SnoopyFan, get in here and explain yourself, please...

Just wanted to address this since it’s another flavor of the same sort of opinion I’ve heard voiced now one time too many.

It’s one thing to care about a debate over hypotheticals on a message board.

But this isn’t a hypothetical, and we’re not Turing machines. We’re people, and the issues we discuss invariably affect many of us, or maybe more (and sometimes fewer). “Gay adoption” isn’t one of those issues that’s way out there in the future, so far away that it’s like discussing a colony on Alpha Centauri. It’s current. It’s important. And to just pop on and say “I think it’s immoral because that’s my opinion and I have nothing concrete to back up my personal opinion…” well, that’s not the sort of intellectual rigor anybody likes in a debate. Hell, this isn’t a “what’s your favorite color?” poll. This is a serious issue and to just pop in there and shit out your two cents (didn’t your mother teach you not to eat coins?) speaks to a general lack of respect for all involved. Including, coincidentally, you.

Personally I don’t give two shits if you adopt my opinion. I care more that you actually research and challenge your point of view rather than just saying “that’s my opinion, you’re not going to change my mind, it’s just a message board”.

With an issue like this (and there are many with similar importance), it’s only the mentally or morally weak who just pop in, give their two cents and generally don’t care what anyone else thinks.

Uh, no SnoopyFan. You’re the one whose made up my mind. I’ll be perfectly happy to change it when you renouce your bigotry. If you are unable to do so, then it is you who have shown yourself to be hateful.

Another tragic consequence of never knowing her father…SnoopyFan is a Blockbuster customer. I bet she only gets the edited “family-friendly” versions of the movies, too.

SnoopyFan my dear, you are in fact full of shit, but unfortunately (for you) it’s not going to be left at “whatever squirts your grapefruit.” You are declaring not only that gay parents are morally inferior but that a society that would tolerate them is also morally inferior. That is rank bigotry. You go on to state that you are not interested in discussing the matter further because you will not change your mind. That is rank ignorance. I refer you to the motto of these boards. The SDMB is about figting ignorance. Telling you that you’re wrong and your moral schema is fucked up has nothing to do with “control” and everything to do with confronting your continuing ignorance in the hopes that something in the continued engagement will dispel it.

You seem to be basing your entire moral condemnation of gay parents on the single example of your own experience in being raised without a father. Is this a fair assessment of the root of your belief? If so, do you understand that generalizing to all gay parents and society in general based on a single example is to say the least logically suspect? If there is something more to underpin your opinion, is there some reason you don’t care to explain it to us further?

Didn’t you see where she posted it, Otto. She doesn’t wana hafta, we can’t make her, and now she’s gone to the movie store to forget all about us. I just hope they don’t have seasons of Murphy Brown on DVD there. A single mother who chose to be single. GAAAH!

Somehow, I’m thinking no sleep will be lost due to your absence. Can you develop a new personality in the meantime?

Why do you think I give a shit? I posted this thread in the pit because I thought it would have a better chance of getting your attention if you weren’t going back to the GD thread. Drive-by sniping is frowned on here, especially if you’re going to smear a whole group of people. Don’t hurry back.

Hey, dickhead: you’re the one trying to get the force of law behind your personal bigotries, not me. And no, on this issue I’m not going to agree to disagree, because your position is hurtful, prejudiced, irrational, and quite simply evil.

Bullshit. This is painfully ignorant. The only area in which we have more families than babies is when it comes to healthy, white infants. When it comes to children with disabilities, children over a couple years old, or children from minority backgrounds, we have almost no one willing to take them in.

True enough: a lot of 'em are gay, too, because a big chunk of that red tape was written by bigots like yourself.

The pretext for removing those kids was precisely the ban on gay adoption you support, so spare us all your crocodile’s tears, m’kay?

Is it? Do you have a cite for that? Priam provided a cite saying that gender of the parents has no effect on the mental health of children. Did you even bother to read it?

Fuck you for saying I don’t care about how our children are raised, you hypocritical bitch. You’re the one who wants to bar needy children from loving families because those families don’t meet your antiquated and deeply Freudian preconceptions of what a “family” ought to be.

Wow, so you’re straight up admitting that gays are second class citizens? Points for honesty, I guess.

We “could” find cites? In point of fact, we have found cites. And please do consider the source: it’s the fucking Amercian Psychological Association. In the mean time, you haven’t found any cites for your position. I can’t “consider the source,” because everything you’re saying is coming directly out of your sphincter.

Yeah, yeah. Yay you. The point, dimwit, is to show that homosexual parents are an “undesirable condition.” Which you still haven’t done.

Hey, I’m open minded. I’m completely willing to beleive you’re not a bigot. All you have to do is stop acting like one. In fact, I’m even willing to be convinced that gays would make bad parents, provided you can come up with a sufficently compelling cite. It better be a fucking doozy of a cite, though. Until that time, however, I’m going to be over here revelling in the irony of being called “hateful” by someone like you.

Why should I pay for these disabled and presently unwanted children when there are qualified homes–albeit gay partners–who are willing to take them in? That costs me a lot of money. [/ectm]

In case you hadn’t noticed, the Florida foster care system is a bit overburdened. “Rilya Wilson” ring any bells? Abuse, neglect, and outright disappearance are what await some foster children because we are upholding some unscientific and hateful ‘religious’ principle. What does enforcing some ancient bigotry have to do with “the best interests of the child” in any real sense in the real world of foster care?

Read the article I linked to: homes with only the maternal figure present have a higher propensity for various social problems, even when economic problems are taken out of the picture. **

Are you seriously asking for a cite for the proposition that gender roles exist?

At any rate, if Poly is satisfied with my post, it’s a pretty good sign that I’m not operating out in left field.

What I agreed with Dewey (and perhaps Snoopy Fan, in part, about, is that gender roles do unquestionably exist, and one’s behavior is judged by a fair chunk of society by how one conforms to them. That I personally object strenuously to the latter is immaterial to the fact that I recognize their existence.

And, as was pointed out in the threads on transsexuals, there are things about what it is like to be a little girl, a girl in her early teens, a woman, that I will never know. The best evocative writing in the world and my gift of empathy will not allow me to cross that gap and feel like a little girl feels.

I would like to think that I would make an excellent role model for a child – a man unafraid to show compassion, non-threatening and usually non-confrontational, but with the chutzpah to stand firm for what he believes is right and face down those who would defend hatred. But there is no way in heaven, earth, or hell that I would ever be able to show a little girl how to be a woman. That takes someone who is one, or at minimum feels like one in her inmost self. And a little boy learns something of how a woman reacts from his mother, his aunts, his grandmother, his family’s woman friends. And the same holds true in reverse: no woman can give a little boy a model of how to be a man, nor let her daughter pick up how a man reacts in various situations from how she herself reacts.

Such role modeling is essential to healthy maturization – even if the child ends up deciding to choose another way to be human, to rebel against the modeling his or her parents have done. The adolescent needs to know the deafult to make a valid inner choice not to abide by it.

But, as Dewey and I said against SnoopyFan’s stance, this is not a valid argument against gay couples adopting. Some single women are able very successfully to fill both mother and father roles – Barb’s lifelong friend Norma raised two little girls to healthy adult womanhood by being exceptional at almost all aspects of parenting. There were men in their lives – me, the “Thatcher boys” (sons of another friend ranging from puberty to young adulthood at the time the girls were children), their grandfather. Similarly, some men are able to be the nurturing, compassionate person who enacts the mother stereotype. And their mothers, sisters, women friends will fill the womanly role model for their children.

I’ve gone into this at length because I feel it is a valid component of developmental psychology which is (a) denied or given too short shrift by the pro-gay-adoption side, and (b) incorrectly used as an argument against gay adoption by the other side.

Further, and this is very important: for a lot of people, this is not merely a theoretical question, but key to their lives. It is all well and good to speculate and theorize and call for ideal solutions – but I know of two gay couples, each having a partner who is a member of this board, who are well qualified financially and emotionally/spiritually to adopt and nurture a child and who want to do so. And, while I don’t have a cite at my fingertips to back up the statement, I’m confident that there are a large number of 8, 9, and 10 year old boys and girls whose foster parents are in it for the money, who get strict discipline and no affection from them, and are forming the opinion that they are unloved and unloveable.

So, dear lady, while you live in a fantasy world in which beagles fly World War I fighter airplanes and there’s a Pleasantville out there where thousands of childless Ward and June Cleavers stand ready to open their homes, the rest of us are dealing with a reality where there are people hurting who could fill each others’ needs if they were not barred from it by the attitudes of folks like you.

This is pretty much exactly what I was trying to say, but couldn’t quite find the words. Kudos.

While I agree that there are traditional gender roles, in modern times the tendency has been to blur the lines. Men cook more, mostly out of necessity. Women work more, mostly out of necessity. Now we should let gays adopt,…

In an era of women in combat, female boxers, and Mr. Moms, what are the gender roles again? Sure, for the forseeable future, women will be in charge of the birthing and breastfeeding. Men will be the sperm donors. Beyond that, what are the clearly defined gender roles? That’s a serious question, because to me they all seem to be in a state of flux. In many cases for the better, IMO. Some not. But that’s for another day.

No. I asked which particular roles you were talking about. Given that ‘gender’ is a social construct (and quite a seperate thing to biological identity) I challenge your proposition that gender roles are as ‘fixed’ as you maintain. Until we know which roles/behaviours you are referring to, it is impossible to debate this on any level. As it stands, your proclamations are so broad as to be meaningless.

Beagle, the nature of the roles change over the centuries, but they have always existed. We have pretty strong evidence now of an neurological component to gender beyond the fundamentals of reproduction, having something to do with how the brain’s formation is affected by androgens (or the absence thereof) during development. Even if we reached the point where there were no gender traditional occupations (a state I doubt we will ever reach), there would still be gender and there would still be gender roles. Gender is not strictly a social construct. Having gender-appropriate role models is not necessary to perpetuate gender; rather, gender is an inherent property of each person and having gender-appropriate role models is important to guiding people of each gender as they learn how to relate to people whose gender is the same as, and differs from, their own.

Wasn’t there a study indicating that those who were androgynous (having gender roles from both male and female) tend to be healthier psychologically? But, paradoxically, they also tend towards higher levels of stress because they don’t conform. I’ll have to dredge my old Psych of Human Sexuality text…

Beagle’s and Kambuckta’s posts produce an interesting and coincidentally ironic juxtaposition. (Have you two considered trying out together for Point Counterpoint?;))

I was not saying, and I don’t believe Dewey was ither, that gender roles are cast in stone and cannot or should not be changed. And as Beagle notes, changes are occurring. Nonetheless, there is a hysteresis, a consrvatism in society that absolutely must be taken into account when engineering solutions to social problems What you or I think people should do, and what they will do, are two quite different things.

My “granddaughter” Amanda is rapidly turning into Tricia Yearwood’s “American Girl” (XXX’s and OOO’s) – though at present she still considers boys (except Aaron Carter) an unnecessary excrescence on an otherwise nice world (her little brothes in particular). But my point is that she alternates between speculating on what career she most wants to go into and being our little princess, interested in beautiful clothes and makeup. That she has a choice in what role she will fill is the product of World War II and women’s liberation, but the old womanly role still exerts a major hold on her (fostered by an aunt and grandmother who are rebels against that role in their own ways). Her vacillation illustrates in small the point I am making: while roles change, they do so with glacial deliberateness. “Things change slowly, if they ever change at all” as the Eagles sang.

I would say that a child should have strong relationships with adults of both genders but that those role models don’t necessarily have to play a parental role. A gay male couple should ensure that female role models are included in some context and vice versa.

In any case, I certainly don’t believe it’s a moral issue as the subject of this pit thread has asserted.

Doggy-knees (no, I can’t get over that;)), I think you’d have to try very very hard to prevent a young person (eg an infant) from being exposed to a person of either sex. The only exception I can think of is someone raised in the innermost parts of the island of Lesbos, back in the day.

A great big “AAWOOOWOOOWOOO” (beagles understand) right back at you. This would be a good time to mention (about, what?, two years late) I didn’t mean to trod on your username. I was just getting into the internet messageboard thing, looked down at my (then one) dog and said “beagle.” I thought the Darwin connection was cool, and beagles have a long history. Anyway, consider it an homage, not theft. OK? :o

So all nations that allow single parents to adopt are “morally gone” too, right?