Douglas Allen was  a witness in the 2014 case in Michigan to overturn their anti-same sex marriage law. He is a Canadian economist who is associated with both the Ruth Institute and the National Organization for Marriage, both strongly anti-gay organizations.

He studies family as it relates to economics, including the concept of sexual economics (the idea that the disparity in sexual desire between men and women drives an economic exchange between men and women where all women trade sex for economic benefit).

While he may be a fine economist in many areas, his strong conservative and anti-gay religious views make his family studies somewhat questionable. Under oath in the Michigan case, he testified that he believed that all unrepentant homosexuals are going to hell. That makes it very difficult to be an impartial researcher on this subject. The irony is that Allen testified repeatedly that his personal opinions had no impact on his conclusions, and yet, for him to be wrong, his God would also have to be wrong.

Allen testified that his recent study published in Review of Economics of the Household, showed that children raised by gay couples graduate high school at 65% of the rate of the children of traditional couples. While Canada has had same sex marriage since 2005, Allen’s data only went up to 2006, ignoring many years of legal same sex marriage. Legal same sex marriage is the real argument- that it provides more stability and should provide better outcomes. If you look primarily at couples who have been unable to marry and are raising children, you might expect worse outcomes for children that might be improved with legal same sex marriage.

As with Mark Regnerus, who also testified in the Michigan case, his conclusions have been strongly criticized by other researchers. He stood by them, though, with the rather surprising claim that his results may be better than those from American research that shows the opposite conclusions because Canadians are more likely to be honest and Canada is a more tolerant place.

According to sociologist Phillip N. Cohen, the Allen study has many of the same flaws as the Regnerus study, and its conclusions are meaningless. While it starts with a large sample, the actual number of gay and lesbian households is relatively small. Allen claims that the law does not allow him to release the actual sample size. Cohen estimates that it is probably about 85 gay father children and around 194 lesbian mother children- not an impressive sample size at all.

The study looked at children 17 to 22 years old. That means that some of his sample are still in high school and have not even graduated yet. There is no analysis comparing the people in his sample to the population of 17-22 year-olds who don’t live with their parents.  Could it be, as suggested by Kristi Williams, that gay or lesbian parents are more successful at launching their children from home that heterosexual parents? In Allen’s study, that would be a sign of a bad family outcome, according to Cohen. This one problem alone makes the conclusions of the study questionable.

The study compares apples and oranges- gay parents versus married parents, instead of the more comparable gay married parents versus heterosexual married parents. As such, it is completely irrelevant to the question of whether gay people should allowed to be married, since they are already raising children and one would expect a better outcome with the stability of marriage.

The statistic, “children of gay and lesbian parents are 65% as likely to graduate” is also misleading. The graduation rate, assuming that any of his numbers are accurate, is actually just 6 percentage points different, although it sounds much worse as an odds ratio the way he uses it.

Allen said in an interview:

Indeed, mothers may provide some parenting services that a father cannot provide, and fathers may provide parenting services that mothers cannot. These services may be necessary for girls but not necessary for boys. For example, I’ve been told by medical people that when a biological father is present in the home, daughters begin menstruation at an older age. Later menstruation is likely correlated with delayed sexual activity, etc., and this may lead to a better likelihood of high school completion.

His study, though, shows that daughters raised by gay parents have the worse outcomes of the four combinations. He can’t even keep his own research straight (no pun intended). And while it is surprisingly true that research shows that girls may delay menstruation in fatherless families, it is only by a month or two. Is it any wonder that Allen’s fellow sociologists have little respect for his conclusions.