Posted on 02/05/2005 5:06:35 PM PST by GMMAC
IT'S TIME TO THINK ABOUT CHILDREN
Barbara Kay
National Post
February 5, 2005
Not long ago I was seated at dinner beside an Ontario family law judge. I asked what his position was on adoption equity for gays.
Would he, once gay marriage was entrenched, and in keeping with our government's current equity legislation in the workplace, feel obliged to fast-track gays' access to available children to make up for "past injustices" and their "disability" on the procreative front? And what about a single mother willing to give up her child for adoption, provided the baby went to a heterosexual couple? Whose rights would be privileged, hers or those of gay adoptive applicants?
The judge paused, then said, "I haven't ever really thought about it." Eventually the judge opined that a gay married couple's rights should trump a biological mother's right to have her child raised in a normative family. And on further reflection, he decided, he would also be partial to equity adoption policies for gays.
I know why the judge was caught off guard. Up until now, the gay marriage debate has focused on the rights of adults. The gay marriage bill arose from the conviction amongst our political and ideological elites that the raison d'etre for marriage was romantic attachment, not procreation. Once the bill passes, the focus will shift from "what is marriage?" to "what is family?"
In passing the gay marriage bill, our government will confer rights on homosexuals that all democracies, except two other extremely liberal ones, and the United Nations itself have considered at length and rejected.
As McGill bioethicist Margaret Somerville recently noted, Article 16 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights says, "Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and found a family (my emphasis)," not "two people of full age" and not "to marry and sanctify their romantic attachment."
The gay marriage debate in the media has scanted discussion about family-building in a post-heterosexual-marriage Canada. Theorists agitating for social change imply that human nature is infinitely plastic, dismissing concerns for children with the simplistic and misleading mantra, "all children need is love; and love has no gender."
Love is neither a unitary product, nor all that children need to thrive. If it were, children would do as well with one parent as with two. In the '70s, feminists insisted that single motherhood was in no way inferior to dual parenting.
Irrefutable sociological data later proved that under any economic circumstances -- not just in poor households -- children of single mothers fared worse in scholastic achievement, self-esteem and eventual success than dual-parented children. Feminists simply ignored or disparaged the studies.
Whether same-sex and opposite-sex parenting are equally good for children is a proposition that has never actually been effectively tested, much less proved. Gay parenting is such a recent phenomenon, we have no scientifically credible control groups of gay-parented teens and adults to establish or discredit such a claim. But research, data and objectivity matter little to theory-bound ideologues.
What will research -- and adult children of gays themselves -- tell us in 20 years? Third-party parenting is in its infancy. Official sanction will widen its base. Social problems in children rarely surface before adolescence.
What if research finds measurable social deficits in children of same-sex households? More worryingly, will ideologues even permit such research to go forward? In today's increasingly frosty academic climate regarding race and gender, such initiatives may be condemned as homophobic, just as comparative aptitude studies are labelled racist. Academic sociologists will likely self-censor themselves on this important issue.
Canadian researchers have made no effort to harvest the views of those most invested in the gay marriage debate -- children. Nobody has asked children if they "strongly prefer, strongly reject or don't care" whether they have: a single mom, single dad, mother and father, two moms or two dads. They won't, because the response from unabashedly politically incorrect children will discomfit the liberal theorists who dictate the rules of sociological inquiry.
You can prep children with Manchurian Candidate-level indoctrination on the fungibility of gender. You can read around the clock to them from books like Debbie Has Two Dads or Brian Has Two Moms And A Deeply Involved Sperm Donor, but children, social conservatives by nature, will always respond: "Strongly prefer" a mother and a father.
Canada is one of only three places on Earth poised to endorse the use of children as social guinea pigs without their consent. And all because our intellectual and political elites "haven't ever really thought about it."
Faith & Family Ping
How arrogant and self-centered of them to deny children mothers/fathers. We have enough problems with heterosexuals who are bad parents without ADDING to the problems of our most innocent, vulnerable and precious children.
If God had wanted homosexuals to have children, I'm sure He had the power to make it so.
It's hard enough to raise a family in the traditional sense. I sacrifice a lot of my personal self for the sake of my family. Would that be the case in the long term for a gay couple like Melissa Etheridge and her ex for instance?
My heart goes out to the poor children who will suffer through this abomination.
I tutored a young girl last year who lived with "two mommies". Believe me, she was so ashamed. Here she was, put in the position of hating what her mother was and then feeling guilty about her feelings. I felt very sad for her...and she did not, for one minute, blame society. She blamed her mother.
This is the crux of the gay marriage argument - children and legal homosexual access to them.
As with abortion's central concern about the right of women, without a care for the unborn child, nobody speaks for the adoption of children in the gay marriage debate because the matter hasn't arisen yet. But, it will.
Bump & Ping
Good point - but I haven't heard a peep from the gay-rights crowd about the OBLIGATIONS of family.
It's just "we're entitled to this... we want to have access to that...".
For most gays agitating for marriage, it's another opportunity to GET SOMETHING.
Hey, you can be gay all day long, I really don't care - but who is going to pay for all these freebies you are demanding?
Me, that's who.
So take a leap, twinkletoes. (And I mean that in the nicest way possible.)
BTTT
In the USA, the ABA sponsored Model Divorce Code has children as "accessories" to marriage. The ABA (and the left) does not include children in marriage. The ABA envisions marriage as a mere expression of sex between people.
That is their purpose, to convert marriage from a raising children driven institution into a adult activity mere contract.
And if the homosexuals believed in God they would repent.
The homosexuals have "a" god. It is their orgasm via fetish.
Homosexuals worship their sex act. It defines everything that they are.
what KIND of love?
platonic? friendship? paternal? maternal? sexual? erotic? conditional? unconditional?
For homosexuals ALL love is sex acts.
They really are clever in coming up with new terms to couch deviant sexual behavior as a "civil right". We cannot fight this much longer unless we have 20 years of conservative judges stuffed into robes everywhere. The West is setting itself up for a Muslim takeover.
nobody speaks for the adoption of children in the gay marriage debate because the matter hasn't arisen yet. But, it will. The argument and gay adoption has indeed arisen. Gays adopt all the time. Either one or the other partner adopts, or one partner has children, and the other is a step parent. IE: Rosie ODonnell, adopted kids, and her partner has her own children, they all live with the 2 mommies. Rosie stated in an interview that her son has said he wishes he had a Dad, so there you have it.
They really are clever in coming up with new terms to couch deviant sexual behavior as a "civil right".
Aren't they though?? Nauseating! Like this one:
"disability" on the procreative front
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