Be proud of what’s been done to you, even when it hurts

My title is chosen from within the article I've linked to. It refers to the child's pain of being different, of not having a mother or a father, and to have to put on a brave face to the world, because that is what is expected of them. This is personal for the writer, Robert Oscar Lopez, because he knows what it's like to be raised by two lesbians. He's one of the very few that are now grown and are able to talk and write about their experiences. He considers two men or two women bringing a child into their relationship on purpose to be abusive.

Worst of all is a same-sex parenting home that arose because two homosexuals contrived the situation knowingly, in order to experience parenting. These are cases in which divorce was initiated by a gay spouse, with the explicit goal of setting up a new gay parenting household, and then custody was transferred (often in an ugly family court process). Or where lesbians went to a sperm bank. Or where two homosexuals began a lifelong relationship with the intent of adopting and then sought adoption on-demand. Or worst of all, two gay men engaged in a surrogacy contract with a woman who sold them her baby.

Many gay parenting advocates say these are more noble scenarios since they “wanted” the child, but they are wrong. They imposed their vision ruthlessly on a helpless being and then extorted gratitude. The false equivalency used in order to make the child “love” a second parent of the same sex is coerced and injurious.

In the household irreversibly alienated from constitutive rituals like Father’s Day and Mother’s Day, it is abusive to tell the child it was all for her own good and she shouldn’t listen to her own feelings, nor her peers, neighbors, or any moral authorities on TV who praise motherhood or fatherhood.

It is abusive to tell a child, “We are your moms” or “we are your dads,” and then expect the child never to feel the loss of such important icons, in addition to the injury of having been severed from at least one, and possibly both, biological parents—not because it was necessary, but because the two adults insisted on the arrangement. The lessons children learn from this undermine selfhood: might makes right, little people are subject to the whims of self-serving parents, and powerful people can impose “love” on weaker beings with money or political influence over adoption agencies, family courts, sperm banks, and surrogate mothers.

None of these problems would arise if we lived in a world where gay people saw children not as a commodity for purchase but rather as an obligation requiring sacrifices (i.e., you give up your gay partner instead of making your kid give up a parent of the opposite sex, because you’re the adult.)

Fletch posted a you-tube on KiwiBlog's General Debate today, where Robert Lopez answers a number of questions about gay adoption and gay marriage, and also towards the end, mentions the linked article. Well worth listening to.

Related link: Same-Sex Parenting: Child Abuse? ~ Robert Oscar Lopez, The Witherspoon Institute, Public Discourse