Gay Families
Recently in Time magazine James Dobson wrote a piece in which he commented on Vice President Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter and her partner having a baby together. Dobson is against homosexual parenting in general and used this particular article to explain why. His primary objections are clearly religious, and he is quite up front about them. It would be hard not to be, given his day job as head of the conservative Christian organization Focus On The Family. While making no attempt to hide his religious objections to gay parenting, he focuses here on presenting a broader and more child-focused set of objections. As I understand his argument, it is simple truth that children fare best in two-parent heterosexual families. Each parent brings skills, experiences and perspectives to the family that are uniquely gender-based and, therefore, simply unavailable to children being raised in gay or lesbian families. In addition to other researchers, Dobson cites the work of psychologist Carol Gilligan as supporting his point that children simply need heterosexual parents to develop and mature as socially and psychologically healthy humans.
As you might expect, Dobson’s piece prompted immediate responses from those supporting homosexual parenting and attacking Dobson’s position. I will focus here on the companion piece in Time clearly intended as an editorial bookend to Dobson’s. This response is from Jennifer Chrisler of the pro-gay and lesbian Family Pride Coalition. In her response, Ms. Chrisler argues that far from showing that children of gay and lesbian families are in some meaningful way damaged by that experience, substantial research indicates that they are essentially no different from children of heterosexual parents. Chrisler provides her own list of social science and service organizations as well specific researchers to back up her claims. In one telling point, Chrisler quotes Gilligan saying that Dobson completely misconstrued her work and she simply does not support his position in any way.
OK. Truth time. I am profoundly sympathetic to Chrisler’s argument. I’m biased, but I think she won this round. She’s got the better argument. Take a look at both pieces and see if you agree. That being said, I think Chrisler’s claims are simplistic in their own right. Regardless of the quality of gay and lesbian parenting, these kids have to go out into the broader world at some point and deal with explaining and defending their life and family. I understand that all kids have baggage to carry, but these particular kids didn’t sign up to be soldiers in this particular culture war-they were drafted. That complicates Chrisler’s position more than she would like to admit.
This, however, is not my main point in writing this posting. In my last post, I asked why people didn’t seem to care more about the clear mistakes made by the Bush administration in the lead-up to the Iraq war. My root question this round is why we should really care at all about gay and lesbian parents? I’m writing this because I think homosexual parenting is a fringe issue that most people in this country should care much less about than Dobson and Chrisler seem to think they do.
Here’s what I mean. I think the majority of Americans could readily agree on many issues and problems facing parents and children in this country. Things that come to mind are lack of basic food, shelter, and clothing for all U.S. kids. Beyond that, we could spend time on both the quality and availability of child heath care and education. As far as people who would be problematic parents, we could start with those who are routinely physically abusive. I know that even within these basic issues there will still be disagreements. For example, what level of physical punishment constitutes physical abuse? For me the answer to that question is ANY level, but I’m less interested in pushing my viewpoint than I am in finding the level of abuse that the vast majority of us can agree upon and working on stopping that. Off the top of my head, stopping/helping parents who beat their kids to the point of hospitalization seems to be a good place to look for common ground. I want to see if we can work on that.
Arguing about gay parenting sells magazines and puts people in voting booths. It does so by incensing and dividing the people who read and hear abut it. But given that estimates of homosexuality are generally less than 10% it simply seems like it should be farther down the list of national social concerns than it is. My guess is that if anyone actually reads this I’m going to get blasted from both sides. Great. Start blasting. I got into this to hear other points of view. I’ll talk to you as long as you’ll talk to me.
Be Brave.
-Grant
