Centerfield

One thing to remember that with adoption the interests of the parents need to play a FAR secondary role to the interests of the children.

The state's primary responsibility HAS to be to represent the interests of the children first. I don't say that I support an outright ban on gay adoption but I do believe that case workers aught to be allowed to take ALL factors into account when considering the suitability of individual placements (INCLUDING the sexual orientation of the prospective parents). Hey, I'm not a child-psychologist I don't pretend to know how relevant it will be. However, I do know that each child is an individual....and so is each parent.... in many cases it may not be a factor...but in some cases it may. For instance, if you place a female child into a single-sex marriage between 2 males, does the lack of a female role model adversely effect the development of a child? A more extreme example.... what about a child that has had a history of exposure to molestation by individuals of the same sex?

What I don't want to see happen, is the welfare of the child be sacrificed on the alter of political correctness.... and that cuts both ways. Obviously, in cases where same sex couple can provide a healthy home atmosphere for a child...a blanket rule preventing them from adopting would harm the interests of children in need of loving parents. Conversely, there probably are some cases where a same sex couple (even if they were decent parents in all other regards) wouldn't be a good atmosphere to place paticular children in..... and we shouldn't be afraid to say so...even if we are giving the appearance of discrimination..... because frankly, in very limited cases discrimination is sometimes justified.... and we shouldn't be afraid to say so.

Ofcourse the old adage is that you need a license to drive, hunt and fish but you don't need one to be a parent.

I am the product of a male father/female mother upbringing that was one level short of Hell.

Children should be accessible to the best parenting available. No matter sexual orientation, mother/father, father/father, mother/mother. Who is to say what the best situation is for bringing up the child?

I have a great idea as to who we can ask...anyone have Bernard Cardinal Law's number in Rome???

Ofcourse the old adage is that you need a license to drive, hunt and fish but you don't need one to be a parent.

I am the product of a male father/female mother upbringing that was one level short of Hell.

Children should be accessible to the best parenting available. No matter sexual orientation, mother/father, father/father, mother/mother. Who is to say what the best situation is for bringing up the child?

I have a great idea as to who we can ask...anyone have Bernard Cardinal Law's number in Rome???

For instance, if you place a female child into a single-sex marriage between 2 males, does the lack of a female role model adversely effect the development of a child?

Careful... that kind of leaves open the door for taking children away from their natural parents as well. Say a mother dies, should the father lose custody because of the lack of a female role model? Or vice versa? What about divorced parents?

Just about any child would be better off with any parent that wanted it than it would in the "system"...

I love fundamentalists. They don't want abortions, but they don't want the children that no body else wants, and they also don't want anyone else to have them. AND they want a small government... It must be like Christmas for them every day.

I suggest looking at it differently. I don't think the problem is gays, but men.

Men are the main abusers. Women do abuse verbally, but physical abuse comes overwhelmingly from men.

I see no reason why lesbian couples should not be allowed to adopt, and in fact, it could be argued that they should be placed ahead of heterosexuals in the queue. Single men or male couples should be examined with the greatest scrutiny, since gender profiling suggests that men are the greatest threat to children.

I know several gays who have raised children. (Their own. What, you thought it impossible? Heh.) They were responsible, loving parents, and their kids all turned out pretty darn normal, with maybe more tolerance and understanding for people's quirks than most. All of 'em straight, as far as I know.

Judge the person's (or couple's) character, and the best interests of the child. Is it better to have a child placed with responsible, sober gay parents of good character, or to grow up a ward of the state, shuffled from foster home to foster home? We know what the odds say--even dysfunctional family stability is usually better than the foster home shuffle.

Yeah, there's a lot of gays I wouldn't let adopt children. There's a lot of straight folks I wouldn't let adopt a hamster, much less a child.

I second Tully's point that with many children in need of adoption, we must evaluate the child's "best interest" in light of the realistic options available, not in terms of the absolute ideal. Even assuming Ward & June is the ideal (I'm not saying that, but just for the sake of argument let's go with it), the number of Ward & Junes looking to adopt children, especially black children, especially children fetal alcohol syndrome or behavior difficulties or other problems, is pretty low. Ward & June can afford to arrange a private adoption from an unwed white girl two states over.

If the choice is between the child shuffling from over-worked foster home to state facilities to foster home again and the child being adopted by a loving, stable gay couple, that seems to be to be a no-brainer.

P.S. Stan, please try not to be so offensive. Indeed there are many very devout Christians in this country who serve as wonderful adoptive or foster parents to both healthy and severely disabled children. Don't use the existence of some hypocrites to tarnish millions of good people in furtherance of your political ideology.

Cengel, you are correct...the welfare of the child should always be the driver of any decision. I think you realize, as do many when they stop to think about it, that imposing a blanket ban makes it very clear that the welfare of the child is not the most important issue--whether or not the prospective parent is gay or not is.

Single men or male couples should be examined with the greatest scrutiny, since gender profiling suggests that men are the greatest threat to children.

Rick, I must say, I would have never predicted you to embrace that point of view. I would repeat the same argument--males should receive no more or no less scrutiny that females. It's impossible to look at statistics and thus determine that you don't need to study prospective Moms as much as Dads--that's simply not looking out for the best interest of the child on a case for case basis, it's making a blanket rule. (Incidentally, there's a foster mother on trial in my home town right now for mudering her foster child.)

My fundamental problem with the argument of the far right is that they are determing that adoptive children should not be in a home with gay parents. If you make that argument, then it's absolutely impossible to then say "but naturally born children are okay." It's inevitable that the next step will be to attempt to prevent judges from allowing gays to have custody of their own children. This is a very real concern for a lot of gays.

Indeed there are many very devout Christians in this country who serve as wonderful adoptive or foster parents to both healthy and severely disabled children.

I don't know how familiar you are with Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue. I'd probably be hard pressed to find any social issue that I wholeheartedly agree with him on, but looking at the example he has set in his personal life (he and his wife have served as foster parents for years), I can't help but admire the character of someone like that. I may disagree with him politically, but there aren't that many other politicians at that level who have the actions to back up their beliefs.

For many in the extreme right, banning adoptions by gays gels quite nicely with their repeated accusations that "radical homosexuals are trying to recruit YOUR children." Quite simply, their argument (with the rhetoric peeled aside) is that by adopting, gay couples are bypassing protective parents and recruiting by bringing orphans directly into their homes.

I think this is an over statement of how mainstream conservatives feel about this issue. I am not saying that there aren't some who believe it, but from what I gather this is more of an issue of right and wrong for most conservatives and not a consiracy theory that homosexuals are attempting to take over the world.

Oh, and what Pat and Tully said. My friend's dad is gay and has a very healthy relationship with his "normal" (whatever the hell that is) daughter, her husband, and her kids.

Funny you should use that example, Pat. I know a "Ward and June" couple. They had two children, one of whom is a soldier of my acquaintance. When their kids hit high school, they saw the empty nest looming and decided they wanted more children, and that adopting was a good idea.

They went for one child, discovered that the child that grabbed their heart was from a family of six children, two of them handicapped, whose parents had died in an accident. So they adopted all six to keep the family from being split up. They're white, the family they adopted is black. I doubt if that slowed them for even half a heartbeat--though they had to battle well-meaning social workers who thought that black children should only be placed with black families.

When I think of saints, I think of them. All adopted children should be so lucky.

Their oldest, my friend, enjoys "litmus-testing" people with his family photos. I like watching him do it. It's an instant character assessment. Some of the expressions are priceless.

Great story, Tully. A good friend of mine, a black woman, was the (birth) daughter of a very religious couple who adopted or fostered over a hundred kids. They have regular reunions and everything. I don't know how they all turned out, but my friend (a lawyer) is now the head of a major legal division of Wal-Mart.

People who adopt or foster children and treat them the way kids deserve to be treated are among the real heros of this world. They'd get more recognition if they weren't almost universally quiet and self-effacing.

Most of the objectors to gay couples adopting seem to be driven primarily by one worry: with gay parents, the children will be persuaded to be gay, too. Because, in their mind, homosexuality is strictly a matter of choice.

One question must arise: if that is true, why doesn't it work in reverse? Why would heterosexual parents, especially conservative ones, ever end up with gay children? To take a sample case, just for illustration, do any of these people believe that Mr. and Mrs. Cheney CAUSED their daughter to choose to be a lesbian? (Whatever one thinks of the Vice President, and I disagree with him on a vast number of issues, he has stuck by his daughter in preference to pandering to the religious right which is a major part of his natural constituency.)

Like most bigotry, this is something that simply cannot survive actually looking at the issue. Which, no doubt, is why those driving it are so careful to focus on emotions and exclude facts or rational discussion.

I'm an engineer. I go with the statistics. So far, the largest estimate I've seen for women sex offenders is 10 percent
(http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/psychology/female_offenders/6.html). That means that men are an order of magnitude more likely to commit offenses.

This is not strictly about gays. I don't trust heterosexual men either.

Most of the objectors to gay couples adopting seem to be driven primarily by one worry: with gay parents, the children will be persuaded to be gay, too. Because, in their mind, homosexuality is strictly a matter of choice.

Well, that and a lot of the anti-gay folks don't seem to understand the difference between homosexuality and pedophilia. i.e., they think that if you like to sleep with those of your own gender, then there's no stopping you from sleeping with children, animals, farm equipment, etc. It's the old slippery slope argument, from people who don't know the difference and don't want to know the difference.

But what about non-sexual abuse, Rick? There's a lot of mother out there who have beaten, starved, or otherwise neglected and abused their kids.

Rick,

While I don't dispute the fact that men are by far the larger % of sex offenders (of all types), I did find out doing some digging on another topic something that surprised me, that both fathers and mothers are about equal when it comes to murdering their children. (of course the numbers of parents that murder their children is very tiny as to make it almost an anomaly it still surprised me).

I don't have the link but googling infanticide will do the trick.

No point here, just an interesting aside.

I think this is an over statement of how mainstream conservatives feel about this issue. I am not saying that there aren't some who believe it, but from what I gather this is more of an issue of right and wrong for most conservatives and not a consiracy theory that homosexuals are attempting to take over the world.

Matthew, just for clarification...I specifically said that "many in the extreme right" hold to this particular belief. I do not consider the "extreme right" and "mainstream conservatives" to be one and the same. And, when it comes to the "extreme right," there are a number of them that truly do believe that gays are trying to take over the world. Some of the literature that is put out is constantly railing about "homosexuals taking over our schools." Just look at some of the reaction to "Brokeback Mountain." While the religious right remained mostly quiet on the issue, there were the select few who couldn't help but turn to the conspiracy argument that the movie was part of a "Hollywood agenda to force acceptance of gays into modern America."

I think the RR was mostly annoyed about the use of Genesis for the first part of the gay-themed plot line in Brokeback.

Think about it. Just the two of them in the Garden (lovely cinematography by Lee, emphasizing the purity of the wilderness) with nothing but the animals to keep them company, then they taste the Forbidden Fruit, get caught at it, and the Boss expels them...and they spend the rest of their lives suffering for their sins, re-sinning, and atoning for their sins while trying to get back to the Garden.

That still cracks me up. But I managed not to laugh out loud in the theater.

LOFL! You would have thought I had noticed that, Tully! I can't believe that even with all of my religious training that one managed to slip right by me.

Now there's no doubt it's all a conspiracy...lol.

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