Where Children Have No Voice: The “Right” of Adoption by Homosexual Partners

A Child Is Not an Adult’s “Toy”
Whether a child is one’s own or adopted, he should never be seen by adults as a toy, pastime or “property” to which one is “entitled.” True, the child is under the authority of his natural or adoptive parents and owes them respect, obedience and love. However, as an intelligent and free being endowed with personality, he cannot be considered a “thing” to be used merely for self-satisfaction. The child’s moral and physical being cannot be sacrificed merely to benefit his custodians.

To every right corresponds a duty. When it comes to begetting or caring for children, this duty is to ensure the latter’s moral and material well-being.

Therefore, although begetting or adopting children gives rise to a legitimate satisfaction, this satisfaction is not the ultimate end of such acts. This end is the noble task of collaborating with the Creator in the propagation and rearing of the human species.

History and universal common sense attest to the fact that a home sanctified by marriage between a man and a woman provides the ideal conditions for this upbringing.

The child needs this protected environment since that which makes a child so enchanting is precisely what makes him so vulnerable: extreme affectivity, intense emotionality, rich imagination, unlimited confidence in those he loves, and a total openness to outside influence.

These are fundamental elements to a child’s process of learning and formation. The child assimilates knowledge mainly by what he sees and hears from parents, siblings, and other relatives. When poorly directed, the child can suffer irreparable moral and psychological damage.

The Unreal World of Homosexual Partnerships
Given the unnatural character of homosexual relations, a homosexual partnership lacks the moral and even psychological conditions to ensure a child’s adequate development. The child is raised in a surreal, artificial ambiance, not to speak of the amorality that will profoundly affect his personality.

Examples of children raised in these conditions are now starting to come to light.

In 1999, homosexual activist Dan Savage published the book, The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Get Pregnant – An Adoption Story. The author comments:

Having children is no longer about propagating the species… [it is] something for grownups to do, a pastime, a hobby. So why not kids? Gay men need hobbies, too. …. I’ve done drag. I did Barbie drag, dominatrix drag, nun drag, and glamour drag. Now I’m going to do dad drag.¹

What future awaits a poor adopted child raised in such an atmosphere?

Rosie O’Donnell, well-known TV anchor and lesbian activist with several adopted children, commented on the confusion in the mind of her adopted son:

[M]y son has said to me, he’s almost seven, you know, “I wish we had a daddy.” I said, “I understand that. I can imagine that you would. And this is the kind of family that has two mommies because that’s how mommy got born, that I love another mommy, not a daddy.” And he gets it, and he knows that most families have a mommy and daddy and that our family is different and that some people don’t think it’s right that two mommies or two daddies have children. He knows that as well.²

The message this child received is that homosexuality is genetic, a mere variant of human nature, and that for born homosexuals a family with two mommies or two daddies is normal. Such a conclusion is absolutely false according to all present scientific data.

The child is also asked to make a moral judgment. The anchor’s qualification that some people don’t think it is right fails to provide elements for the child to judge. In fact, given his lack of maturity and need for affection, the child will naturally accept the position of his adopted mother more than that of another.

Deep down, and without judging intentions, this is a form of emotional blackmail: if you love me as your mother, you cannot accept the assertion of those who say having two mommies is wrong.

Growing up Confused
In a recent article, “Growing Up With Mom and Mom,” published in the October 24 issue of The New York Times Magazine, Susan Dominus tells the story of two girls, Ry and Cade, who were artificially conceived and raised by a lesbian couple.

The story of these girls could not be more poignant. Having reached adulthood, one daughter became a lesbian and the other, though heterosexual, lives in a continuous state of tension between her formation and her own feelings. Dominus writes:

Sometimes when she’s with her boyfriend, she [Ry] told me the first night we met, “I feel guilty about how much privilege I feel as a straight couple, but I also love the privilege. …. At the same time, it’s like this nightmare to be totally absorbed into this stupid straight world.” She made a face, half-sticking her tongue out. “So at the same time, it’s sad for me. I feel like I’m losing something else.”

She narrates her intimate struggle:
“It took me a lot of struggle to realize that I really was attracted to men, yet now it is really hard for me to deal with men as human beings, let alone sexually.” Further on, Ry reports about how she was intrigued but “repulsed” by heterosexual relations, afraid of the “sexist soul-losing domain of oppression.” Her parting thought: “I cannot understand or relate to men because I am so immersed in gay culture and unfamiliar with what it is to have a healthy straight relationship.”

“Scientific Activism” at Professional Associations
Such confusion in the minds of children raised by homosexual partners should cause grave public concern. However, several professional health and counseling associations have published statements favoring the homosexual lifestyle and their adoption of children in an expression of what some have called “scientific activism.”

One such statement was recently published by the American Psychological Association (APA). Rhea Farberman states in the journal, Monitor on Psychology that no research shows that “same-sex couples should be denied marriage rights” and that a “review of the literature calls for joint and second-parent adoption rights for gay parents.”³

Dr. A. Dean Byrd, a member of the National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), contests the APA’s assertion that the resolution is based on the recommendations of researchers studying same-sex families:

Consider those who were appointed to the committee: Armand Cerbone who was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 2003… Beverly Green, editor of Psychological Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Issues, Kristen Hancock who developed “Guidelines for Psychotherapy with Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Clients”; Lawrence A. Kurdek, Editorial Board of Contemporary Perspectives on Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Psychology and Candace A. McCullough — whose partner, Sharon Duchesneau, was artificially inseminated from a deaf sperm donor to make it highly likely that their children would be born deaf because of their belief that deafness is not a medical condition but a cultural identity!⁴ (McElroy, 2002).

The committee members were hardly an unbiased group!

Dr. A. Byrd also criticizes the Committee’s reliance on the research of Charlotte Patterson whose studies were questioned and subsequently thrown out by a Florida Court. That Court concluded: “Dr. Patterson’s impartiality also came into question when prior to trial, she refused to turn over to her own attorneys copies of documentation utilized by her in studies. Dr. Patterson testified as to her own lesbian status and the Respondent maintained that her research was possibly tainted by her alleged use of friends as subjects for her research.”⁵ (1997, June Amer, Petitioner v. Floyd P. Johnson, p. 11)

In an official statement of June 17, 2004, the American Medical Association said: “our American Medical Association supports legislation and other efforts to allow adoption of a child by the same-sex partner or opposite sex non-married partner who functions as a second parent or co-parent to that child.”

Psychiatrist Dr. David Fassler praised the AMA resolution as evidence that “the AMA is moving away from a conservative agenda and into areas where policy is based on science.”

However, Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, president of NARTH contested the statement saying:

To say that one side of the debate is based on politics, and the other one on science, is a false presentation of the debate. Values issues are at the heart of all of these matters — how each research study is designed, how its results are interpreted, even how we define the very concepts of mental health and illness. Neither side can ever say it simply represents “science.”⁶

Dr. Fassler’s pro-homosexual bias is manifested in his support for Gay-Straight Alliance clubs on junior high and high school campuses. The homosexual publication, The Data Lounge, further reports:

Dr. David Fassler, a Vermont psychiatrist who works with teens, told The Globe there is nothing wrong with encouraging teens to explore their emotions and attractions, though parents may heatedly disagree. “The experimentation in itself doesn’t determine someone’s sexual orientation,” he said. …. “I think it’s important for schools to do everything they can to support these kids during the high school years.”⁷

No Unbiased Research Supports Homosexual Parenting
Robert Lerner, Ph.D, and Althea Nagai, Ph.D. rigorously evaluated the studies favoring to adoption by homosexuals. The result of their research was compiled in a book titled No Basis: What the Studies Don’t Tell Us About Same-Sex Parenting.⁸

In an interview with National Review, Dr. Lerner summarized the methodological errors contained in such studies claiming that the research purporting to show that the sexual orientation of parents’ makes no difference in child outcome is seriously flawed. Dr. Lerner affirms these studies have the following errors:

— Completely misconstrue and thus blatantly misuse the standard logic of statistical hypothesis testing (e.g., they attempt to affirm the null hypothesis, which is wrong; one can only fail to reject the null hypothesis)

— Fail to use proper or even any control groups (e.g. Charlotte Patterson Bay Area study)

— Use wildly unrepresentative nonrandom samples

— Use far too few cases to draw any valid conclusions

— Fail to control for essential variables when presenting their findings

— There is only one study that has any kind of follow-up. This particular study misanalyses its own data, which in fact show that the daughters of lesbian couples are more likely to engage in lesbian sexual experimentation as adults than are the daughters of heterosexual couples. This effect is probably understated since the authors lump together heterosexuals who are married with those who are cohabiting

— The above study is the only one which included adult data; findings based on young children are inadequate for talking about the development of adult behavior and identity

— None of the studies in question is a study of gay adoption; the children studied are either the natural children of one partner or result from artificial insemination. This limits the generalizability of the studies, even assuming they were valid otherwise.⁹

The study, Staying ‘True to the Research’ on Same-Sex Marriage and Parenting, by Glenn T. Stanton and Geremy F. Keeton of the organization Focus on the Family provides countless quotations from specialists corroborating Dr. Lerner’s views.

For example, Steven Nock, Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, who has also reviewed existing literature on the issue, concluded:

[The current literature on lesbian parenting] is inadequate to permit any conclusion to be drawn. None had a probability sample. All used inappropriate statistics given the samples obtained. All had biased samples. Sample sizes were consistently small …. I do not believe this collection of articles indicates that lesbian and heterosexual mothers are similar. In fact, from a scientific perspective, the evidence confirms nothing about the quality of gay parents.¹⁰

No Voice for Children
Perhaps the most tragic aspect of the whole homosexual adoption issue is the fact that the children have no voice in the matter.

They are suddenly immersed in a subculture advocating an amoral unnatural lifestyle. The child is further deprived of either a mother or father and left to navigate in a surreal world of gender confusion. His own physical security is jeopardized by a subgroup fraught with much greater incidence of social disease and other health problems.¹¹

All this is accepted in the name of a political correctness that is based on false premises and pseudo-science. Many in the scientific establishment seem intent upon engaging in a kind of “scientific activism,” not unlike the judicial activism of liberal judges, which forces through an agenda contested by the facts and established scientific method.

Such activist experiments can only harm the innocent child and take him away from the traditional family, the only proven atmosphere of stability and tender loving care favoring the child’s physical and moral development.