But no matter how you look at it there was a Father *figure *there for the vast majority of his childhood. It’s not splitting hairs. Splitting hairs is when you are imprecise by a small margin.
But no matter how you look at it, the family of Jesus is not the model that the “one man, one woman” crowd is pushing.
Jesus had two daddies.
Someone should make this into a bumper sticker.
A bit of a stretch. You guys seem to be hellbent on trying to make this idea fit even though it doesn’t at all. Jesus had a stepfather for all of his childhood. As Polycarp pointed out, we don’t have a record of what Joseph did after Jesus was 12, not that he died when Jesus was 12, but yes, technically Jesus was conceived out of wedlock. :rolleyes:
This is Saturday’s thread winner – everybody can log off now.
I hope you’re just singling out the extreme end of the pro-life movement because a lot of people who are anti-abortion are in favor of adoptions by gay couples.
What, no bonsai kids?
I want one if they do. 
Do you have any poll numbers on that ? I’d expect a major overlap between the anti-gays and the anti-woman religious activists.
There don’t seem to be many polls about whether or not people are in favor of allowing gay couples to adopt. However since you rarely hear people say things like “It’s okay if gays marry, but adopt!?”: CBS says 54% of Americans are pro-life, and ABC says 49% are pro-gay marriage & 57% pro-civil union, so clearly there have to be other people like me who are both.
MAYBE puberty, perhaps? I could see if you were a girl, you might want to ask, say, an aunt about your period instead of your dad. (I’d have died of embarassment at that age). Or a boy would rather talk to his cousin about erections and wet dreams.
That’s the only thing I can remotely think of. “Girl talk”, or whatever. But that would come up even if you have single parents, so that’s easily solved.
I thought that was what Judy Blume books were for.
Heh. I can see NOBODY to disagree with on this thread. Amazing - a thread about homosexuality and parenting, two handbag-worthy topics, and everyone’s in broad agreement! 
Anyway, I’m raising my daughter with my female partner and I do make an effort to keep consistent, positive male role models in her life, which is more than I can say for some of her friends with straight parents.
Are you making fun of broads, scifisam2009?
There is something to be said for people who choose to parent under less traditional circumstances. We are adoptive parents of an Asian child - so it thrills us to have Asian role models for him. We give him opportunities to explore his heritage we - the white people - wouldn’t ordinarily look for (and which he is not at all interested in, but we keep asking).
Gay people don’t generally become parents accidentally. They don’t become parents because everyone around them expects them to, or (generally) because their mother is bugging them for grandchildren. Like the rest of us less than fertile folk, they become parents after long and hard thought (or at least logistical complications beyond ‘we went on vacation and I forgot my diaphragm.’) That means that most people who parent under non-tradition methods actually make efforts to say 'can I give my kid a male (or, in our case, Asian) role model or two.
It would be very hard to corrolate the stats for the anti-abortion anti-gay adoption crowd. I image a lot of fundamentalists are anti-both.
I tell you one thing: anyone who thinks that a single woman is better off having the child and keeping it (which I do), and doesn’t think children should be removed from newly single parents, but doesn’t support single and gay adoption because "kids need both a father and a mother) is a hypocrit write large.
That’s a good question.
Ideally, we would have complete and thorough information on the relative stability of the various parental gender combinations. Ideally. I’m not about to propose any grand experiments to collect this sort of data, though. At the risk of being mocked (“What about the children??? Waaaaah!!!”) I’d be very uncomfortable with the idea of any social engineering experiments when a child’s welfare is at stake.
“But we already know that gender won’t make a whit of difference!” some would exclaim. That’s supposition though, not established fact.
OMFG! I am using that soooooo often now. Kudos, mostro!
Ask and ye shall receive.
I don’t have cites at hand, but at my training to do interventions in high schools I’ve found out that apparently this is a very thoroughly ploughed field.
Oh wait, I lie. Here’s a broad-based metastudy (massive .pdf):