I don’t know if this really should be in GD or in IMHO, so, I’ll put it here. I tried searching for this topic, but alas, I’m not exactly proficient at the use of the search engine here, so if this topic has already been tackled, please just give me a link to it. Anyway, here goes.
I’m a gay man. And eventually I would like to find the man of my dreams, settle down, and adopt a few kids. I was just kinda wondering what the world in general felt about gay couples raising children? Mainly, is it fair to the children to be raised in a household with two gay parents? Is it wrong for homosexual couples to want the same thing that many straight couples want?
I found some interesting results on opinions on gay adoption with a Google search, but results varied widely. This poll(Harris, reported by third party) suggests that people in the United States were as of the year 2000 overwhelmingly opposed to gay adoption, but this poll (ABC News) suggests that in 2002 a plurality of people in the U.S. support gay adoption.
If you’re mainly just looking for ideas on what people believe, my suspicion is that here you will find fairly strong support for permitting homosexual couples to adopt children, with which I would personally agree. To me it seems much fairer to a child to be raised in a home with two loving parents than without any parents at all.
I do not have children of my own, but the man who was my ward in his teens and his two friends whom we also provided a home for all have kids whom I consider as “honorary grandchildren.” With them, the situation would never arise that they would be up for adoption, thanks to extended families who love them, but if it did, I’d want them to have loving parents who cared about them as people, and set them good examples of how to live as they grow up. What those parents are and how they relate to each
other is, therefore, important. But I can see no reason why a loving same-sex couple would be bad examples to them.
I know a former moderator here and her husband have provided that if they both should die or be incapacitated before their youngest reaches 18, their children will be entrusted to the custody of a gay couple with whom they’re friends.
You will find a number of people who, having no objections to a gay couple per se, will hold the view that for one reason or another (e.g., the need for both a father figure and a mother figure; social intolerance against gay couples), it would be against the child’s best interests to entrust him/her to a gay couple. Do not mistake such an attitude for homophobia – IMHO, it’s merely placing the emphasis where it belongs – the welfare of the child.
In short, you may or may not be a good parent (or candidate for adoptive parent), and whether or not you are one is not necessarily in any way tied to what your sexual orientation might be.
There are occasional studies of children growing up in non-standard relationship situations (I’ve seen one recently on offspring of multi-adult households making the rounds). I believe that the overall consensus is that kids growing up in non-het-monogamous households are more or less just like kids growing up in het-monogamous households.
I tend to think that the argument that kids need both a male parent and a female parent is silly, and will continue to advocate in response to it that if kids need to have such role models in their homes and can’t get them elsewhere, clearly they also need to have a working mom and a stay-at-home mom, too.
Ah ha! You see, a truly macho man wouldn’t hesitate to rape a nun. If the only thing you have on your record is expired tabs, your 2 daddies raised a total wuss.
