This week the Family Research Council released its second annual report on “belonging and rejection” in U.S. families. That’s a fancy way of basically trying to measure the impact of kids not being raised by their biological parents.

The report looks at several categories of sociological data to score each state, including high school graduation rates, school spending, reading scores, child poverty rates and teenage out-of-wedlock births. Taken together, each state is scored on a scale of 1 to 100, and a bad rating in one category can really screw up a good rating in another.

There’s lots to chew on and some interesting numbers, but two big things jumped out — one that’s in the report, and one that’s not:

— The report has a really harsh view of blended families (at least for research purposes)

— Nearly all the states that allow same-sex marriage come out near the top of family function (at least as measured by this report)

Minnesota came out on top, with a “index of family belonging” total score of 57. Four of the report’s top 10 states allow gay marriage:

No. 6 Iowa: 52.2

No. 7 Massachusetts: 51.9

No. 9 Connecticut: 51.3

No. 10 Vermont: 51

(New Hampshire came in at No. 11 with a score of 50.7. The newest state to allow gay marriage, New York, came in at No. 24 with a score of 47.1).

One important caveat: The District of Columbia, which also allows gay marriage, came in with a “pathologically low” score of 18.6, far behind No. 50 Mississippi (34). Why the low score? Horrendous schools and high rates of poverty.

In fairness, the report did not look at same-sex marriages and was never really intended as a commentary on same-sex marriage (although same-sex families wouldn’t be seen as intact anyway; more on that later).

Why do we care? It seems worth noting that FRC and its allies constantly preach of the “threat” of same-sex marriage to the sanctity and stability of the family. But by the FRC’s own scoring, there are lots of other factors that threaten American family life, and none of them have anything to do with gays and lesbians. What’s more, the states that do allow same-sex marriage actually have some of the healthiest families (again, according to the FRC’s own criteria).

One other thing: FRC has long championed children raised in a home by a mom and a dad, but the report seems to take a pretty dim view of remarriage. Only children who reach adulthood living with both thier biological mother and father were coded as having an intact family. Kids who turn 18 while living with someone else (either as a step-child, adoptee or foster child) was categorized as basically having a broken family, even if they had a married mom and dad at home.

Why do we care? Well, again, the FRC is always saying kids need a mom and a dad, but apparently a stepdad or stepmom doesn’t qualify. That might be news to blended families everywhere. And if adopted kids don’t count, doesn’t that call into question FRC’s commitment to being “pro-life” and saying kids should be adopted, not aborted? I’m not sure of the answer, but it seems a question worth asking.