An International expert on child development told an employment tribunal in Sheffield on Thursday that placing a child in the care of a gay couple is not in their best interests.
Professor Dean Byrd, President of the Thrasher Research Fund, and clinical professor of medicine, University of Utah School of medicine is an expert witness in the case of Andrew McClintock verses the Department for Constitutional Affairs, which enters day three today.
Dr Byrd, who is also vice president and standing psychologist to the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), the foremost research body in the US on the medical and social study of homosexuality, based his assertion on on international research on child development.
Dr Byrd will advise the court of extensive worldwide research, demonstrating the financial and emotional stability that dual-sex, married relationships offer a child, and of the huge benefits to their social, health and educational development.
He will also advise the court that children raised in homes with both mothers and fathers navigate the developmental stages of life more easily, are more solid and secure in their self and in their sense of gender identity, perform better at school, have fewer social and emotional problems and become better functioning adults.
He will also tell the court of widely-respected evidence on the consequences of father or mother absence, and will state that while there have been decades of evidence of dual-sex parenting families, studies on same-sex parenting are quite infrequent. Studies of children raised by male couples are virtually "non-existent".
Mr McClintock, a committed Christian, was forced to resign his role as a magistrate on the family panel last year when he asked to be given leave of cases where he would be required to make an order for a child to be placed in the care of a same-sex couple.
Mr McClintock said that went against his Christian conscience and against his legal obligation to act in the best interest of the child, based on all available evidence.
Dr Byrd will conclude his evidence by stating his belief that as a sitting British magistrate, and with the requirements placed on him under the Children's Act, and Article 3 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children (1990), Mr McClintock would have substantial, worldwide evidence on which to base his view that placing a child into the care of a same-sex couple was "not in the best interest of the child".
He will state that Mr McClintock's views are not, in his expert view, discriminatory, but founded on good academic research.
