The Sacred Project of American Sociology

by Christian Smith

Here then is the bottom line of what’s going on: Same-sex households on average have had higher levels of instability than heterosexual households (whether this remains true in the future we do not know), and such instability causes greater problems in the lives of children who come from them. We know this. Yet instability does not cause same-sex households, rather the opposite: some features about same-sex relationships in our society (that last point about society context being potentially decisive) produce experiences of greater household instability. Sociologists advocating the “no difference” conclusion argue that it is really the instability per se, not the same-sex feature, of the household that produces the worse outcome results. That turns “instability” into a generic variable abstracted away from the causally driven disproportionate amount of instability that in fact characterizes same-sex households. However, if that instability is actually caused by something about the same-sex nature of the parent relationships (in the context of a certain kind of society and culture), then controlling for instability only obscures our understanding of how and why the mechanisms-process works to produce outcomes. Otherwise, one would have to claim that the same-sex factor is spurious, which does not make sense. (Consider,