Well, I guess the best place to start is by ridding all of you of the preconceptions you got from the opening title. I'm not a homophobe, hell, you couldn't survive a day working in my University if you were. Without outing anyone, I'll simply say I deal with gay people a lot. I find them to be as normal or not normal as most people. Some I was suprised to find out, others I was not. Basically, I find no difference in the way I feel around them from the way I feel around my straight friends. I plain old just don't care. If they hit on me it might make me feel different but for some reason (gaydar?) they seem to know I'm straight. Hell, maybe it's just that I make a damn ugly gay guy, I don't know, but like I said, I plain old just don't care. Keep it to yourself. I don't want to know your sexual exploits and that applies to everyone. Second point; I'm not religious in the standard sense. I don't subscribe to any ideology based on any religion, so spare me your Christian-bashing rants. I will say one thing though; why would you gay couples care at all what a bunch of religious people think about your relationships? They sure as hell don't care what you think of theirs. Trust me, I asked. "Marriage" is a religious rite, want to have a church that honors Gay Marriage? Start your own church with your values, and get "Married" there. Just a thought. Anyway, with that out of the way, here's the reason I can't support "Gay Marriage".
Children. That's it, plain and simple. More specifically, adoption and custody battles. You see, with everything that we do in our lives there are unintended consequences. You drive your car to work everyday and that causes Global warming. See, not what you intended, but it still happens. With Gay Marriage the unintended consequences are that children get sucked into the fray. Kids just want to be "normal". You wanted to be normal when you were young, we all did. Now I understand that life's rough, we're all going to get picked on for something at sometime in our life, but let's all at least agree that we should try to limit it for the sake of our kids. Anything that makes kids feel less "normal" around their friends I view as a negative. I know it makes them stronger, but they'll get plenty of harrassment without you helping. Now here's where it gets complicated. People can't help it if they're born gay and some of you out there were. The exact percent? Somewhere between what the far right is saying (0%) and what the far left is saying (100%). Some of you were in denial or trying desperately to fit in and be "normal" and found yourself with kids, I have no problem with you. Please do the best you can to give your kids a chance to fit in without your desire to change the world getting in his or her way. Now here's where I have a problem. Should we say that a gay couple is the same as a straight couple legally. How do we decide if a father/father couple is a better environment than a single mother for the raising of a girl?Read any far left publication and they'll have one answer, read any far right publication and they'll have another. Who should I believe? The Heritage Foundation or the Triangle Foundation? This is my dilemma. My gut instinct on this is that there are a lot of different levels and to address it properly we need to look at whatever I can find on gender influence, single parents and any other social variables that might apply, so here we go.
Once again, the advantages of working in a University setting and having a diverse stable of friends comes in handy. I went straight (pun) for two friends that I know are gay. (They've told me, no I'm not guessing.) One is in a steady relationship and has an adopted child, the other is in a relationship with no children, both are advocates of Gay Marriage and are considered by me to be good, intelligent, people all around. I asked both for their opinions and any supporting research that they could give me and I thank them for helping me. Since the preponderance of evidence that I found was agenda-driven, it was very hard for me to separate good research from bad. Pro-Gay Marriage research tended to rely on subjects that were overwhelmingly lesbian/lesbian parents since the research (I'm guessing here since I could not find any) on gay male/gay male parents must tend to be less favorable to their agendas. Since this form of research dominates the Web and is generated by Universities which favor Gay Marriage, some of my conclusions came from research that was generated to argue that single mothers were better single parents than single dads or that gender influenced the child's outcome when the custodial parent was/wasn't the same sex. This research would often conflict with other studies that supported Gay Marriage. Like I said, this is complicated.
I relied heavily on two research papers that took different sides of the issue at hand. The first one was decidedly Pro-Gay Marriage, from the American Academy of Pediatrics titled, "Technical Report: Coparent or Second Parent Adoption by Same Sex Parents" and was given to me by one of the aforementioned advocates. In the opening paragraph the Author, Ellen C. Perrin, concedes that, "The secrecy resulting from the stigma still associated with homosexualty" hampered her research. This leads one to believe that there is a stigma attached to being Gay that is accepted as a negative by even it's advocates. It's very hard to on one hand say that someone suffers prejudice in society for being Gay and then turn around and claim that it won't have a negative effect on the children. The body of her research seemed to focus primarily on Lesbians and came to the conclusion that there were no negative results of a child in a Lesbian/Lesbian household. Although I found her research in that area to be compelling, I could not help but wonder why she chose to focus on Lesbians instead of Gay Males as did every research paper I read. Is it possible that the dirty little secret in the Gay community is that Gay Male/Gay Male parenting did not fare as well in research. One has to wonder. This would be consistant with other papers I researched that were Pro-Womens rights that claimed straight men did not do as well as their straight female counterparts in raising children, particularly girls.
Which brings us to the issue of cross gender parenting. Even among straight parents it is accepted that children do slightly better in a single parent household that is of the same gender as the child. This makes sense as a boy can find himself isolated in a house with a sister and a mother, the same would be true if you turned the genders around. While it's true that a positive role model of the same gender would help the child, it's a stretch for me to assume these people exist in most relationships when everyone I talk to has a hard time finding one. There's also a level of commitment to consider. Friends come and go, that's the idea behind Marriage to begin with; to commit to one another and to the children they intend to raise. It's not the responsibility of friends to help you raise your child, nor should it be.
The second paper I found relatively reliable took the opposite position, although not "Anti Gay Marriage."It was titled "Review of Research on Homosexual Parenting, Adoption, and Foster Parenting" by George A. Rekers Ph.D.. I found his piece to be equally bias as it focused on problems with research done by advocates of Gay parenting. That said, I found his arguments equally compelling. He raised several questions I found valid to ask. Such as; why research seems to focus on Lesbian households, how long do Gay relationships last compared to Straight relationships and how is sampling of the well-being of the children in question being done. He points out that a great of the research being generated is not being done on a random basis, rather it is being done with volunteers who most certainly would not be volunteering against their own cause.
After filtering through all this research and talking to people on both sides I can only come to one conclusion. Both sides are doing their best to discredit the other side. I could not, with any degree of certainty say, that all things being equal, all married couples should be judged the same in the eyes of the law. I found compelling evidence that there is a difference between Gay families and Straight families particularly when raising children of the opposite gender. I have serious questions about Gay Male/Gay Male parenting that I could not answer through research that dominates the Web. I would like to say however, that I believe any loving family is better than not having one. For this reason I am not against adoption or custody of children by Gay families, but I have serious concerns about how we are going to make decisions when the issue is between the many different family units we are creating. How we decide will decide the type of life these children will have. This is no time to be experimenting to further a social agenda. I have no problem with civil unions that give Gay people the same legal rights in property, medical decisions or anything else, but, until I can rest assured that children are not being used by people for selfish reasons, I can not support Gay Marriage. King Solomon is famous for his wise decisions, most notably when two women approached him both claiming to be the mother of the same child. Solomon instructed his guards to "Cut the baby in half" thus solving the problem. One of the women lept forward crying and said the other woman was the mother, to please spare the child. Soloman then gave the child to the woman who lept forward, saying she had proven she was the real mother by doing what only a mother would do. Give up what she wanted for the sake of the child's welfare. The point here is the children must come first. If they don't, you don't deserve the child. In the future, more evidence may become apparent, society may become more tolerant, but we don't know for sure what the future holds. Until that day, I'll advocate for one man/one woman, married to each other, being the optimum family for raising a child, and we can continue to argue over who comes after that. H.C.
Children. That's it, plain and simple. More specifically, adoption and custody battles. You see, with everything that we do in our lives there are unintended consequences. You drive your car to work everyday and that causes Global warming. See, not what you intended, but it still happens. With Gay Marriage the unintended consequences are that children get sucked into the fray. Kids just want to be "normal". You wanted to be normal when you were young, we all did. Now I understand that life's rough, we're all going to get picked on for something at sometime in our life, but let's all at least agree that we should try to limit it for the sake of our kids. Anything that makes kids feel less "normal" around their friends I view as a negative. I know it makes them stronger, but they'll get plenty of harrassment without you helping. Now here's where it gets complicated. People can't help it if they're born gay and some of you out there were. The exact percent? Somewhere between what the far right is saying (0%) and what the far left is saying (100%). Some of you were in denial or trying desperately to fit in and be "normal" and found yourself with kids, I have no problem with you. Please do the best you can to give your kids a chance to fit in without your desire to change the world getting in his or her way. Now here's where I have a problem. Should we say that a gay couple is the same as a straight couple legally. How do we decide if a father/father couple is a better environment than a single mother for the raising of a girl?Read any far left publication and they'll have one answer, read any far right publication and they'll have another. Who should I believe? The Heritage Foundation or the Triangle Foundation? This is my dilemma. My gut instinct on this is that there are a lot of different levels and to address it properly we need to look at whatever I can find on gender influence, single parents and any other social variables that might apply, so here we go.
Once again, the advantages of working in a University setting and having a diverse stable of friends comes in handy. I went straight (pun) for two friends that I know are gay. (They've told me, no I'm not guessing.) One is in a steady relationship and has an adopted child, the other is in a relationship with no children, both are advocates of Gay Marriage and are considered by me to be good, intelligent, people all around. I asked both for their opinions and any supporting research that they could give me and I thank them for helping me. Since the preponderance of evidence that I found was agenda-driven, it was very hard for me to separate good research from bad. Pro-Gay Marriage research tended to rely on subjects that were overwhelmingly lesbian/lesbian parents since the research (I'm guessing here since I could not find any) on gay male/gay male parents must tend to be less favorable to their agendas. Since this form of research dominates the Web and is generated by Universities which favor Gay Marriage, some of my conclusions came from research that was generated to argue that single mothers were better single parents than single dads or that gender influenced the child's outcome when the custodial parent was/wasn't the same sex. This research would often conflict with other studies that supported Gay Marriage. Like I said, this is complicated.
I relied heavily on two research papers that took different sides of the issue at hand. The first one was decidedly Pro-Gay Marriage, from the American Academy of Pediatrics titled, "Technical Report: Coparent or Second Parent Adoption by Same Sex Parents" and was given to me by one of the aforementioned advocates. In the opening paragraph the Author, Ellen C. Perrin, concedes that, "The secrecy resulting from the stigma still associated with homosexualty" hampered her research. This leads one to believe that there is a stigma attached to being Gay that is accepted as a negative by even it's advocates. It's very hard to on one hand say that someone suffers prejudice in society for being Gay and then turn around and claim that it won't have a negative effect on the children. The body of her research seemed to focus primarily on Lesbians and came to the conclusion that there were no negative results of a child in a Lesbian/Lesbian household. Although I found her research in that area to be compelling, I could not help but wonder why she chose to focus on Lesbians instead of Gay Males as did every research paper I read. Is it possible that the dirty little secret in the Gay community is that Gay Male/Gay Male parenting did not fare as well in research. One has to wonder. This would be consistant with other papers I researched that were Pro-Womens rights that claimed straight men did not do as well as their straight female counterparts in raising children, particularly girls.
Which brings us to the issue of cross gender parenting. Even among straight parents it is accepted that children do slightly better in a single parent household that is of the same gender as the child. This makes sense as a boy can find himself isolated in a house with a sister and a mother, the same would be true if you turned the genders around. While it's true that a positive role model of the same gender would help the child, it's a stretch for me to assume these people exist in most relationships when everyone I talk to has a hard time finding one. There's also a level of commitment to consider. Friends come and go, that's the idea behind Marriage to begin with; to commit to one another and to the children they intend to raise. It's not the responsibility of friends to help you raise your child, nor should it be.
The second paper I found relatively reliable took the opposite position, although not "Anti Gay Marriage."It was titled "Review of Research on Homosexual Parenting, Adoption, and Foster Parenting" by George A. Rekers Ph.D.. I found his piece to be equally bias as it focused on problems with research done by advocates of Gay parenting. That said, I found his arguments equally compelling. He raised several questions I found valid to ask. Such as; why research seems to focus on Lesbian households, how long do Gay relationships last compared to Straight relationships and how is sampling of the well-being of the children in question being done. He points out that a great of the research being generated is not being done on a random basis, rather it is being done with volunteers who most certainly would not be volunteering against their own cause.
After filtering through all this research and talking to people on both sides I can only come to one conclusion. Both sides are doing their best to discredit the other side. I could not, with any degree of certainty say, that all things being equal, all married couples should be judged the same in the eyes of the law. I found compelling evidence that there is a difference between Gay families and Straight families particularly when raising children of the opposite gender. I have serious questions about Gay Male/Gay Male parenting that I could not answer through research that dominates the Web. I would like to say however, that I believe any loving family is better than not having one. For this reason I am not against adoption or custody of children by Gay families, but I have serious concerns about how we are going to make decisions when the issue is between the many different family units we are creating. How we decide will decide the type of life these children will have. This is no time to be experimenting to further a social agenda. I have no problem with civil unions that give Gay people the same legal rights in property, medical decisions or anything else, but, until I can rest assured that children are not being used by people for selfish reasons, I can not support Gay Marriage. King Solomon is famous for his wise decisions, most notably when two women approached him both claiming to be the mother of the same child. Solomon instructed his guards to "Cut the baby in half" thus solving the problem. One of the women lept forward crying and said the other woman was the mother, to please spare the child. Soloman then gave the child to the woman who lept forward, saying she had proven she was the real mother by doing what only a mother would do. Give up what she wanted for the sake of the child's welfare. The point here is the children must come first. If they don't, you don't deserve the child. In the future, more evidence may become apparent, society may become more tolerant, but we don't know for sure what the future holds. Until that day, I'll advocate for one man/one woman, married to each other, being the optimum family for raising a child, and we can continue to argue over who comes after that. H.C.
10 comments:
Good piece HC.
I also think that gay people should be able to adopt as long as single people of either orientation are able to.
I think, however, that in a society that doesn't care about children as much as it pretends, your arguments may fall on deaf ears.
Such is the cost of being correct, I suppose (I almost said right, but thought better of it.
Please add a closing parenthesis before the period of my last sentence. Thanks.
You know, I don't really know where to go with this post. On the one hand, I think it was well-written and incredibly compelling. But, on the other, you seem to justify your argument using children as the condition when, in fact, children can be just as vulnerable in ANY other circumstances (not just gay marriage).
For instance, some studies have show that bi-racial children are often in conflict because of their racial identity. Does that mean that people shouldn't marry interracially? Other studies suggest that children are less likely to develop fruitful relationships with step parents. Does that mean that widows/divorcees should never be remarried?
I completely understand your point about the oppression that children are likely to receive from homosexual parents (more so with gay men. If a child had lesbian mothers, most of his/her male friends would probably be envious. *Joke*). But I can't name a single incident where a child can't be affected; from alcholism, to abusiveness, to poverty. Only in EXTREME cases of some of the aforementioned things will parents be deemed unfit for their children.
How then is gay marriage so much different?
You raise a good point Andre.
But I think there are several differences between a bi-racial marriage, and a gay marriage, even just as far as kids are concerned.
First, bi-racial marriages result in really, really beautiful children. Gay marriages don't result in children at all. (This is a joke, although it is true)
Second, children from a BRM (Bi Racial Marriage because I am lazy) will struggle with an identity which they have no control over, which they receive from their parents.
Children 'from' a GM don't necessarily struggle with their own identity at all, but with those of the lifestyle choices of their 'parents'. They will, however, likely lack the interaction with the gender opposite their 'parents', which is (I believe) HC's point.
In an ideal household there would be a parent of each gender present to provide the interaction children need with both genders to form into functional adults. It is for this same reason that we can be comfortable with persecuting deadbeat dads.
And prosecuting them, even.
Man, these typos flow from my hands like water.
Though I will point out we should persecute them as well.
Hey Dre,
This column was a month in the making. I thought so much about the different scenarios; gay male/gay male, lesbian/lesbian single straight mom, etc. that my head almost exploded. I talked to a lot of gay people as well as straight and read a ton of research that was technical beyond belief. In order to make a rational argument in either direction, I had to assume all other things were equal. That said, I had to discard any argument based on other factors such as race, since that's a different issue. That's what I'm really trying to do here, is point out that all things being equal, this is my conclusion as to what's the very best for the child. Is a Gay Family who's well adjusted better than a F'ed up family who's straight, yes. But our courts aren't going to make moral judgements. Ask anyone who was faithful while their spouse was not. What I'm doing here is defining the optimum, the perfect scenario. And that to me, is not a gay couple, and they could only be viewed as completely equal under the eyes of the law if both are consider a "married couple". The gender issue really struck a cord with me as I began to consider a gay couple as the same as two straight people of the same gender raising a child. It isn't even that they're gay, it's that they're both male or female. Like I said, we can argue over who's next in line, but I stand by, all things being equal, a married man and women as being the optimum. Please, and this is to everyone, don't confuse that with my thinking gay people shouldn't have custody of kids. I saw enough kids at the Whaley home here in Flint to know any loving family is better than none.
Yet another piece where I agree w/ some (albeit little) of what you write, and disagree w/ others. (sigh) What happened to the articles that we were in sync on? :P
Go back & reread what you wrote (as if you haven't done so 100x already in the last month) & tell me that the way you're arguing this DOESN'T basically apply to every marriage, whether it be gay or not. Maybe it's just me, but that's how I'm reading it.
Also, I've got a proposition: Instead of debating about who shouldn't be able to marry, why don't we devote all this energy to getting all the single-mother-baby-factories (nearly 20% of all mothers of those 18 and younger; though to be fair, not all of them are the "baby-factories" that I detest so) MARRIED. I bet there'd be little debate on that one.
Hey Nic,
This agreeing thing is starting to freak me out.(jk) Actually, I suspect that athough you lean to the left, your a bit of a traditionalist at heart when it comes to families. Your right on about my opinion on this not really being about gay people at all. I think I would feel exactly the same if it were two straight women vs. a man/woman or, well, you get the idea. It's the input of BOTH sexes that I feel is the real advantage of traditional marriage. As far as debating who SHOULD be getting married, go back a couple of dozen posts and read "The Fading Institution of Marriage" where I addressed just that. Thanks for commenting, don't worry, I'm sure something will come up we can debate.
Well said.
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