Same-Sex Couples and Adoption

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Here is a statement frequently uttered buy people who don't think same-sex couples should have kids.

"A person needs a paternal and a maternal figure to be psychologically healthy."

I agree with this. I never got along with my dad and when I turned thirteen my mind ran on juvenile hormonal bullsh** until I discovered George Orwell and decided to make him my new dad. A paternal or maternal figure doesn't need to be a parent, it could be a grandparent, author, neighbor ect.

The statement, "a person needs a paternal and a maternal figure to be psychologically healthy." is accurate but it is not a justification for not letting same-sex couples have kids. It is a justification for introducing your kids to your neighbours.

This video might be of some interest.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyAueltLsa4&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

There are straight marriages in which the mother is the paternal figure and viceversa.

Family has never really had a standard such as mommy, daddy, boy and girl. The nuclear family is barely a sitcom cliche. I am not even sure if it is prevalent statistically.

My mother had basically three mothers in that she didn't live with her father but she did live with her mother, grandmother and aunt. My father, had 10 or 12 siblings but lost his mother when he was little. Their family experiences were drastically different to the nuclear family. They turned out just fine.

I had a more normal family in that I had a father and a mother, but in the case of my sister both of our parents were very busy working I was much older than her so I did more parenting than you would imagine.

I can imagine many ways in which families are way different than the standard. Dead parents, step parents. Uncles, aunts, best friends. In the case of adoption, your family is going to be forcibly non-standard.

I can't really picture a mechanism in which having two fathers or two mothers will be forcibly be a bad thing. Sure it will affect the children. But guess what? Having military parents does also affect children. Having a reverend player too.

BTW, single people are able to adopt, so adoption law is really not built upon the nuclear family standard .

Well, I think having maternal and paternal figures are definitely important but I see no reason a same-sex couple could not provide that. A lot of kids these days grow up in single parent homes, surely a same sex couple would be preferable to that in my opinion.

Unless single parents are also going to be banned from adopting, then it is unfair to ban gay people based on that argument. In fact, as married couples may adopt and then divorce, all adoptions should be banned.

How much adoption is actually going on these days?

My experience is way back, but there was such a string of requirements one wondered if any adoption even happens. Age, marital status, age gap between spice [plural of spouse, compare mouse / mice], income. careers, education, "race", "religion", perceived quality of marriage. That was in the early 70s, there must be new additions to the list.

My impression was that the State was anxious to find any possible reason for refusing the application.

Although I certainly agree with your conclusion, I do not agree with the premise--or your need to distinguish away from it.

I think that mother + father + children paradigm is intuitively appealing--but I am not aware of any clinical evidence that supports its superiority over any other two parent model. The advantage of two parents is well demonstrated clinically--but not the sex of those parents. (So far as I am aware).

Aw, the opponents of gay marriage just want to equate the nuclear family with opposite sex parents because they hate the notion of a gay couple forming a family with children. Same reason why they claim having gay parents would bring emotional and financial ruin down on a child, as well as they would be more likely to get molested, apparently.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I agree with this statement to a point - perhaps not as maternal/paternal as much as female/male figure. In an ideal situation all children should have male and female figures in their lives, but although not having these can effect a child's psychological health, they're not essential for psychological health.

This argument is of course not an argument against homosexual couples adopting, it comes from the minds of those who view the traditional family as the best and only way, however I do think that during adoption it should be a criteria for ALL potential adoptive parents (heterosexual couples, homosexual couples, single parents, etc.) to have constant male and female figures present in the child's life.

There are plenty of gay people out there trying to raise their children and do right by them, often by taking up with a lover of the same sex. If you ever catch some Christian weirdos trying to interfere with these families at the expense of their children's welfare, cut their eyes out with broken whiskey bottles.

Living with same-sex parents is better for children's welfare than living as wards of the state, you stupid, obscene cretins. Don't you people even take a minute to think about your annoying opinions before spouting your filth in public? The proponents of same-sex adoption are talking about same-sex parents as alternatives to lives in foster care, not as alternatives to raising children with their biological mommies and daddies, and anyone who is trying to make it out to be anything else deserves to be castrated with a dull oyster knife.

Oh, and this maternal/paternal figure crap is ignorant pseudo-science, and it has never been subjected to anything resembling rigorous examination. All of the studies that supposedly support the idea are based on single-parent households, and I have never heard of any evidence whatsoever that the absence specifically of a male or female parent ever made any substantial difference in a child's development.

Noe this [I hope marshall is watching] is the sort of thing I mean.

A. Stupid rabble rousing implication that nobody but a Christian weirdo is likely to "interfere with these families"

B Stupid rabble rousing implication that Christian weirdos are likely to "interfere with these families"- I know a good few Christian weirdos - I am one myself. I have never met anyone, even the scary Conservative Baptists who were very much NOT weirdos, who woiuld ""interfere with these families""

C. Extremely vicious rabble rousing incitement to a particularly nasty fpornm of violence.

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And how would you respond if you heard that homosexual hating people [I do not know or care what the odds are that they would be weirdos, I do know they would be no Christians whatever tattoos they wore] ewanted to cut your eyes out?

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Next time PLEASE threaten your enemy with disembowelling - I have a serious eye phobia and talk connecting eyes and broken glass is extremely disturbing.

Not that Rage Talk cares about anybody's feelings.

Way to take the moral high ground, dude.......

I didn't think there was anything that would make this Christian weirdo oppose gay people being able to adopt, but this came really close.

I think most people here so far agree with you. Unless I failed to understand your post, I think you may have misunderstood ours.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I wouldn't be surprised. They're savages and lowlifes anyway, so I've quit being surprised by anything those pathetic trash do.

I have ample excuse for rage talk over this particular subject. In Brunswick County, NC, someone who is different or odd isn't just pleasantly swept under the rug like they would be in say Columbus County or Iredell County. No, instead, if you have the slightest suspected deviancy, everyone knows about it and will harangue you about it to the point of driving you to thoughts of self-murder. If I had only had to deal with social isolation, I would have been happy enough. I'm a self-contained kind of guy.

But, if I haven't even made any admission at all of having any kind of sexual attraction and some idiot is freaking out, after having knocked me down sprawling on the floor, "HE LICKED HIS LIPS AT ME! LOOK! HE LICKED HIS LIPS AT ME! WAAAAH!" as if he's been victimized somehow, and I'm in helpless tears and not even sure what he's talking about, I think that something is a little screwed-up already. When the teacher comes and treats me like I'm Public Enemy No. 1 for the same reason (a suspicion that I am intent on making sexual advances toward the boys in the class), we've gone from "screwed-up" to "outright deranged." WHEN SOME LITTLE RED-HAIRED SCOTCH-IRISH PIECE OF WHITE TRASH IS BEING PRAISED FOR GIVING ME A FAT LIP AND TREATED LIKE A HERO WHEN I HADN'T EVEN MADE A MOVE IN MY OWN SELF-DEFENSE, much less done anything to deserve the abuse (except for being vulnerable to being prodded into a rage and being cursed with a loud, booming basso profundo pitch of voice), I think that I'm getting close to being justified in having blood-curdling fantasies about what I might want to go back and do to those people. I wasn't even aware of my sexuality at the time, and I was going through this because I apparently flamed severely.

IF YOU WANT TO CONDEMN ME FOR HAVING A COMPLETELY NORMAL, HUMAN REACTION TO BEING TREATED LIKE SOMETHING SUB-HUMAN, LIKE SOME MISTAKE OF NATURE THAT SHOULD BE DESTROYED FOR EVERYONE ELSE'S BENEFIT, GO RIGHT AHEAD, BUT I AM PAST GIVING A DAMN.

And have I mentioned that nobody has ever condemned my sexuality in the name of God? Seriously, these low-lifes don't even usually pretend that religion has anything to do with their behavior. The presence of anti-gay beliefs in someone's religious outlook is a consequence of being anti-gay in the first place. To blame religion for it is to confuse the causality.

"And have I mentioned that nobody has ever condemned my sexuality in the name of God? Seriously, these low-lifes don't even usually pretend that religion has anything to do with their behavior. The presence of anti-gay beliefs in someone's religious outlook is a consequence of being anti-gay in the first place. To blame religion for it is to confuse the causality."

At least you are capable of seeing / saying that much.

For the rest - good luck facing unreasoning attack with unreasoning counterattack. It does not usually work.

People talking about ideals when it comes to adoption simply haven't done the math.

There are a lot of children out there who would be glad to have any number of any variety of caring, stable adults around.

Of course that goes hand in hand with a whole other parcel of problems, like people having kids they can't properly care for, who then end up as screwed up kids in the foster system.