Frank Lombard and Mark Sanford (Conservative Waving the White Flag Alert)

A reader in the most recent Mark Sanford combox thread voices a familiar complaint from the previous ones. The argument goes like this:

1. Mark Sanford is a social conservative who advocated against same-sex marriage rights.

3. Therefore it is hypocritical for him -- and by extension, other social conservatives -- to argue against same-sex marriage.

4. Because some opponents of same-sex marriage are unfaithful to their spouses, there is no good reason to oppose same-sex marriage.

It's an absurd argument, but that doesn't stop more than a few people from pushing it. If you are one of the people who find its logic persuasive, though, then surely you agree that the arrest of a gay Duke University official on charges of having prostituted his adopted five-year-old son on the Internet is a convincing argument against allowing gay adoptions.

It is in no way a convincing argument against gay adoption, and no argument at all. Neither does Sanford's failings have a thing to do with the rightness or wrongness of the case against same-sex marriage. But if you're going to say Sanford's sin invalidates the anti-gay marriage cause, on what grounds do you then argue that Lombard's sin (and alleged crime!) has nothing to do with the case for gay adoption?

Maybe we'd all be better off sticking to arguments themselves, citing real-world examples only when they're relevant, and leaving argumentum ad hominem out of it.

Here is my response to Rod who is normally a fairly good but he is wrong on this issue and is falling in to the trap that conservatives so often do. They surrender before even a shot is fired across the bow and cede the advantage. What makes this sad is that there is real good that can be done with this case that can be used to help protect children and the culture. It is the opportunity to open up a healthy debate on this issue. ---------------------------------------------------------

The case of Frank Lombard does reflect badly on gay adoption and the tactic approve that the gay community has for child pornography, child sex art, and the idolizing of young pre-teen males not specifically but when taken in context of increasing numbers of incidents involved gay activists that are down played and even ignored by the media conservative and mainstream. A gay man can be held up for scrutiny only when he is seen to be an asset of affirmation of the cause but when he is no longer an asset he is no longer even referred to as a gay man. Mark Sandford has been offered up to the scrutiny and those who detract from him have no problem carrying analysis of him far beyond his scandalous affair but when it is a Duke Associate Director of Health Equity studies in charge of researching AIDs in the rural south and living in what is a self described gay eco friendly commune having adopted two African American boys for the sake of molestation there is almost no scrutiny and a deathly silence that is uncanny. Silence from the liberal church where he was a member of the vestry. Silence from the close knit community, and a terse statement from Duke University.

Frank Lombard admitted to specifically targeting African American children because they were easier to adopt especially younger ones and pimped those kids out to a cop. The whole story is interesting and requires analysis in order to heal the community on this issue or that is what I've heard in the past. The question should be asked in light of a growing body of research showing that homosexuals have been molested themselves as children to a far greater degree than the heterosexuals, we also know that those who are molest especially men are far more more likely to become perpetrators themselves. This is an opportunity to see if what the gay activists and their allies have been saying about there being no connection between the homosexual lifestyle and molestation is true.

We are making a mistake in allowing this opportunity to have a debate which could indeed result in the protection of many children and also keep the door open for gay men who like one of my friends who was molested as a child by his gay uncle to get the help they need but no one wants to talk about these things. No one dares be outraged in public and allow a gay man to be called to the floor for his bad behavior. Only Mark Sanford and shoe tapping politicians in bathroom stalls are afforded this scrutiny in order to help push forward an agenda that denies so many adopted children something that is so simple but which this society refuses to affirm the value of and that is a Mom and a Dad.

Gosh, Rod is so incoherent. Let's look at this as a policy matter, analyzed for the good of society and the individuals in it. What married people do that is most valuable, homosexuals cannot do: raise adopted children in a sane and stable environment, and in most cases, produce children of their own. What married people do badly, such as fight, cheat, and divorce, homosexuals do worse. Hence, there's no point on that score to homosexual adoption.

Meanwhile, there's no net social benefit to "gay" adoption: Homosexual guardians don't do anything positive that can't be done better by normal people, because normal people are on average less crazy.

And as to costs, what homosexual guardians do that is, to put it mildly, negative (such as abusing children), they do at a much higher rate than normal people. And those "negative" acts are not the peccadillos that get social workers so excited, such as spanking, but "sins that cry to Heaven for vengeance." So sorry, adultery is bad, but the cost in Heaven and on earth does not approach that of sodomy.

Hence, Sanford's problem doesn't put a scratch in the institution of marriage, whereas what the perv from Duke was doing is a true indictment of all the idiotic accommodations made to homosexuality in the West. It is a mental illness that needs to be contained or cured, because it poses a hazard to the main purpose of human society: the raising of healthy children.

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