rather than marriage per se."  This assertion no doubt serves the authors' ideological interests, since the political correctness of the modern university militates against belief in the social benefits of "marriage per se."   

But the data compel the authors to admit that "marriage per se" apparently confers some benefits that even multivariable analyses cannot account for.  For instance, when looking at the data for black children, the authors concede that "the marital status gap in housing insecurity is not explained by the covariates in the [statistical] model."  Similarly, in multivariable analyses of the data of white children, the researchers find that "the marital advantage persists when considering a reduction in food and housing security."   Such findings force the researchers to concede that "among white children, there sometimes is a marriage advantage that cannot be accounted for by their parents' socioeconomic characteristics."  For politically correct academics, such concessions can be quite painful.