Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This paper seeks to explore the attitudes of lesbian mothers towards same‐sex marriage, focusing in particular on how they perceive the relationship between marriage and children's best interests. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on 36 semi‐structured interviews with lesbian mothers living in British Columbia and Alberta, comparing their views on marriage and children's best interests with those articulated by lesbian and gay litigants during the Canadian same‐sex marriage campaign. Findings It was found that few of the mothers made any positive link between having married parents and children's best interests. Only a quarter of the couples had married or intended to marry. Research limitations/implications Whether the views expressed in this research will be embraced by the next generation of lesbian mothers is difficult to predict. Prospective lesbian mothers will be able to marry before having children, will likely experience greater societal pressure to marry, and may have weaker ties to feminist politics. The issue should be revisited to see whether the views expressed in the research resonate with the next generation of mothers. Practical implications Law reform directed at same‐sex families should not presume that lesbians perceive there to be any positive relationship between marriage and children's best interests. Originality/value The paper provides empirical data on how lesbian mothers understand the relationship, if any, between having married parents and children's best interests. It challenges the universality of the very traditional views expressed in the same‐sex marriage litigation, and argues that amongst the wider lesbian mothering community attitudes towards the relationship between marriage and parenting are considerably more diverse.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".