My point is, and always has been, extremely simple in my own mind, though obviously I’m not bringing it across here at all well. And it is this:
*Gender-based roles do exist, like it or lump it. Much, though not all, of society is in fact quite comfortable enacting them. And there is always peer pressure, which gets internalized, to live up to them.
Kids learn how to behave appropriately – and how not to behave – from the adults around them. (Thanks, 'punha, for using your grandfather to make that point. My choices in how to react with people, and particularly with my boys, are tailored largely on the hurt I felt from my father’s inappropriate modes of raising me.)
Nobody is obliged to live out a role society may try to straitjacket them into. But common decency says in being of any help to another – and particularly in parenting – one must take those roles into account.*
The condemnation that Kelly experienced in another thread because she had not in fact been a little girl, experienced whatever it is a little girl feels like at, say, age ten, gone through menarche, etc., speaks to this point. Though I suspect Kelly will have a much better handle on such feelings than myself, iampunha, or Dewey would, she has, in point of fact, not had first-hand experience of those feelings – the person was right on that, though very much wrong in discounting Kelly’s feelings of wanting to be a girl from an early age.
To generalize from a single individual to the world is generally fraught with error. I am not Dewey, Izzy, iampunha or his father; I am me, a unique individual. But everyone, right or wrong, tends to create generalizations about people in general from the sampling of them that they have encountered – in fact, this very sentence is an example of that!
Kids need role models. Not necessarily a nice neat Ward and June Cleaver pair. If I had custody of Chris’s boys right now, I would much rather have them associate with gobear and learn how he specifically deals with the world than a large assortment of people I can think of, including two of their uncles, their paternal grandfather by blood, the drunk who lives next door, toaster52, any number of the-world-is-going-to-wrack-and-ruin conservatives who would be excellent character models by the standards of my old home town…
But, given that, there is no question in my mind that Brandon (the older boy) is going to be a ladies’ man, and as he matures, a good husband and father. It’s already very clear in his present behavior patterns as an 8-year-old. And he is going to need to learn the broad spectrum of what women are like from an exposure to a lot of different sorts of girls and women, in order to grasp how to react in the ways he wants to. And, given his keen insight into people, he will in fact get that exposure and learning – but he’ll get it from observing the women he comes in contact with.
Now, how one gets from there to the idea that a gay couple would not be good parents for him is something I have no clue how someone got there. Because, in Brandon’s specific case, while he has an excellent matched set of heterosexual parents, one element of his upbringing has been ongoing involvement with his Uncle Dave – me – and with the love that it is no secret that his father and I bear for one another.
So I categorically deny any intent to say anything negative against gay couples as adoptive parents – in general – while reserving the right to suggest that individual person X might not be a good candidate as a parent and role model, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, creed, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identification, or previous state of servitude (though I do confess to an overall generalized opinion that BDSM submissives probably won’t be good role models ;)).
