It would surprise me very much if it were true. It strikes me as something I would read in a Chick Tract, and is contrary to all of my lived experience with the children of gay couples. It would also surprise me very much if it were true that religious people had different brain structures that impaired their logical reasoning. They strike me as being in roughly the same category of rank speculation more likely attributable to bigotry than any sincere effort at truth-seeking.
But the levels of anticipated surprise about these findings vary greatly across posters, so what of it? I don’t see why our subjective assessment of the truth value of speculation matters. Either it’s a good idea to try to shunt offensive/distracting opinions about a poster’s core characteristics to their own IMHO, GD, or Pit threads, or it’s not. If it’s a good idea, we should do it in this situation too. If it’s a bad idea, we should allow speculation about how a poster’s race, religion, or whatever is leading to some negative result based on some theory that just so happens to align with the opinions of bigots.
If you don’t want your life dissected like it’s on a slab then don’t ask a bunch of random strangers who aren’t important in your life about personal situations in your life.
While it’d be bad enough if that’s all that he said, it’s important to note that his post also, out of nowhere, said things like, “Sorry to burst your gay bubble,” and, “your shoving alot of gay propaganda down the kids throat.” Set aside the three errors in that last quote: these are not words of helpful advice, but straight up unwarranted snarky attacks on the poster for being gay.
Even if one adopts the softer position that his thesis isn’t bigoted, or that bigoted theses are permissible in advice threads, his post comprised a personal attack.
And that’s an important point. The justified displeasure with the nasty bigoted snark buries the actual issue: since our society is actually still sorting out this same-sex marriage thing, and the attendant changes to societal expectations, is it legitimate to ask whether a same-sex marriage family is under stresses and behaves slightly differently than a different-sex marriage family? Or are we going to set some kind of doctrinaire standard that SSM is 100% identical to DSM, and we will not tolerate anyone taking a contrary position, even if respectfully?
That’s what worries me about this discussion. I wonder if there are some here who want to enforce the latter position at the expense of legitimate discussion, using the bad behavior of a few to justify dictating an enforced position on the issue.
Again, I think parallels are helpful. If someone says that a black family might experience different stresses from a white family, that’s one thing. If someone says that a black family experiences different stresses because they’re less intelligent, that’s another entirely.
This is where the judgment call comes in. If someone is saying that a kid of two women experiences mother’s day differently from a kid of a man and a woman, that can be legitimate. If they say that the kid is confused and resentful because he doesn’t have a man in his life, that’s different, namely, it’s the sort of bigoted bullshit that belongs in GD, not IMHO.
You’re making an assumption about intent in asserting it’s bigoted. If it’s stated non-respectfully, yes, bigoted. If it’s factual and on-topic, not so.
“No male influence” in the context of the original thread has some potential relevance, because of one of the other phenomena mentioned in that thread: “mother” is a gender-based role, and “Mother’s Day” is nominally a day to celebrate a female parent.
A dual-mother SSM, therefore, has two people who should be celebrated. And, as pointed out in the thread, it’s usually a parent of the non-celebrated role (i.e., “father” in this context) who often cajoles a teenager to participate. No man in the kid’s life, no one to encourage participation (because, apparently, having one mother encourage the child to participate on behalf of the other mother doesn’t happen. Or didn’t, in this specific case.)
It’s a logistical difference, not necessarily a gender/sexual preference difference. Assuming it wasn’t said as a sneer or a snark.
As I said, if it was a sneering snark, it’s homophobia and should be moderated along with other bigoted personal attacks. If it’s the basis of a rational examination of a logistical difference, it shouldn’t.
As with many things, it’s not necessarily what’s said, it’s how and why it’s said. And that’s subjective.
For many reasons this is wrong, but one of the reasons is the assumption that a son of two women is not going to have a male influence in his life. Given the difficulties involved in two women starting a family together, you have to be pretty motivated to be a parent to do so, and it’s going to be vanishingly rare for two women to decide to do so, to have a son, and then not to have a male adult in the kid’s life.
Note also the bit about the kid being “confused” and “resentful.” Those have nothing to do with the sorts of essentially logistical challenges you’re discussing. There’s a line.
To clarify SBMB policy: we generally construe “hate speech” to mean the use of derogatory terms such as nigger, kike, or faggot or statements that members of certain groups deserve to be lynched or otherwise harmed - in other words, extreme cases. We don’t moderate posts that are merely bigoted or ignorant; we figure the Teeming Millions are well equipped to call out instances of this when they see it, as in fact has occurred in the present case. We reserve the right, but don’t have an obligation, to tell someone to knock it off if their negative remarks about gays (or anything else) become obsessive or otherwise creepy; we’ll keep an eye on UrbanRedneck now that this individual has been called to our attention. Please report any posts you find objectionable. That said, be aware that our bias is toward more speech, not less, and our judgment of offensiveness won’t necessarily coincide with yours.
I’ll leave this thread open briefly in case there are questions regarding the above; if there aren’t any I’ll close it.
I appreciate the clarification, though I obviously disagree with it :). I do have one question. There were a couple of posts that appeared later that I didn’t report, out of an assumption that nothing would be done with them:
Am I right that, given what you said, the absence of words like “dyke” in these two posts, they would not have been modded?
If so, I know you’ve said your piece, but I strongly encourage the mods and admins to reconsider their interpretation of the “no personal attacks” rule.
I haven’t polled the staff, but think it unlikely there would be any inclination to mod the above post. We haven’t construed this sort of thing as a personal attack in the past. It is not against our rules to be bigoted or ignorant.
There was hinting awhile ago that calling another poster “bigoted” was off-limits. If it’s okay to call a woman a step-father because she’s one of two women raising a boy, but it’s not okay to call a poster bigoted because he says that, there’s something highly skewed.
No one called the stepmother a stepfather; there was a facetious, and hilarious, comment made by me when another poster asserted that a stepmother is ONLY the wife of a father. Obviously, that is false: a mother’s wife could also be a stepmother. If the point, and riotous humor, were lost on you, I’m glad to have had this chance to clear it up.
It might be worthy of a GD (or Pit) thread to debate the merits of the argument that one lesbian parent is actually a stepmom rather than another mom, but it has no place in the IMHO thread about Mother’s Day.
I’m not going to get into a hypothetical discussion. If there’s a specific post you find objectionable, please report it. If you did so and got no satisfaction, feel free to start a thread about it in ATMB. Make sure you include a link to the post you take exception to.
The present thread has gone off in multiple directions, making it difficult to respond, so I’m going to close it. If unresolved issues remain, please start a new thread and we’ll try to clarify matters.