Posted on 11/06/2004 11:29:32 PM PST by NYer
PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island, NOV. 5, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Adopted children of same-sex parents face the deprivation of either a mother or father and the strain of living in an unstable and unnatural situation, according to a researcher in the field.
Dale O'Leary, a writer and researcher for the Catholic Medical Association , shared with ZENIT how same-sex parents give their children a second-class upbringing by exacerbating normal problems that adopted kids experience.
Part 1 of this interview is here.
Q: What's the difference between a child being adopted by a same-sex couple and by a heterosexual couple?
O'Leary: If children adopted by married couples ask, "Why was I given up for adoption?" what will the children who are given to same-sex couples ask? Will they not wonder why their mother would give them over to a permanently and purposefully mother-less or father-less family?
And how does adoption by a same-sex couple—which gay activists admit can expose the child to social stress—protect a child from the stigma of being raised by a single mother?
Sooner or later the child will ask, "Why was I deserted by my father, given up by my mother and then treated by society as a second-class baby who could be placed in a second-class situation?"
Persons with same-sex attractions who adopt love their children, and the children love their adoptive parents, but because there is love there will also be denial.
The same-sex couples will not be able to admit to themselves the harm they have done to the children they love, and so will blame "society" or "homophobia" for the problems they face. The children will not be able to voice their dissatisfaction and will at the same time feel guilty for not being grateful. The children will be made to feel that there is something wrong with their natural desire for a parent of opposite sexes.
We have already seen an example of this. Rosie O'Donnell, a very public lesbian and advocate for lesbian adoption, was asked what she would do if her adopted son wanted a father. According to O'Donnell, her son had already expressed that desire. When he was 6, he said, "I want to have a daddy."
O'Donnell replied, "If you were to have a daddy, you wouldn't have me as a mommy because I'm the kind of mommy who wants another mommy. This is the way mommy got born." He said, "OK, I'll just keep you."
While O'Donnell undoubtedly sees this as a positive affirmation of same-sex adoption, there is another interpretation: She made her son feel that his natural desire for a father is a rejection of her. That is a terrible burden to place on a little boy.
And it gets worse. In the same interview, O'Donnell recounted how she explained adoption to her son: "... he understands that there are different types of people; that he grew up in another lady's tummy, and that God looked inside and saw there was a mix-up and that God brought him to me."
In other words, in light of this and the previous conversation between O'Donnell and her son, it is wrong for him to want a daddy because God decided that he shouldn't have one.
Q: What other dangers threaten children who are adopted by same-sex couples?
O'Leary: Children surrendered for adoption have been separated from their biological mothers and often from transitional caregivers. This can lead to attachment disorders. Attachment to a single maternal figure during the first eight months of life is crucial to emotional development. Raising a child with an attachment disorder requires special sensitivity on the part of his or her adoptive parents.
A friend who adopted a child from Eastern Europe discovered that her adopted son had a severe attachment disorder. The specialist told her that his ability to trust was so damaged that she should not leave him for any extended period for several years.
Because children surrendered for adoption have already suffered one major loss, it is very important that they be placed in the most stable situation possible. Same-sex couples are the least stable arrangement.
Gay male couples are very likely to break up; even if they remain together, they are rarely sexually faithful to one another. Lesbian couples are more likely to remain together than gay male couples, but they are not nearly as stable as married heterosexual couples.
Because of this, a child placed with a same-sex couple is at greater risk for a second major loss during childhood. The research on the effects of divorce on children is clear and unequivocal—divorce is profoundly damaging. The damage is necessarily greater for the adoptive child.
Michael Reagan—who was adopted by President Ronald Reagan and his first wife, who later divorced—speaks of divorce as two adults going into a child's room, breaking everything of value and then leaving the child to try to put the pieces back together. Michael Reagan in his vulnerability became the victim of a pedophile who took pornographic pictures of him and then used them to blackmail him into silence.
While the press presents a happy picture of same-sex couples adopting babies, there is a different side of the picture: nasty breakups and custody fights.
An article by Barbara Eisold entitled "Recreating Mother" in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry reports on the effects of a mother-less family on one little boy. This boy was conceived for a male couple using a surrogate mother who was paid for her service.
His father, the older member of the couple, hired a nanny to care for the boy. When she became too emotionally involved she was fired; another nanny was hired and then a third. The boy was then sent to nursery school. By the time he was 4 he was suffering from profound psychological problems and a therapist was hired to treat him.
One of his problems was that he wanted to "buy" a mother. The therapist asks "How do we explain why this child, the son of a male couple, seemed to need to construct a woman—'Mother'—with whom he could play the role of loving boy/man? How did such an idea enter his mind? What inspired his intensity on the subject?"
The therapist was hired to convince this little boy that what was done to him was OK and that he must accept it. But the therapist missed the obvious: Children need mothers. This child was artificially deprived of what he needed.
A recent article in the New York Times Magazine on Ry and Cade—sisters now 22 and 24 years old who were born to a female couple—appears designed to present a positive picture of how having two moms is a "big, messy, incredible experiment" that "worked." However, the lengthy article reveals the many ways in which the experiment has not worked.
Their two "mothers" did not provide the girls with clear models of femininity or masculinity. According to the article, "Ry remembers Cade pouring over Seventeen magazine as if it contained a code she needed to crack." Cade apparently didn't find what she was looking for, and at age 18 came out as a lesbian.
One gathers from the article that Ry's "mothers" were part of an active radical feminist community that held extremely negative views about marriage, and those views affected their daughters.
At one point, Ry was "repulsed" by heterosexual relations and afraid of the "sexist soul-losing domain of oppression" she associated with male-female relationships. At 16 she wrote, "I cannot understand or relate to men because I am so immersed in gay culture and unfamiliar with what it is to have a straight relationship." Ry's mothers encouraged her to have sex with her boyfriend, which she did, but at the same time she felt conflicted about having "sex with a man, which meant 'growing up and away from my mothers.'" Since then she has become more confident with men, but still feels as though she is "passing" for straight.
The experiment has clearly placed a burden on the girls. According to the article, "For most of her life, Ry has been both parent and child to her mothers." If this is supposed to be a success story, one can only imagine what the failures are like.
The adoption controversy is growing as courts and agencies favor same-sex couples over heterosexual couples. Social workers and foster parents who protest are sometimes punished.
Laurie Ellinger, a foster mother who protested the adoption of a black little boy by a white gay male couple, was temporarily suspended from sheltering foster children because she made the case public. Two married Christian couples had tried to adopt the boy, but the baby's natural father protested to the social workers, who had control over the adoption.
Q: How will same-sex couples adopting children affect society?
O'Leary: Our first concern should be the welfare of the children turned over to same-sex couples, but this policy also negatively affects our families. By sanctioning adoption by same-sex couples, the government is sanctioning homosexual behavior. It is one thing for the state to tolerate what goes on behind closed doors and quite another to say that it is equal to marriage.
How will the schools, particularly the elementary schools, handle this problem? The question is not theoretical. Schools in Massachusetts and other areas are already teaching elementary school children to accept same-sex relationships as equal to marriage between a man and woman.
This puts religious parents in an untenable position. They have a duty to teach their children the truth, namely that homosexual behavior is always and will always be contrary to God's plan. On the other hand, they do not want to go into the details of homosexuality with a kindergartner. Nor do they want to subject children being raised by same-sex couples to additional pain.
The only answer for many parents is to withdraw their children from public education. When public schools are used as instruments of indoctrination against religion, religious parents are discriminated against.
Count me in.
Contempt as an ors d'oeuvre. Or however it's spelled.
As a side note, I wonder if things can get turned around, or is it too late? The election gives me the hope that things can get turned around, but I'm still pretty doubtful that it can happen without major disruption of some sort.
Religion aside, I think it takes a tortured reading of the federal constitution to permit a same sex marriage ban. I don't see any difference between this issue or the racial civil rights issue.
Congrats zarf! You fell for the mental re-programming of the homosexual lobby.
Discrimination: is a word whose political redefinition originated in the civil rights movement. In normal usage, discrimination is synonymous with discernment, but as used in a civil rights context it means irrational bias against a person. "Irrational" is the hidden qualifier in the term that distinguishes appropriate discernment from prejudice.
In an enlightened society there can be no rational basis for discrimination on criteria such as race, skin color or ethnicity. However, as with multi-culturalism, the introduction of morally significant criteria changes the analysis of discrimination.
Discrimination against harmful conduct is entirely rational, and in many cases necessary.
Discrimination is now synonymous with racial prejudice in the public mind. The "gay" movement has exploited this association to legitimize its own claims by adding itself to the list of minorities in anti-discrimination statutes.
Moral discrimination is "rational" discrimination.
Fwd to PEDL
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OK!!
I look at it like this, If a small minority of perverse citizens can achieve their goal of turning reality on it's head then it stands to reason that the majority can expose perversion for what it is and make things right again! Keep the faith and fight the good fight!
BTTT
which is also why we need more conservatives to run for county school boards.
It really has become a choice between right and wrong.
Wish everyone could have the same luck I do with their school board. I live in a rural county in S.E. Texas. Mostly Conservative Christian, The county is lopsided to the Republican side.
The kids at the high school 9-12 held a mock election. They had to register and everything just like the real deal. The results were 348 Bush 31 Kerry. 20% Did not participate (failed to register on time)
Beats me ... but I bet zarf has an answer.
Yes .. but the 'system' is now sympathetic to the gays. I am an adoptive parent and this was never an issue. My daughter recently decided to fly out of state to meet her birth mother. The first meeting was like a honeymoon ... there are so many unresolved questions that adotees have. It went so well that she decided to return for a 2 week visit. Three days after her departure, she told her birth mother that she wanted to return home to "her" family. The 'honeymoon' was over.
Giving birth does not make a parent. Raising a child in a loving environment with consistent moral values, is what provides the foundation on which adoptees grow their future lives. My daughter means the world to me. I may not have given birth to her; she is the answer to years of prayer and is given the total respect due to any child born into this world. I love her with all my heart!
I can vouch that extensive screening is indeed done for adoptive parents. My wife and I have been in the process for the past 8 months, and there's still more paperwork that we need to get for the government agencies that will be evaluating our suitability to raise a child.
Remind me never to get on one of these gay threads again. They are usually full of people who do not want to consider a new thought. I thank you for confirming the extensive searches that almost everytwhere precede adoptions.
Since you've been looking into this, I am sure you also know that I am telling the truth about hard to place children, the dreadful possibilities which face them almost everywhere, and the fact that a loving stable and mature gay couple certainly beats those alternatives.
Care to provide some evidence for this statement?
Agreed. Straight couples should be given preference in adoption situations. However, there are a lot of kids who are basically unadoptable. Say, a black kid with developmental issues. If a properly vetted pair of homosexuals wants to adopt such a child, I figure he's better off than he would be in permanent foster care.
Or, as another poster said on one of these threads: If I was a kid whose only options were foster care or living with a pair of of environmentalist lesbians, I'm going to go eat tofu and listen to the Indigo Girls rather than take my chances in foster care.
There are certain kids who are basically unadoptable. Straight couples should be given preference, but if a properly vetted gay couple (especially a lesbian couple, whose relationships tend to be very stable and long-lasting) wants to adopt a kid that nobody else wants, isn't that better than letting him languish in foster care?
Actually, having posted - and read voluminously - on these "gay" threads for the last two years, I can assure you that people are not willfully ill-informed, but well-read and highly informed. The wool can't be pulled over peoples' eyes about the homosexual agenda if those people have informed themselves.
The line you are accepting and repeating is the official leftist homosexual activist official propaganda position. It has nothing to do with truth, and everything to do with trying to advance the "gay" agenda.
Check out Scripter's links and read up. You are the one who does not want to consider a "new" thought. I don't want to be rude, but I just can't let your silly comment slide.
Thank you. The conditions of children in foster care are so horrible in many cases , it's unbearable to think of them. My sister, a social worker, cried one day, She had made a routine visitor to one of these homes and the darling kid there silently went to her room, packed all her things in a shoebox and handed them to my sister. She was in a good home with people who loved her. But before that she'd been shuttled around so often, she just assumed a visit by a social worker automatically signaled another shift. After that, my sister never went on inspections without bringing gifts for the kids, making clear she was just there to visit and they were not being moved. Think about that.
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