“If you redefine marriage to include same-sex couples you
must permit adoption by same-sex couples, and there’s considerable
disagreement among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a
child in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or
not." said Justice Scalia in Supreme Court arguments March 26.
There's only considerable disagreement in the "two schools of thought" sense of Tom Baker's crazed Elizabethan sea captain in Blackadder II. There are two schools of thought on the subject: Mark Regnerus and everybody else.
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What we hear: “What is most important is love. A homosexual couple can give much love to a child, sometimes even more than a heterosexual couple.”
What we often neglect to say: To love a child is one thing; to love a child with a love that provides the necessary structure is another. There can be no doubt that homosexuals have the same capacity to love a child and to convey this love as do heterosexuals, but the role of parents extends beyond the love they feel for their children. To reduce the parental bond to its affective and educative aspects is to overlook the fact that the parent–child bond is a psychological vector of fundamental importance for the child’s sense of identity.
All the affection in the world will not suffice to produce the basic psychological structures that address the child’s need to know where he comes from. For the child establishes his own identity only by a process of differentiation, which presupposes that he knows whom he resembles. Thus he needs to know that he issues from the love and the union between a man, his father, and a woman, his mother, thanks to the sexual difference between them. Even adopted children know that they originate from the love and the desire of their parents, even when these are not their biological parents.
Father and mother represent a genealogy for the child. The child needs a clear and coherent genealogy in order to find his place as an individual. What has always and will always constitute our humanity is the capacity for language in a sexually differentiated body and as part of a genealogy. To identify a child’s parentage is not only to indicate who will raise the child, with whom he will have affective relations, and who will serve as his adults of reference. It is also, most important, to situate him in a generational chain. The chain guarantees each individual a place in the world in which he lives, for he knows where he came from.
Today we face the immense risk of irreversibly scrambling the chain of generations. Just as one cannot destroy the foundations of a house without the house collapsing, one cannot reject the foundations of our society without putting that society in danger.
“Homosexual parenting” is not parenting. The term itself was invented to mitigate the impossibility of homosexuals’ being parents. This new foundation, invented to promote the legal option of giving a child two “parents” of the same sex, is part of a fiction. Neither marriage nor parenthood has ever been based on the sexuality of individuals but rather on sex itself—that is, on the anthropological distinction between man and woman.
Thus, by abandoning the man–woman distinction in favor of the heterosexual–homosexual distinction, homosexual activists demand not parenthood (paternity or maternity) but the right to some new abstract parental status that reduces the role of the “parent” to the exercise of certain functions such as education. This overlooks the fact that, even in the case of adopted children, to be a parent is not only to educate the child but also to recreate lines of paternity and maternity.
We must therefore strongly reaffirm that to be a father or a mother is not merely an affective, cultural, or social function. The term “parent” is not neutral; it involves sexual difference. To accept the term “homosexual parenting” is to strip the word “parent” of its intrinsic bodily, biological, and fleshly meaning.
The Association of Gay and Lesbian Parents and Future Parents has proposed several substitutes for the term “parent” depending on the various functions to be performed: “stepparent,” “co-parent,” “homo-parent,” “mother to another,” “biological parent,” “legal parent,” “social parent,” “second parent,” etc. It seems unlikely that a child could manage naturally to find a stable meaning in relation to all such terminologies.
Dear Annymous.
Hooey.
So unless you are raised by your two biological parents you are an inferior being? Hooey indeed.
When you say that "everyone else" (i.e. other studies) contradicted Regnerus' study, do you realize that all these other studies were: 1) conducted on a tiny, unrepresentative sample, often just the personal friends of the study's author; and 2) worse, the conclusions were drawn from a questionnaire in which the parents were asked to describe their child, and of course the parents usually said their child was perfect in every way. Regnerus' study, on the other hand, used a large randomized sample and objective criteria such as school records, medical records, criminal records, and the like. But you imply that Regnerus' study was the faulty one? Really?
And as the first poster here alluded to, there is ample reason to believe that both a father and mother - representing both genders - do give a child the balance that only both genders can provide. Responding to this point by saying "hooey" is not an intellectual argument.
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