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« Time for a Change | Main | Darwin v. Intelligent Design » January 19, 2005The Enemy of the GoodI am willing to concede that it's plausible that the ideal family situation for children is a mother and a father who are committed to the welfare of their children above all else. That provides the children with strong male and female role models, which seems intuitively to be a good thing. But we don't live in that world: we live in the real world, where children too often grow up with only one parent or in foster homes where they risk abuse and even death. We don't have the luxury of asking what the ideal family for each child would be. We have to ask what's the best we can do with the resources we have. Which means that laws preventing homosexual couples from adopting aren't guaranteeing that children will end up in good homes. It just means that those children are cut off from potentially good, loving homes because we're making the perfect the enemy of the good. We need to be asking the right question: is a child better off in foster care, or with a loving couple that just happens to be homosexual? And that answer needs to come from facts, not from personal fears and prejudices. I find it difficult to understand how anyone could consider it better for children to be shuttled from foster home to foster home until they're 18 rather than let a gay couple raise them. Maybe there are facts out there that indicate that growing up with a gay couple is worse than foster care. But I tend to doubt it, and I think that until someone can produce evidence to that end, it's time to let common sense overcome prejudice and actually think of the children first. Posted at January 19, 2005 11:08 AM
Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsI'm with you on this one. My point has always been that beign in a happy stable home of any sort has to be better than a life of uncertainty and potential abuse. I don't have any statistics, but I would hypothesize that most homosexuals have come from heterosexual parents. Maybe we should look into banning opposite-sex realationships to prevent homosexuality. Posted by: Scott at January 19, 2005 11:26 AM Andy, I agree 100%. Look at the costs and other hurdles anyone (okay, any non-celebrity) has to go through to adopt kids, and then add in the additional obstacles faced by gay couples - I think anyone who is willing to go through all that is serious about being a parent. The most common argument I hear against gay adoption is that it would be hard on the children growing up with parents who are "different" - ie. exactly the same thing that my parents were told 40 years ago, before being rejected by a dozen or so adoption agencies for being the "wrong" religion. Yet somehow I survived having parents who were not white heterosexual christians... On a slightly related note - how about those reports that the army fired 26 competent Farsi and Arabic translators for being gay, while information about potential threats to our country were piling up untranslated? Posted by: Heather at January 19, 2005 11:48 AM OK - let's think about the kids and put them FIRST and above anyone's personal agenda. I, along with you, despise the current, for profit (?)"Foster Parent" system. Posted by: Anonymous at January 19, 2005 11:57 AM OK - let's think about the kids and put them FIRST and above anyone's personal agenda. I, along with you, despise the current, for profit (?)"Foster Parent" system. Posted by: dlthomas at January 19, 2005 11:57 AM i That child is forced to confront society's prejudice against the gay lifestyle and become a defender of it without the necessary maturity and skill (or even understanding. This is not fair to the child. Yup, just as I expected, there's the exact reason my parents were rejected by a stack of adoption agencies 40 years ago: "It's just not fair to the child to have to confront/defend society's prejudices against your type." Yes, I did have to deal with prejudiced and ignorant comments from people who didn't approve of my parents' "lifestyle choices". Kids get picked on for having fat parents, short parents, multiracial parents, badly dressed parents, poor parents, and a million other different kinds of parents. But guess what - I survived being adopted into a family that was "different", and I sure as hell wouldn't trade my parents for years in foster care! Posted by: Heather at January 19, 2005 12:34 PM There is another question people should ask. Are orphanages better than foster care or adoption? There is an assumption that adoption is better- but I've never read a study or seen any evidence supporting the assumption. What if this assumption is like the food pyramid assumptions of the 80's, or the welfare recipient assumptions of the 70's, or like any number of other, stupid assumptions, which are proven false when examined? If the welfare of the orphans is the priority, why has noone ever checked this out? Posted by: Harkonnendog at January 19, 2005 01:14 PM I just noticed where your argument went wrong. You say that we should think of the children and what is best for them. Everyone knows that you need to think for the children and do what is best for you. It is along the same lines as firing the homosexual interpreters. You can never be sure that they are helping with threats and interrogations or if they are talking about outfits and whether or not the suspects hair looks good with a part Posted by: Scott at January 19, 2005 03:01 PM Post a comment |
