DETROIT – Outside Detroit federal court, the protesters continued on Thursday.
Inside, a judge listened to testimony to determine whether there is a measurable difference in the outcome of a child's life if that child grows up in a household with same-sex parents. The state of Michigan's key witness, Dr. Doug Allen, is an academia from Canada.
Allen perhaps discredited himself in the final 30 seconds of his testimony while being questioned by the attorney for Jayne Rowse and April DeBoer. It was a bombshell. The dialogue went like this:
Attorney Ken Mogill: Is it accurate that you believe the consequence in engaging in homosexual acts is a separation from God and eternal damnation from God?
Allen: Unrepentant, yes.
More: Paula Tutman's courtroom blog for March 6
It's a bombshell because Dr. Allen, a Canadian theorist and an expert in crunching and interpreting data, had spent the first 3 and 1/2 hours of his testimony debunking dozens of studies that indicated there is no measurable difference in outcomes if a child is raised by same-sex parents. He debunked those studies with numerous studies of his own that indicated that when you re-interpret the data and include variables other scientists left out, there is a very negative outcome when children are raised by same sex parents.
In his studies using census data from the U.S. and Canada, along with questionnaires, he found a significant reduction in the likelihood that a child will graduate high school if that child grows up in a household with same sex parents.
In his findings, daughters of gay men are only 15 percent as likely to graduate high school compared to children in traditional households. Daughters of lesbian of same-sex female couples are only 45 percent as likely to graduate high school. Sons of same-sex female parents are 76 percent as likely to graduate high school, while sons of same-sex male parents are only 61 percent as likely to graduate high school compared to children who come from traditional households with parents of the opposite sex.
The testimony has been painful for the plaintiffs DeBoer and Rowse.
"That's the hardest part is that we're not numbers. We're not a number. We're just one family in the big pool that's here fighting for our kids' rights. That's all we're here for and that's all we have been here for," said Rowse.
More: Roger Weber blogs from trial over Michigan's gay marriage ban