Grave Consequences For Children With Gay Parents

[Pangloss62]

The above fucktard works for Dobson's Focus on the Family. He wrote an editorial in our paper this week that stated:

The argument for gay marriage boils down to two words: "I want." It's not about what's best for children, or society, or future generations — it's about the "right" of 2 percent to 3 percent of the population to redefine the nature of marriage, regardless of the consequences.

Then he notes:

"...and mountains of social science data tell us that comes with grave consequences for children."

This data must have come from the same "mountain" that gave us creation science.

2 to 3 percent? Are you kidding me? Talk about wishful thinking. The most conservative estimates I've seen for the total number of homosexuals in America is around 7%, and I've seen estimates as high as 15%. Does anyone out there have a substantiated percentage%

Aren't heteros are more likely to abuse and/or molest their kids than homos? That's what I've read.

[9th Engineer]

No, the most conservative you've seen would be 2-3%. You just believe 7% is about the right number. And frankly I have as much reason to doubt the people who spew numbers as high as 15% as those who lowball at 2%.

[MrVisible]

The percentage is immaterial. Even at 2%, that comes out to six million Americans. That's what, twice as many people as live in the Chicago metro area? Almost as many as live in Los Angeles. The entire population of Arkansas.

Not that I think the entire population of Arkansas is gay. I don't want to piss off Arkansas. There are a lot of states that you could get away with pissing off, but I don't think Arkansas is one of them.

And as to gay marriage being all about 'I want'... well, sure. We want, first and foremost, to make sure that our children have the same protections that all other children in this country have. That they can't be ripped away from us on the whim of a court. That if one of us passes away, they don't suddenly lose the other parent because of judicial myopia.

We want more, of course. We want to make sure that we get the same return on our Social Security investment that everyone else does. We want to be able to insure our partners. We want to be able to leave all the posessions that we bought as a couple to our partner, without them being taxed as if we were complete strangers. We want to visit our partners when they're sick or dying, something we currently do at the variable sufferance of hospital administration. We want to be able to make each other as happy and as secure as we possibly can.

Is it selfish to want these things? When the vast majority of society takes them for granted, gets them instantly with a visit to the county courthouse or the local Elvis impersonator? When there has never been any harm demonstrated that will come from, or has come from, such unions? After all, Massachusetts hasn't been reduced to smoking rubble as of yet and they've been doing the gay marriage thing for months now.

But that's not the worst part of that article. The article goes on to use Rosie O'Donnel's son Parker as a shill, painting a mental image of the kid lying in bed wishing he had a daddy. To wit:

And it disregards the needs of children such as Parker O'Donnell. Parker doesn't lie awake at night wishing the state would legally recognize Rosie and Kelli's relationship, or that Rosie and Kelli could share Social Security benefits.

He lies awake at night wishing he had a daddy.

He probably also wishes he had a rocketship. Of course he doesn't have the maturity to realize that he's better off with his two mothers married than he is without them having legal status in the eyes of the state; he's six. But he'd damned sure want his mother back if one of them had something terrible happen to her, and the state took him away from the other one, the mother who'd helped raise him.

He's probably not mature enough to realize that his chances of succeeding in life are much, much better with two parents, no matter what their genders, than with just one.

I don't know where the Religious Right gets the idea that there are an infinite amount of Ward and June Cleavers just waiting in the wings, ready to adopt any adoptable infant and take the kids of gay parents under their wings (as well as to support all the children that are born as a result of abstinence-only education, but that's another rant). The reality is that kids have divorced parents, single parents, gay parents, and parents who are altogether absent. That doesn't mean those kids should be discriminated against. That means that they should be provided with all the help we can muster.

That means recognizing the marriage of two people of the same sex, so that the children they raise don't become wards of the state, they don't lack for Social Security, they don't miss out on the benefits that society has decided that kids need in order to grow up well.

As to your question on the child sexual abuse issue, here are some links. Suffice it to say that the idea that gay people abuse children is the big boogeyman in the religious right's arsenal, designed to scare people into being stupid about this issue.

http://www.thetaskforce.org/download...exualabuse.pdf
From here:

There is no evidence to suggest that lesbians and gay men are unfit to be parents. Home environments with lesbian and gay parents are as likely to successfully support a child’s development as those with heterosexual parents.

Good parenting is not influenced by sexual orientation. Rather, it is influenced most profoundly by a parent’s ability to create a loving and nurturing home -- an ability that does not depend on whether a parent is gay or straight.

There is no evidence to suggest that the children of lesbian and gay parents are less intelligent, suffer from more problems, are less popular, or have lower self-esteem than children of heterosexual parents.

The children of lesbian and gay parents grow up as happy, healthy and well-adjusted as the children of heterosexual parents.

From here:

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP),2 the American Academy of Family Physicians,3 the Child Welfare League of America,4 the National Association of Social Workers,5 and the American Psychological Association6 recognize that gay and lesbian parents are just as good as heterosexual parents, and that children thrive in gay- and lesbian-headed families. As the American Academy of Pediatrics report explains, "Children deserve to know that their relationships with both of their parents are stable and legally recognized. This applies to all children, whether they parents are of the same or opposite sex."7 Furthermore, in 1999, the American Bar Association adopted a resolution, prompted by its Section Family Law and its Steering Committee on the Unmet Legal Needs of Children, supporting the promulgation of laws and public policies that provide that sexual orientation shall not be a barrier to adoption when adoption is determined to be in the best interest of a child.

Are there actually any good, non-idiotic arguments against gay marriage out there? Or are they all appeals to peoples' most fearful, bigoted, ignorant emotions?

[DanaC]

Are there actually any good, non-idiotic arguments against gay marriage out there? Or are they all appeals to peoples' most fearful, bigoted, ignorant emotions?

Well MrV. I am going to take a wild stab in the dark and say probably the latter.

I think it's fascinating the way so many Christians latch on to the few references in the bible which deal with this topic and conveniently forget about the whole poverty thang.

Jim Wallis makes a good case for it in an interesting article :

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2...im_wallis.html

The Right is comfortable with the language of religion, values, God talk. So much so that they sometimes claim to own that territory. Or own God. But then they narrow everything down to one or two issues: abortion and gay marriage.

I am an evangelical Christian, and I can’t ignore thousands of verses in the Bible on [another] subject, which is poverty. I say at every stop, “Fighting poverty’s a moral value, too.” There’s a whole generation of young Christians who care about the environment. That’s their big issue. Protecting God’s creation, they would say, is a moral value, too. And, for a growing number of Christians, the ethics of war—how and when we go to war, whether we tell the truth about going to war—is a religious and moral issue as well.

[9th Engineer]

Or are they all appeals to peoples' most fearful, bigoted, ignorant emotions?

I've come to believe that most strong emotions involve some or all of the above, and certainly those that people rally around when presented with something they aren't comfortable with. I feel the same way regarding issues with cloning, stem cells, large-catchment drug tests, and other issues in the biotech field that are demonized.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Slight but I believe related thread hijack, branching off a point DanaC raised: capitalism does something about poverty. The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, by Rodney Stark, traces the somewhat surprising interrelationship between the medieval Catholic church and early capitalism, among other factors that worked in combination to make Western society materially and financially successful beyond all other societies, and offers some opinions why. It's more a history than a work of advocacy, though there's a bit of that too here and there.

The Catholic church nowadays has an anticapitalistic, antibusiness reputation, but this was not always so; it grew, says Stark, out of disenchantment with the abuses of the Industrial Revolution. In earlier times, the sheer scale of the business of managing the monastic estates and their assets, plus the Church's not trying to suppress the late-medieval Italians who were inventing banking and high finance, pretty much required that capitalism be devised.

[xoxoxoBruce]

During the Industrial Revolution, weren't most of the big money people Protestants, leaving the Catholic church financially dependent on the working class, in England and the US?

[Elspode]

Originally Posted by DanaC

I think it's fascinating the way so many Christians latch on to the few references in the bible which deal with this topic and conveniently forget about the whole poverty thang.

There's no money in trying to cure poverty. The poor aren't very good donators to election campaigns.

[9th Engineer]

There's no money in trying to cure poverty. The poor aren't very good donators to election campaigns.

The reason why any polician who claims to do the same is lying.

[Trilby]

i got a recorded phone call the other day from a "married mother of three" who was concerned about the possibility of gay marriage and she urged-nay, BEGGED-me to push #1 and record my vote AGAINST gay marriage for posterity.

[DanaC]

*Shakes head*
Reminds me a little of a group who set up in Yorkshire just recently. Theyre an auxillary group to th far right fascist party BNP, but they call themselves 'Mothers Against Paedophiles'. For some reason if you put a 'married mother of three' in the frame they suddenly become more acceptable.

[lumberjim]

Originally Posted by DanaC

*Shakes head*

still doing *that* eh?

[jonesieQ]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

...traces the somewhat surprising interrelationship between the medieval Catholic church and early capitalism, among other factors...
...plus the Church's not trying to suppress the late-medieval Italians who were inventing banking and high finance, pretty much required that capitalism be devised.

"among other factors"...is putting it mildly, no? The Church was in bed with the wealthy Italian Renaissance banking families - needed to be - because the Church's power suffered a serious decline during & after the Black Plague. The Protestant movement then disempowered them further. This coincided with Gutenburg's printing press which had begun the evolution of education for the other 95% of the population. And the movements toward Humanism and Individualism also forced the the Church's hand. Preceding all of this was the Magna Carta which laid the groundwork for the move away from feudalism and toward the nation-state, as well as toward mercantilism, which was the early stage of capitalism.

The Church could no longer control the populace as it had pre-plague, and it could no longer control government as it moved toward the nation-state, so its power had to expand in another way...global wealth...and with the global expeditions and discoveries of the time, and the mutual back-scratching of the wealthy, it achieved its goal. The Church knew it could guarantee its survival only through the power of assets.

Capitalism does raise the quality of life, no question. But the time for the free market, Adam Smith routine is over. The evolutions of our societies and systems since the Industrial Revolution have brought new standards. Laissez-faire systems, particularly now, are just abusive to a majority of the populations.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Yeah, it's really hard to drag the peasants away from the TV long enough to get a good pitchfork and torch parade.

[9th Engineer]

Capitalism does raise the quality of life, no question. But the time for the free market, Adam Smith routine is over. The evolutions of our societies and systems since the Industrial Revolution have brought new standards. Laissez-faire systems, particularly now, are just abusive to a majority of the populations.

Brought new standards is an understatement. Tripled life expectancy and made it possible for people to independently provide for their families would be nice additions as well. The abusiveness you mention is the result of people being told they should be getting services they can't pay for as well as being deceived into thinking that they have a right to many things that are still very expensive. People feel entitled to things without earning what it really takes to provide them. The one area I think we could stand to make some improvement on is health care, not universal health care, affordable health care. The reason everything is so expensive is that ~27% of people who use our ER's don't pay a dime for it, and that cost is passed to everyone else. In addition, physicians must carry gross amounts of private insurance which drives wages up.