The Heart-Warming Science Of Gay Dad Brains

"Opponents of marriage equality claim that same-sex couples should be banned from marrying because children deserve both a mother and a father, but a new study suggests otherwise. Researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel compared the brain scans of new moms, new straight dads, and new gay dads, and found that the gay dads developed brain patterns that resemble both mothers and fathers.

In the study, the mothers, who played a primary caregiver role for their children, demonstrated heightened activity in their brain's emotion-processing regions when watching their children. The straight fathers, playing a traditional secondary parenting role, exhibited increased cognitive activity in the brain, demonstrating awareness of what their children's cries and cues were trying to communicate. But the gay fathers demonstrated both the mothers' emotional and fathers' cognitive brain activity, suggesting that they were, at least according to their brains, operating like both mothers and fathers."* The Young Turks hosts Ana Kasparian and John Iadarola break it down.

*Read more here from Zack Ford / ThinkProgress: