Well, then, what is your point. Just because you “think” it’s a valid point doesn’t make it so. Even if two men can’t contribute directly to a little girl’s understanding of womanhood, then there are usually women in the couple’s life than can do so. Why do you assume that the woman must live under the same roof to provide that guidance? If one of my friends, for instance, used her mother as a guide to womanhood, she’d spend the rest of her life flitting from one boyfriend to another, neglecting her parental duties and generally leaving a mess behind her as goes. Instead, she has gotten her sense of responsibility and dignity from a step-mother who came along later and she didn’t live with for most of her childhood.
Isn’t this pretty much exactly what I’ve been saying over the course of this thread? Haven’t I explicitly said that other factors might make a single-sex couple the best option? Haven’t I explicitly said that my point is not an argument against gay adoption?
I’ve laid out the rationale behind my thinking. You are free to disagree with my reasoning, but let’s not pretend that my argument has consisted solely of “I think it, therefore it is.” **
I addressed this in an earlier post. As useful as quality time with other adults may be, there is nothing quite like quantity time of the sort one gets by living under the same roof with parent.
Much thanks DTC! As the saying goes, long-time reader, relatively new poster. (Work’s been slow lately!
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Dewey Cheatem Undhow, upon reflection I realize that you’re right. I glazed over a part of your argument and thus made my counter-post irrelevant. Apologies.
Polycarp, oh, damn, yes, I’ve been there. I was a small, skinny, weak, bookish 12-year-old. I tried to do what was expected of me, hard as it was. I cried a lot, and it got me teased a lot when I was a freshman. I learned to suppress that because “boys don’t cry.” Fortunately, I managed to find a place for myself on the edges of the school’s academic elite, and so I managed to emotionally limp my way through high school, mainly by burying the pain in all-night hacking sessions, academics, and science fiction. Mind you, I never dated and never went to a social event of any sort, which nearly got me labeled “gay” on several occasions (I made up girlfriends, when pressed, to avoid that label, although I’m sure a lot of my classmates believed I was gay).
I have a much better idea of what it’s like to be an unpopular 13-year-old boy than any sort of 14-year-old girl. I never had to deal with menarche (a fact that still makes me cry from time to time), and I was 31 before I had to deal with budding breasts. I never had to worry about getting pregnant. On the other hand, I did get raped once, so I do know what that’s like.
It is not true that I have always considered myself to be a woman. If you had asked me when I was 18, I would have told you I was a man. (I would also have told you that I was a Republican and that homosexuals are disgusting, sinful people. People change, sometimes dramatically.) I would have said that not because I particularly felt like a man (hell, I never felt like either a man or a woman most of the time) but because I’d been told since I was little that I was a boy and boys grow up to be men, and besides I had a penis so that pretty much proves it.
I recognize now, with the benefit of clarity that time, knowledge, and appropriate medication often provides, that I was confused then, that I have always been a woman with a birth defect who naively tried to be a man because that’s what she was told to do by her parents, her teachers, and society generally.
It took a friend outing herself to me to open my eyes and recognize that I didn’t have to do that, and that trying to do so was what was making my life so painful to live. (And convincing myself of the truth of that took another decade, and wasn’t really complete until I started Premarin and the fog I had been living in for the previous 25 years burned away in a week, never to return.) I’d post a link to the USENET article that opened up that door, but that would out my “boyname”, which is one of the very few aspects of my life I am not willing to discuss publicly.
With the emphasis you and Dewey put on “gender role models”, it almost sounds as though I’m unfit to be a parent by your standards because I am unable to provide those models in a consistent fashion.
I could probably say more but writing this post has made me cry and I have a dinner guest arriving in fifteen minutes and I need to clean myself up. I might have more to say later.
You are the one pretending that your opinion is anything more than that. You’ve admitted that there is no scientific basis for your position, yet you cling to the thought that quantity outweighs quality in most cases. If you can’t provide evidence to support your theory that quantity is better than quality, then it is simply an opinion.
Your theory suggests some pie in the sky idea that parents sit around imparting wisdom 24/7. Flesh out your theory a little more and explain how “womanhood” is taught by women and “manhood” is taught by men. Be sure to explain how quantity is more important than quality. Explain how living under the same roof is demonstratively, consistently better than frequent exposure to a interested, active role model who happens to live in another abode.
DCU, I’ve no doubt you’ll correct me if I am misapprehending your position, but it appears to me that the capsule summary of your stance on the issue of gay people adopting is “I have no objection to it, so long as there’s no better alternative.” I find that attitude to be highly disrespectful of gay people who are parents either through birth or adoption. The phrase “damning with faint praise” comes to mind.
I don’t believe I claimed otherwise. I think my view is a reasoned opinion, and I think it’s right, but I never claimed to have anything amounting to divine truth.
Although I must add: we’re talking about touchy-feely emotional stuff here. I think much of this defies objective measurement one way or the other. By necessity, discussions on this topic are going to rely on anecdotal experience and individual intuition. That doesn’t mean the discussion isn’t worth having or that my view (or yours, for that matter) is less than credible. **
Actually, I think that most parenting doesn’t take place in heart-to-heart chats where the parent gives the child eternal words of wisdom. Quite the contrary, I think most parenting is, for lack of a better word, passive: the child’s observation of and interaction with the parent on a daily basis.
It isn’t like Dad has a lesson plan to teach Junior about manhood, checking off various items from a list of required topics (“Day 1: Scratching your crotch unnoticed”). Those lessons are imparted informally, in the thousands of individual moments a father spends with his child. And they aren’t lectures. They are simple observations of the manner in which Dad carries himself, interacts with the rest of the world and reacts to the events around him. **
See above.**
[quote]
**
A child’s growth will be shaped most dramatically by those he sees the most frequently. Why this is a complicated or controversial concept is unclear to me. Frankly, it seems self-evident. Who do you know better, a friend you see twice a week or the roommate you see all the time?
Otto you are living proof that those who go looking to be offended will invariably succeed.
That is not my position, as any fair reading of my posts will indicate. I’ve clearly indicated, for example, that a loving, caring gay couple creates a much better environment for a child than an unloving, uncaring hetero couple. And, of course, I’ve repeatedly said that there should not be barriers to gay adoption.
What I object to is the dismissive air given to gender roles in the parenting environment. I think it absurd to say, as some in this thread have, that gender is “irrelevant” and that a child raised in a single-sex household isn’t deprived of anything worth noting. I think that’s a foolish notion. Gender roles are important, and for the reasons outlined in earlier posts, those roles are best imparted by parents of both genders.
That isn’t “damning with faint praise,” it’s a realistic assessment of the situation. I think poorer people should be allowed to adopt, too, but that doesn’t make the observation that the adopted child of poorer parents may want for some material things a “damnation by faint praise” of the adopting parents.
And it isn’t “disrespectful” of anyone to point that out. Indeed, my point isn’t premised on any kind of failing on the part of gay people – hell, my argument doesn’t even relate to homosexuality except in the most tangential way possible. Indeed, my argument can be logically extended to any parenting environment where one gender isn’t around (most notably, the single-mother pheonomenon). The sexual orientation of the parents is wholly irrelevant.
Oh, well, in that case, fuck you very much. You know, based on this thread, coupled with your responses in several other recent threads, it’s so damn obvious that you’re not worth my time.
I also object to the notion that “we should let gay people adopt because otherwise these poor kids will be parentless.” It means that gay people are second class and we’re only letting them partake in the joy of parenthood because it’s useful to the rest of us, not because they’re people entitled to participate in society as equals to the rest of us.
Has anyone addressed the link I posted on the first page? The one from the APA which states that none of the (admittedly few and far between) scientific studies have found anything inferior or substandard about the children of same-sex parents? That seems to be the only hard scientific evidence propogated by a reputable organization thats been brought up here…
Logic is a wonderful thing, reason is great, and when followed from a proven principle often leads to a correct answer. However, why aren’t children raised by same-sex couples showing the lack of conformity or understanding of gender roles one would expect?
Directly from the research summary
There’s been very little studying of gay male couples in parenting, so it can’t speak from that side of things. However, the lack of a male parental figure didn’t seem to change much in gender role or gender identity. Indeed, it even brings up male children of lesbian couples (who you’d think would need such exampling more than female)
Incidentally, can anyone explain exactly what someone is supposed to learn from the respective gender roles models? And don’t say, “How to act like a man,” I mean what specific attitude or responses a child is exprected to pick up from a male parent and what from a female parent? It seems a little odd that this debate has gotten this far without anyone defining the essential terms of the debate.
Frankly, I’d be surprised if any two people come up with the same list. I’ll be even more surprised if anyone comes up with a list that can’t in some way be justifiably attacked as sexist.
Thanks, Miller, I was trying to think of how to put that in words.
Priam, they haven’t addressed your link becaues it conflicts with their “reasoned opinion” which they “think is right”.
The only reason we let anyone adopt, regardless of sexual orientation is because otherwise “the poor kids would be parentless.” It’s silly to object to speaking about adoption in those terms because that is what adoption is.
:rolleyes:
How tragically predictable.
I think the things that are learned are a bunch of intangibles. Like I said earlier, it isn’t like there’s a checklist of things for a parent to mark off. Granted, it’s a touchy-feely area. That doesn’t invalidate it or make it any less real.
I’m afraid that this is another Poly-apology post.
First, Dewey, I took the comment you made in your response to KCSuze to mean that you held, and ascribed to me, that the gender-role question made hetero-couples usually preferable to same-sex couples. That was what I attempted to disagree with you on – and clearly it was a misreading of what you intended to say. My apologies for misrepresenting you in attempting to distance myself from what I (mis)read as a misrepresentation of my own view. I think that by and large we’re in pretty close agreement – and that neither of us, so far as I can tell, regard a gay couple of reasonable parenting skills and other qualifications as second class in any way.
Second, Kelly, I am very sorry that I misunderstood you or made you cry. There’s a lot about your life I don’t know – and your boyhood was one aspect of it that, until your post to me, was included in that. I remembered comments you’d made about your self-identification as a woman and presumed (obviously incorrectly) that your “I’ve always thought of myself as a woman” precluded an effort at overcoming gender dysphoria and living as a boy and a man. I was wrong, and worse, I hurt you in being wrong. And for that I can only ask your forgiveness, and your understanding that I worked from what little I did know about what you’ve been through as a transsexual. I will probably never fully understand what it’s like for you, but I know better now, and I’ll continue to try to understand.
Finally, several people have asked what the big deal over gender roles is. The best answer is that kids work on the basis of “Don’t tell me – show me!” My image of how a man ought to treat his wife is comprised of how my father treated my mother, what she didn’t like about how he did that, how married men I knew as a child and adolescent treated their wives, and so on. My understanding of when a man ought to take a stand and when he ought to keep quiet for the sake of peace is founded on the same sorts of examples: men I respected who spoke out, who obviously kept quiet when they disagreed, and so on. Kids form their ideas of what they should be when they grow up from what the grown-up people around them are like, and what’s good or bad about what they do. My son and his wife raise their children the way they were raised – except for the things they remember as being unfair when their parents did them that they have not changed their minds about the unfairness of in adult life, which they scrupulously avoid – and forbid their own parents to do with their kids (e.g., spanking administered with anything but bare hand).
And, of course, this in no way suggests anything about gay people. If I were an adoption agency operating only on what I know of people from the boards, I would quickly choose gobear or Anthracite and partners over quite a few married heterosexuals as excellent parenting material. From what I know of him, I’d add Priam to that list in a very few years. And Homebrew is of course already a parent, and from what I’ve been able to put together, a very good one.
I guess I’m not understanding why it would be impossible or even difficult for a child of a same-sex couple to generalize from the example of “Mama and Mommy” or “Dad and Pop” in the same way that you generalized from “Mom and Dad.” If you picked up “how a man treasts his wife” from observing couples other than your parents, why would the children of single parents not do the same?
’brew, you are long on snarkiness and short on argumentation.
As for Priam’s post (which, my goodness, I’d hope you’d give me a few minutes to respond to before you assume I’m ignoring it), well, a couple of points.
First, I note that Priam does a little creative bolding in the second paragraph she quoted, and it behooves the reader to examine the entire paragraph. 
Secondly, as Priam notes, there isn’t enough research out there to draw any definite conclusions about anything.
Thirdly, and most importatly, I think science has its limits, and this is one of them. I’m not sure it’s possible to objectively measure emotional health or one’s comfort with societal integration. This is fuzzy, right-brain stuff. I’m not sure science can answer these questions with any kind of meaningful certainty. Intuition and experience continue to play important roles in this area.
Note well, however, what I am not saying. I am not saying gays are destined to be awful parents, nor am I saying that their kids are invariably doomed to be social misfits incapable of dealing with a particular gender. Just because I think the adopted child of a gay couple might be missing out on certain forms of gender-role nourishment does not mean I think that child is being raised in a terrible environment. Quit trying to imply that I think gays are second-class citizens. I do not. That is false.