Point taken, Jeff; I wasn’t attempting to do a dissertation on the social value of marriage, just to illustrate a couple of examples in which the legal recognition of the married state makes sense.
However, that raises the controverted question of why it makes a difference to anyone what the sexes of the two persons wanting to marry and start a family happen to be. And that probably will give rise to a cosmic hijack of this thread. So suffice it to say that any gay person or any two gay persons constituting themselves a household have my blessing to make good homes for any kids they wish to adopt.
There is one issue that might deserve raising here, though – many “out” gays seem to show a strong sense of activism and hostility towards the culture that has demeaned and marginalized them. While I can sympathize strongly with that sense of hostility and outrage, to what extent is that continued activism and ill-temperedness going to adversely affect the children they adopt? I hasten to say that I’m not talking about any legal sanctions in that regard, merely expressing concern for the emotional health of the kids, and I’d greatly appreciate it if no gay poster takes it as an affront towards him personally, but as a real concern about the children – offered in much the same vein as one might offer a similar view about a fundamentalist convinced of the evilness of mankind unless they repent and turn to Jesus, and how his/her religious views are going to affect any kids he or she adopts.
It would be just as appropriate to question the fitness of WWE fans as parents, Polycarp. Or football players, or video game geeks, or members of the military. There are areas in life where agression, towards whatever object, is appropriate. The assumption that agression in any form translates to agression in the context of one’s family is going to need some serious proof to be considered as a valid point in this debate.
A very valid point, Mr Visible, and I hope you do not see me as arguing against adoption by homosexual people (individually or as couples), which I do strongly support.
I think the term we’re looking for here is “assertiveness” as opposed to “aggressiveness” (I trust you’re familiar with the distinction?) and whether, if “aggressiveness” is in fact present, belligerence against perceived abusiveness, it is sufficiently compartmentalized to prevent any abuse of the children.
In that context, fundamentalism, radical gay activism, WWE fan-ship, enthusiasm about football, etc., are elements to be brought into consideration in evaluating the potential for abusiveness towards children – but, of course, not the deciding elements. Surely you can make a distinction between, say, lel and Fred Phelps, between Reggie White and Esara Whatsisname, etc. (And believe me, I had much rather have Mel White and his partner adopt a child than Reggie White, for reasons I’m sure you agree with.)
Polycarp,
If you’re worried about homosexual activism bringing tension into gay households, keep in mind that the gay rights movement is going through an extremely conservative swing right now, and will probably continue to do so. The actual activism of the early '90s has waned, shifted into the same lazy middle-of-the-road politics found in much of the Democratic party leaders.
As for me-- my politics are much more zealous, sort of a ‘70s back-to-the-earth hippie lesbian meets sex-positive anti-WTO PETA freak who might be found protesting outside the HRC headquarters (gay lobby group) for being too homophobic. But that doesn’t mean I’ll bring any aggressiveness to my child’s life— I’ll just be the weird mom who only buys organic and doesn’t allow meat or tv in the house… my kid will have to sneak sodas at his/her friends’ houses… and we’ll camp out at music festivals rather than go to Panama City for vacation, and my child will know why Barbie is a bad role model, but if my parents buy her one I’ll let her keep it… and she’ll attend a Montessori school with a bunch of other kids with weird parents, and when she goes through her rebellious period she’ll have to join the Young Republicans.
So, I’m being a little silly (not altogether sure how I feel about Montessori schools anyway), but I just wanted to illustrate that political activism, at least for wild radicals like me, does not necessarily translate into any kind of hostility. It’s just about recognizing problems in the world, and trying to find positive ways to respond to them through life choices. And I’m familiar with a lot of gay activists, enough to know that most of them are only checkbook activists who would turn Republican the minute the Log Cabiners’ views are accepted by the party. They are, by and large, quite conservative.
Exceptional point, keira. On rereading what I’ve said, it appears to me that the average reader would see me saying that gay activism per se is a negative value towards adoption.
Rather, my concern would be that the discrimination and hatred and outright persecution that many gay people, particularly the outspoken ones, have experienced would leave a bitter and non-compassionate mindset in those people, and that this would not be a healthy environment for a child, not because of gayness but because of that tendency towards bitterness and lack of compassion that might ensue. Which sounds very much like I’m arguing against gays being able to adopt – instead, what I’m trying to say is that a gay person (llike any other prospective adoptive parent) must be able to evince evident compassion towards his/her potential child – and I am concerned that that might be difficult for people who have the sense of outrage that Mr Visible demonstrates here. If he can successfully compartmentalize his anger at the Fred Phelpses and Jerry Falwells of the world from the cuddling and patient guidance that a child will need from him as its father, I’m all for his adoption. But if I were an adoption agency, I’d want to see evidence that he can, given what little I know of him from this board (where he is no doubt a bit more outspoken and angry-sounding than he is in flesh-and-blood life, a situation I’ve seen across the spectrum of posters and not a judgment on him personally).
I am not, repeat not, arguing against gay people becoming parents in adoption – I am for it.
I am expressing a concern, from the POV of the best welfare of the child. And that’s all I’m doing.
I can name three gay men and one woman from this board that I’m firmly convinced would be excellent parents. Likewise, I can name a few others that I’d be concerned about, from the perspective of how good a home they’d make the child. And I can do likewise for a fair proportion of the straight people. (Aside to one couple that may be lurking: If you want an endorsement letter on your own prospective adoption, let me know.) In real life, one of the finest mothers I know is a woman who belongs to my church and is married in a ceremony with no legal validity but IMHO strong moral and spiritual validity to a Jewish woman whom she loves dearly, and they have two daughters with special needs for whom they’ve made a wonderful home and who are thriving and dealing with the world around them terrifically.
To suggest that Saltire might make an excellent parent on the basis of what little I know and that Coffeeguy might not (taking names completely at random from the “last poster” list on the main index page) implies nothing about their sexuality or anything else irrelevant – it would be based on my judgment of their assets and liabilities for the role of prospective parents (assuming I were in the role of evaluating them) taking all the stuff mentioned earlier as appropriate considerations into account.
I merely expressed a concern about how well a given group might function in the role of caregiver – which at bottom is what this is all about.
and I am stating how the same argument could be applied to many more groups of people which does not hold true and is therefore invalid.
Yes, there are gays who are militant. There are also blacks who are militant and females who are militant, etc.
Does this mean that they can’t show compassion for their children? I don’t think so. My fiance is VERY involved in gay (and woman’s) rights and wants to actually do a revolution with violence and all that because she percieves that as the only way she is ever going to get anywhere. However, she also enjoys animals and small children very much and would make an excellent parent.
A fair number of my friends are daughters of feminists and are wonderful girls with very healthy self-esteems.
A person can go out and get all angry and emotional when trying to defend gay rights and still come home to hug and show comfort to their loved ones. It isn’t a paradox.
A person may be hostile and forceful in some circumstances and gentle and compassionate in others, regardless of sex, age, creed, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identification, or whatever other putative ground for discrimination one cares to irrelevantly raise.
But IMHO if someone shows aggressive behavior in one circumstance, no matter how justified, a person charged with evaluating whether that someone is capable of providing care for a small child would be well advised to see whether such aggressive behavior carries over into homelife as well. And if it doesn’t, all well and good.
To take your earlier example, to suggest that a black person cannot give as good care to an adoptive child as a white person is rankest racism. But a person sufficiently embittered by racist maltreatment may not constitute a good parent because he or she is incapable of divorcing his or her anger against “the system” from the behavior he or she acts out vis-à-vis the small child he or she is adopting. Or he or she may be quite capable of the requisite behavioral shift and make an excellent parent. But one (at least one with the job of making such evaluations) must judge which is in fact the case.
Same applies to gay people, IMHO. And that’s all I was trying to say.
Umm… somehow I don’t think that someone who wants to violently overthrow the government would make a wonderful parent. The leader of the ELF certainly loves animals, and for all I know, loves kids too. But I would say his desire to engage in acts of violence against those who disagree with him disqualifies him from being a good parent.
Jeff
Hmm. I’d have to point out that you’re basing your opinion of my child-rearing abilities on not just the limited posting that I do on the boards, but on a limited sample of those limited postings. I, like most gays, am a multifaceted person. Saying you have doubts about whether I can be compassionate towards a child based on my posts here is like videotaping a virulent gay rights demonstration and saying that those people might not make good parents, after all, look at them all angry and yelling and stuff.
It’s a tactic that’s popular with brothers. Annoy your brother long enough, and he’ll retaliate, and then you can go to Mom and say “He hit me!” And frankly, Polycarp, I’m surprised; I considered this kind of badly reasoned argument to be beneath you.
If you want to familiarize yourself with more of my online life here, I’ll be happy to provide you with some threads which I’ve been involved in. Some of my favorites:
I’ve got posts in cafe society threads about Joe Strummer passing, Firefly getting cancelled and Warren Zevon’s recent diagnosis. I’ve got a post or two in most every Buffy thread, with a special burst of effort going into my fanfic version of Buffy vs. Gilligan’s Island. I’ve posted in about every board game thread there has been around here in the past couple of years, and about half of the threads on role-playing games. I’ve added my ‘SDMB classified ads’ scheme to a number of threads about how we can pay for these boards. I’ve ranted about the woman who set her dogs on mine, and on the ketchup quantification conundrum at Carl’s Junior, both in a humorous vein. And I was cited by Ace of Spades himself as a favorite writer of his here on the boards, despite our history of differing opinions, in the OP of his recent thread in IMHO.
If you’d asked me what the one thread on these boards was that I recall most fondly, that I’m most proud of participating in, it would have to be the GQ thread Why don’t they make people kibble? from way back when I started posting here. I love that thread; it was fun, and thoroughly educational. But you didn’t ask; you just assumed that the cross-section of my posting and your own represented the complete contents of my contribution to the SDMB. And that my participation in the religion/homosexuality threads was enough to judge my child-rearing abilities by.
I don’t much like participating in the homosexuality debates on here. It sucks, quite frankly, to have to defend myself against those who would see me live out my life as a second-class citizen in my own country. I simply consider it to be my duty to make sure that ignorance on this particular subject is opposed. I try and retain a civil manner while doing so, but it’s frustrating to have to spend your life defending yourself. But that’s the position I’m in. It’s important to me. But so are many, many other things.
If you have a one-dimensional picture of me as a ranting anti-homophobe, then frankly, you have no idea who I am at all. Do a search on my username, and you’ll get 48 pages of posts, on a pretty big variety of subjects. And yet, all you judge me by is what you bother to read. I can’t imagine you condemning a belief, an idea, or an organization based on similarly limited information. Judging my ability to raise children from my posts in the debates about homosexuality is like judging someone’s ability to show compassion from their performance in the boxing ring.
Before you cast doubts on someone’s character, you might consider getting to know that person better first.
This is what a homestudy is for. To talk to the prospective adoptive parents and evaluate whether they’d be good parents. There is an element of subjectivity to it, but social workers will turn down parents who are overly passionate about a cause or activity and willing to put it first before their children - any cause - politics, religion, gay rights, their job. One of the things a social worker does look for is open mindedness - you are taking a new human being into your family - a human being who may be nothing like you. Another thing is a stable home life.
Ava’s fiance, would she make her revolutionary views known to a social worker, would and should be turned down - it shows a lack of tolerance and a potential for an non-stable home. The willingness to put “cause” before “self and family.” (And sometimes, in this world, it is unfortunately necessary to put cause before self and family, but one should never be eager for it when raising children). But it has nothing to do with sexual perference, a Christian militia member trying to adopt would face the same problems.
Poly, someone could have the same issues with your obsessive Christianity (which is extraordinarily open minded and tolerant, I know) as you have with Mr. Visable.
I appear to have been a bit ambiguous - sorry. When I posted, I was responding to the suggestion that marriage is no longer an indicator of stability. It is my understanding that as between common law straight couples, and straight married couples, marriages tend to be consistently more stable. I was not intending to use the stability of marriage as an argument against a gay couple, who obviously don’t have the choice.
Regardless of the cause of the stability of marriages generally, I would simply say that adoption officials should evaluate the stability of a couple’s relationship, whether straight or gay, since a stable relationship is important for the child. That evaluation should be done on the personal history and relationship of each couple. The mere fact that a straight couple is legally married should not give them an advantage over a gay couple who don’t have the option of marriage.
I respect you as a fellow gay man who is no doubt doing far more to advance the cause of a mature humanity than anything I’ll ever manage to do. Having said that, may I suggest…and it’s an irony of the sort we all get to confront, especially while driving…that your last posted response to Polycarp sorta made his point? (Or rather–the point you attributed to him.)
I don’t “read” him as uttering quite the personal slur against you that you seem to have discerned. He mentions you by name once, and then makes the grave error of speaking as if, thereafter, you personally are to function as his example of a (possibly) less-than-ideal adoptor. (If “he” can learn to handle “his”–etc.)
So the heat and length of your response is founded in logic–BUT: given your familiarity with Polycarp’s postings (as you ask him to be familiar with yours), don’t you think he probably intended something along the lines of “if one can can learn to handle one’s anger or bitterness and not bring it into the homelife of the child”…etc?
Which is not to say that there aren’t quite a lot of issues to be debated when we (seem to) suggest holding minorities to higher than the general standard. (Should postal workers be allowed to adopt?) But that sort of issue is more to the point than the content of your last post, if you don’t mind my saying so.
I don’t intend the above to be patronizing. (Not that patronizers ever do…)
Thanks, Scott. You’re precisely right; I’d intended to make that “he” a generic one (and incorporating “she” – something I generally try to spell out rather than depending on the “common gender ‘he’” because it is offensive to many women and not a few men). And because I had used Mr Visible as an example shortly before, it did therefore look as though I was judging him particularly.
I tried to stress, Mr Visible, that I’m all too acutely aware that what any one poster, including emphatically myself, sees of any other poster on this board is in no way indicative of the actual person – but it’s all those of us who have not met and become personal friends have with which to evaluate (not “judge”) who another board member is. And you’re entirely right; I was totally unaware of a fair proportion of what you cited as examples (though I had read a few of them.) Of course, as a Buffy fan, you’re disqualified as a prospective adoptive parent anyway!
Like my apparent judgment of you, you are correct in that the board gives a less-than-perfect picture of me. I am not anywhere as outspoken on Christianity elsewhere – it’s merely that there has been more ignorance on the stance of liberal Christianity here than was tolerable, and the purveyors of “atheist chic” on the one hand and purblind fundie-ism (as opposed to DDG’s cogent explanation of “true” fundamentalism) on the other, made speaking out, and in particular speaking out in the defense of gay people, incumbent on me. But I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned the number of times my boy Chris and I sat around making sarcastic comments about the soap-opera-for-teenage-boys of the then-WWF, or the fact that my wife and I have adapted the old fantasy-baseball game Extra Innings to our own taste and are just completing the complete Major League 2000 schedule (playoffs are coming up between the Red Sox, Tigers, Rangers, and wild-card Twins in the AL; in the NL, and the Braves and Rockies as having clinched their divisions, the Cubs or Astros in the NL central to be decided, and the loser between them or the Diamondbacks as the wild card). Nor have I described adequately the cuteness of my honorary grandkids and the funny things they say.
We’re all much more than our posts show ourselves to be.
And I reiterate my concern that a child have a home that is the best available one for them. I think the one you and your partner will open to a lucky child in a few years will meet that description, and I’m sorry I inadvertently implied otherwise.
It’s not those who disagree with her, but those who stand “in her way”. And she doesn’t want to overthrow the goverment. Stonewall was a riot with violence and look where that got the gay movement. If it takes another riot, or something of the sort to get gays equal rights, she wants to do it. I prefer nonviolent means myself, but I also appreciate the fact that sometimes violence is necessary.
