Oh, to be the meat in this sandwich...

Just when I think that I couldn't be more turned on...

I notice that sexy, quizzical little lift of his eyebrow and the lust fires even higher.

Myth No. 3

Myth: There's nothing unusual about a child being raised by two daddies.

Fact: It's so rare that the figures barely register as statistics.

I was intrigued to read a factoid recently about the number of children being raised by gay couples. Despite what fashionable TV shows depict, the numbers are tiny - in Australia, fewer than three children in a thousand, or 0.3%, are being raised by a same sex couple.

Also interestingly, the vast majority of those children are being raised by lesbians, and the vast majority of those children being raised by lesbians are the biological children of one of the lesbian parents. It's hard to find definitive statistics, but it would appear that for every nine children with two mothers there is only one with two fathers.

As such, the popular image of two gay men with their adopted child is about as common as being struck by lightning. To put it into perspective: I live in a city of two million people, including around four hundred thousand children. Statistically, this means that in this entire city there are maybe three dozen children with two daddies... barely enough to fill a typical primary school classroom.

And furthermore, that three dozen is actually dominated by gay men raising their biological children from a previous straight relationship with a new boyfriend, not by two gay men choosing to have a child together.

There were some other interesting facts that came to light during my googling around. In the US, which has a far higher adoption rate than Australia, around 1 in every 780 children is being raised by either a gay male couple or a single gay male. But 1 in 234 is being raised by either a lesbian couple or a single lesbian. Given that lesbians can generate their own children without much fuss, while gay men can only get a child by taking it away from somebody else, this discrepancy is hardly surprising.

I found this graph fascinating too.

In the US, 22% of children in same sex parented households are not adopted or fostered, and are not the offspring or step-children of the householder. Which leaves... what? I assume scenarios like younger siblings being raised by an older brother and his boyfriend after the loss of their parents. Or a gay couple taking in a teenaged gay boy thrown out by his family. Or a high school student living with her gay uncle and his partner while she goes to a good school because her parents live in a one horse town in the middle of nowhere.

It's hard to draw any precise conclusions from these figures, since the data is ambiguous, reliant on a lot of self-identifying, and based on tiny sample groups. It's worth noting that in one study of the US census, it was suspected that nearly half of the same sex couples identified were in fact coding errors; that is, idiots in heterosexual relationships ticking the wrong box.

The other interesting observation I read was that since lesbians overwhelming dominate same sex parenting, most data about the outcomes of children raised by "homosexuals" is primarily about children raised by lesbians. Gay male couples who parent are actually so rare that there really isn't any specific evidence of positive or negative outcomes for the children in their care, despite the statements made by both gay activists or anti-gay activists.