Same-Sex Parenting

[Galeongirl]

Originally Posted by Pearl

I've heard and read about many gay people saying this. If they had to choose between being accepted by society or being discriminated or even hated, they'd go with the former. Fortunately, it is more easier these days to be gay than ever before.

Hmm, I reckon it must be different in different countries/situations then. Guess I'm really lucky to live in a country where it's pretty much accepted. Except for a few minorities who might still commit hate crimes, but that's luckily in relatively low numbers. So I feel pretty safe.

Originally Posted by AEON

Thank you, Irvine. I look forward to reading more about this.

As for me - I've become more involved in this thread than I really want to be. I've ended up too focused on an issue that I'm not all that clear on. I'm also concerned that if I keep defending it - I will harden my heart.

Please forgive me if I take a breather from this subject and pray/meditate/ponder it further. I do not see these discussions as win/lose debates - but about sharing each other's viewpoints. However, I fear that this if I'm not careful - I will hurt more than help, and I certainly don't want to do that. Please try not to picture me as the man with a bullhorn outside of the stadium - instead, please view me as one of you at a pub, sitting around a table, drinking a pint, talking about life as Achtung Baby plays in the background.

Perhaps a very wise decision to take a break and reconsider your thoughts. I'm enjoying to hear your points of view, actually. It's refreshing and it makes me rationalise that not everyone thinks the way I do.

Just to clarify, your opinion doesn't hurt me in any sense. I respect that you're willing to explain it and discuss views with me. Even though some views aren't quite positive on me, it's still your opinion. And as long as it's put respectfully, it's fine by me.

[jeevey]

Originally Posted by AEON

And I thought I was biased

Because my comment wasn't about something that you would need a study to see. Fertility science has made possible families with all sorts of combinations of genetic relatedness. Many different adults may be involved in the conception of a child, and they may stay involved in the child's life. If we can take my aforementioned example of two sterile straight people conceiving with two donors and a surrogate and have no trouble recognizing that as a legitimate family, why is a same sex couple raising a child that one of them may be genetically related to suddenly not a real family?

What are gay parents doing other than parenting?

If their families look and act and function just like families, what makes them something other than families?

What makes this model false?

An appeal to nature is the argument that because something occurs naturally it is necessarily good or ideal, or that something that does not occur in nature is necessarily bad.

"Appeal to nature is a fallacious argument, because the mere "naturalness" of something is unrelated to its positive or negative qualities - natural things can be bad or harmful (such as infant death and the jellyfish on the left), and unnatural things can be good (such as clothes, especially when you are in Siberia). Another problem is the distinction of what is "natural" and what is not, which can be really murky: crude oil occurs naturally, but it's not something you'd like poured on seabirds or your garden. The word "natural" itself has no exact definition and can be used in multiple ways, thus allowing equivocation." Appeal to nature - RationalWiki

[jeevey]

On a different note, I heard Alysia Abbot talk about her book Fairyland on the radio a little while ago. She was raised by her biological father, a gay man, in San Francisco in the 1970s and she was really interesting. It's not all sweetness and light, and she talks a lot about some of the more complex issues that have been mentioned.


"While these days it's not uncommon to meet children with gay parents, in the 1970s it was. Alysia Abbott was one of those kids. When her parents met, her father — Steve Abbott — told her mother he was bisexual. But when Alysia was a toddler, her mother died in a car accident and Steve came out as gay. He moved with his daughter to San Francisco, just as the gay liberation movement was gaining strength.


While her father had not initially wanted a child, Abbott says he enjoyed spending time with her when she was a baby. Her mother's death brought the two of them even closer.


"After my mother's death, I think my father felt like he didn't have very much," Abbott tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "His relationship with a young man that he had while he was with my mother had dissolved. And he, in a sense, felt that I was all that he had in the world, and he was all that I had in the world."


In San Francisco, as Abbott describes in her new memoir, Fairyland, her father immersed himself in the city's gay arts scene, becoming a leading literary figure. His daughter also became a part of that community, but as she grew older, Abbott found herself struggling to parse where she fit in. The scene at the literary events her father attended, for example, began to turn her off. She says: "I was like, 'OK, I've seen that transgressive, weird thing, and it's just a little too weird for me. I'm not interested in that.' "

Fairyland is based largely on her father's journals, which she found after her father's death from AIDS-related complications in 1992, when she was 22. It was reading the journals, she says, that helped her see more clearly the situation they were in together from her father's perspective.


"Unfortunately, he died just as I was becoming an adult," she says. "To be revisiting the journals now ... I have so much more sympathy for his struggles and respect the fact that he was a single father living among roommates, trying to find love as an openly gay man, and also trying to make a name for himself as a writer."


Here's the NPR profile on the book with excerpts from the interview 'Fairyland': A Girl Grows Up In San Francisco's Gay Community : NPR


and here's the link to the audio NPR Media Player

[Pearl]

Originally Posted by Galeongirl

Hmm, I reckon it must be different in different countries/situations then. Guess I'm really lucky to live in a country where it's pretty much accepted. Except for a few minorities who might still commit hate crimes, but that's luckily in relatively low numbers. So I feel pretty safe.

Come to think of it, I haven't really heard or read any gay person saying such comments in a long while. I guess with the acceptance of homosexuality and SSM gaining more strength in America, there will be fewer gays saying that. And they weren't really saying that they wish they were straight. They just wished homophobes would realize being gay was not a lifestyle choice as some believed (and still believe) it is.

[AEON]

Originally Posted by Galeongirl

Just to clarify, your opinion doesn't hurt me in any sense. I respect that you're willing to explain it and discuss views with me. Even though some views aren't quite positive on me, it's still your opinion. And as long as it's put respectfully, it's fine by me.

This post made me smile - and it makes me happy that I decided to start posting/responding again.

I am guessing we probably agree on more issues than we disagree on and you seem very kind and patient in your responses. Thank you for sharing your thoughts in such a way.

[nbcrusader]

Originally Posted by AEON

Would you concede that is "wrong" to willfully remove/deny any of these elements?

A great, tough question. If we are truly honest with ourselves, we must come to the conclusion: yes, it is wrong.

And, in keeping with such honesty, it is a great indictment of a great number of heterosexual parents in the US today.

[nbcrusader]

Originally Posted by jeevey

Because my comment wasn't about something that you would need a study to see. Fertility science has made possible families with all sorts of combinations of genetic relatedness. Many different adults may be involved in the conception of a child, and they may stay involved in the child's life. If we can take my aforementioned example of two sterile straight people conceiving with two donors and a surrogate and have no trouble recognizing that as a legitimate family, why is a same sex couple raising a child that one of them may be genetically related to suddenly not a real family?

What are gay parents doing other than parenting?

I think you are missing the point of AEON's question.

The only study cited in the original article (are there others?) contained the vague summary that children of same-sex couples "compared favorably" with children of opposite sex couples.

Let's say, for example, a study comes to a different conclusion - that children of same sex couples did not compare favorably with children of opposite sex couples. Would the study be accepted with the same authority as the original? Would the study be examined to validate the testing methodology? Or would the study be deemed "homophobic" and discarded entirely.

The underlying concept to this discussion is: does each sex (male/female) bring separate, qualities to a relationship focused on raising a child. While men may take on the "mothering" role (which has been done long before same sex adoption - single dads regularly take on this role) - does this fully equal (thus replace) the mothering role provide by a woman?

The fact that this may be irrelevant to some does not invalidate it as a concept to discuss, especially when we are trying to draw a picture of the ideal.

[PhilsFan]

Originally Posted by nbcrusader

I think you are missing the point of AEON's question.

The only study cited in the original article (are there others?) contained the vague summary that children of same-sex couples "compared favorably" with children of opposite sex couples.

Let's say, for example, a study comes to a different conclusion - that children of same sex couples did not compare favorably with children of opposite sex couples. Would the study be accepted with the same authority as the original? Would the study be examined to validate the testing methodology? Or would the study be deemed "homophobic" and discarded entirely.

The underlying concept to this discussion is: does each sex (male/female) bring separate, qualities to a relationship focused on raising a child. While men may take on the "mothering" role (which has been done long before same sex adoption - single dads regularly take on this role) - does this fully equal (thus replace) the mothering role provide by a woman?

The fact that this may be irrelevant to some does not invalidate it as a concept to discuss, especially when we are trying to draw a picture of the ideal.

Are you saying we should ignore the study on the off chance a future study has a different conclusion?

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by nbcrusader

A great, tough question. If we are truly honest with ourselves, we must come to the conclusion: yes, it is wrong.

Thank goodness you have the answer to this question.

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by PhilsFan

Are you saying we should ignore the study on the off chance a future study has a different conclusion?

Or until anti-gay forces can fund a rigged study to show their "science" as we saw with the Regenerus "study" done just in time for SCOTUS arguments last March.

Instead of playing the race card, seems we now play the gay card whereby anti-gay organizations can complain that it's only political correctness that prevents social science from validating their own viewpoints. Just as we have scientists funded by energy companies to "dispute" global warming science, so to are we going to have "tough questions" that pretend to bravely question the stranglehold that gay liberal forces apparently have upon the APA.

It's like Middle East politics. If you don't like the results, discredit the process.

[Galeongirl]

Originally Posted by Pearl

Come to think of it, I haven't really heard or read any gay person saying such comments in a long while. I guess with the acceptance of homosexuality and SSM gaining more strength in America, there will be fewer gays saying that. And they weren't really saying that they wish they were straight. They just wished homophobes would realize being gay was not a lifestyle choice as some believed (and still believe) it is.

I guess that they didn't mean that if they had the choice they would be straight, per se. I just think they want to be accepted by others as another normal human being..

Let's just hope we get to that point some day for all.

[MrsSpringsteen]

I just really struggle to comprehend the seeming notion that there is some vast existing majority of straight male and straight female parents out there with their perfect families, the perfect model. To set that up as the model ideal that gay families somehow automatically fail to live up to simply because they are two men or two women, well to me THAT is a false model. ALL families have some sort of difficulties to deal with, who ever knows what exists behind closed doors. I don't have kids, but I think I still know something about what makes for a healthy and happy family. I know by the opposite, unfortunately. And I know with 100 percent certainly that a male and female parent does NOT equate to automatically correct gender modeling. A gay man is perfectly capable of modeling what makes for a good man for a male child, or what could make for a good male partner for a female child. A gay woman, the same. It's about modeling basic goodness and human decency, not stereotypes about what makes a man a man or a woman a woman. Yes there will be times when you might want to get a different gender's perspective on things, when you're a teenager or whatever. That's why they say it takes a village, a healthy family doesn't exist in a vacuum..keeping out all outside opinions and influences.


Bottom line for me is- what all parents should be doing is providing love, security, friendship, self esteem and confidence boosting, and so many more things I don't have the time to list here. And any healthy functioning adult is capable of providing that. Kids of straight couples have plenty of struggles growing up with parents who are alcoholics and drug addicts, parents who are emotionally and physically abusive, parents who have never dealt with their own demons, parents who are selfish and never should have had children. And many more struggles. THAT is reality, not this idyllic utopia that doesn't exist. Maybe it does for the lucky few, but that hardly makes it the gold standard that gay couples fail to live up to just because they are gay. The kind of person you are makes you the kind of parent you are. So does the kind of relationship you have with your spouse. That relationship is about love, trust, communication-all that stuff. Not about gay or straight.

[Diemen]

Originally Posted by nbcrusader

A great, tough question. If we are truly honest with ourselves, we must come to the conclusion: yes, it is wrong.

And, in keeping with such honesty, it is a great indictment of a great number of heterosexual parents in the US today.

The question is pointless because it falsely assumes that gays are "willfully" denying something that a child cannot go without in order to live a happy, productive life.

When faced with personal stories such as Pac mule's, I hear from Aeon that of course you wouldn't say that he shouldn't have been raised by two women, but I'm having a hard time trying to see where the line gets drawn between acceptable deviation from "the ideal" and unacceptable.

[Pearl]

Originally Posted by MrsSpringsteen

I just really struggle to comprehend the seeming notion that there is some vast existing majority of straight male and straight female parents out there with their perfect families, the perfect model. To set that up as the model ideal that gay families somehow automatically fail to live up to simply because they are two men or two women, well to me THAT is a false model. ALL families have some sort of difficulties to deal with, who ever knows what exists behind closed doors. I don't have kids, but I think I still know something about what makes for a healthy and happy family. I know by the opposite, unfortunately. And I know with 100 percent certainly that a male and female parent does NOT equate to automatically correct gender modeling. A gay man is perfectly capable of modeling what makes for a good man for a male child, or what could make for a good male partner for a female child. A gay woman, the same. It's about modeling basic goodness and human decency, not stereotypes about what makes a man a man or a woman a woman. Yes there will be times when you might want to get a different gender's perspective on things, when you're a teenager or whatever. That's why they say it takes a village, a healthy family doesn't exist in a vacuum..keeping out all outside opinions and influences.

Exactly.

Instead of lamenting and getting nervous over gay parents raising kids - and even doing a great job at it - why not focus on making straight parents better? There's plenty of straight parents who are not good role models for their kids in anyway, and to say they're still better parents because they are straight is wrong.

Really, I think some people who are against same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting are just nervous that homosexuals may do a better job than straights, thus proving that some gender expectations and roles no longer fit in today's world. Instead of kicking and screaming over this, they should re-examine what went wrong with heterosexual relationships and come up with rational ideas on solving problems like single parenthood, fewer straight men wanting to get married, things like that. Of course, the people who aren't happy about homosexual parenting are the last people to get involved in fixing the heterosexual world.

Oh, and in regards to taking a village to raise a child - many societies and cultures have extended families taking care of the kids. Sure, the parents are the prime guardians and role models, but the uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents are always nearby (sometimes in the same house) and raising kids is a family thing. So, gay parents have good company.

[jeevey]

Originally Posted by MrsSpringsteen

A gay man is perfectly capable of modeling what makes for a good man for a male child, or what could make for a good male partner for a female child. A gay woman, the same. It's about modeling basic goodness and human decency, not stereotypes about what makes a man a man or a woman a woman.

The kind of person you are makes you the kind of parent you are. So does the kind of relationship you have with your spouse. That relationship is about love, trust, communication-all that stuff. Not about gay or straight.

Great post.

And that "village" mentality is where the needs of an opposite-sex child being raised by a gay couple get met.

[BonosSaint]

Originally Posted by MrsSpringsteen

I just really struggle to comprehend the seeming notion that there is some vast existing majority of straight male and straight female parents out there with their perfect families, the perfect model. To set that up as the model ideal that gay families somehow automatically fail to live up to simply because they are two men or two women, well to me THAT is a false model. ALL families have some sort of difficulties to deal with, who ever knows what exists behind closed doors. I don't have kids, but I think I still know something about what makes for a healthy and happy family. I know by the opposite, unfortunately. And I know with 100 percent certainly that a male and female parent does NOT equate to automatically correct gender modeling. A gay man is perfectly capable of modeling what makes for a good man for a male child, or what could make for a good male partner for a female child. A gay woman, the same. It's about modeling basic goodness and human decency, not stereotypes about what makes a man a man or a woman a woman. Yes there will be times when you might want to get a different gender's perspective on things, when you're a teenager or whatever. That's why they say it takes a village, a healthy family doesn't exist in a vacuum..keeping out all outside opinions and influences.

Thank you for your post.

[BonosSaint]

I think a child might miss having a mother or a father and feel a loss (an experience I know from friends who grew up in single parent households). But in many cases the father/mother missing would not have made great, supportive parents. I think, as Mrs. Springsteen said so eloquently, it is important for children to have an entire support network of both sexes that do not need to be their parents, but need to provide a broader experience (And this goes for children who have both a mother and a father). They need the aunt who encourages mischief and the male family friend who does all that guy stuff that women don't quite get--like introduce the kids to The Three Stooges. They need a constant presence and acceptance in their lives from both sexes.

[nbcrusader]

Originally Posted by Diemen

The question is pointless because it falsely assumes that gays are "willfully" denying something that a child cannot go without in order to live a happy, productive life.

When faced with personal stories such as Pac mule's, I hear from Aeon that of course you wouldn't say that he shouldn't have been raised by two women, but I'm having a hard time trying to see where the line gets drawn between acceptable deviation from "the ideal" and unacceptable.

In your scenario, “gays” are electing to forgo an element, just as many hetero couples do (having children without being in a committed relationship, having children without taking primary responsibility to raise the children, etc.)

Again, for discussion purposes (I would hope we all view these threads as AEON described:

Originally Posted by AEON

I do not see these discussions as win/lose debates - but about sharing each other's viewpoints. However, I fear that this if I'm not careful - I will hurt more than help, and I certainly don't want to do that. Please try not to picture me as the man with a bullhorn outside of the stadium - instead, please view me as one of you at a pub, sitting around a table, drinking a pint, talking about life as Achtung Baby plays in the background.

, we are talking about an ideal – something that we can recognize is not being met by many parents.

[nbcrusader]

Originally Posted by PhilsFan

Are you saying we should ignore the study on the off chance a future study has a different conclusion?

Nothing even close. We should scratch our heads if all we see is a vague reference to an executive summary from one study. As Irvine has informed us, there are other studies that do come to different conclusions. We can ignore one study or the other based on the result we are seeking, or we can evaluate and weigh the conclusions of two or more studies in thoughtful discussion – what I thought was the intention of this thread.

[nbcrusader]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

Or until anti-gay forces can fund a rigged study to show their "science" as we saw with the Regenerus "study" done just in time for SCOTUS arguments last March.

Instead of playing the race card, seems we now play the gay card whereby anti-gay organizations can complain that it's only political correctness that prevents social science from validating their own viewpoints. Just as we have scientists funded by energy companies to "dispute" global warming science, so to are we going to have "tough questions" that pretend to bravely question the stranglehold that gay liberal forces apparently have upon the APA.

It's like Middle East politics. If you don't like the results, discredit the process.

It would have been far easier to answer AEON's question with the word "No".

Your post gave me the opportunity to look into the Regenerus study. I can see why Ligtvoet did not cite this study as it would have required far more significant analysis than intended for his article. What Irvine fails to mention is the study faced political opposition, but more importantly, scientific peer review. The peer review validated Regenerus’ work, both at the University of Texas (where Regenerus works) and on a national stage.

A preemptive attempt to discredit the process is not worthy of this thread. If you are going to start a thread seeking discussion, we deserve a better response.