Sorry, but I do not agree with post #34. The State, not only Catholic Charities, is a stakeholder in adoption outcomes, because the results determine the full humanity of the “offspring.” Unless you believe that half of the human race is irrelevant to any particular household, then you cannot be pro-same-sex adoption, because an entire gender is being excluded from the parenting of that child. That’s Reason #1.
Then there’s the corollary of that: the fantasy that says that because you might know some particularly “bad” heterosexual parents (by your standards) & have decided (who are you to decide, btw?) should not adopt, or worse, that you assume some people who in your “almighty” opinion (no sacrcasm directed toward the poster here) must be or will be or have been bad parents because of certain behaviors or personalities you’ve seen – that it makes it acceptable to engage in a social experiment which will affect a significant portion of an entire generation. I simply can’t see anything in Scripture supporting such “reasoning.” And I’m just, for starters, limiting myself to Scripture; I’m not even supplementing that with Catholic apologetics.
Argument #1 against such flawed reasoning is that (1) Unless you live simultaneously, or in long stretches in alternating fashion, with both a particular heterosexual couple and a particular homosexual couple, you have a limited picture of the parenting strengths & weaknesses of either couple. Argument #2 is that (2) such comparative judgments on an ‘observer’s’ part is limited to the present moment and/or the past (and again, limited) knowledge base. It does not account for the full arc of a child’s journey (into the future) from infancy through adulthood. It is most often once we have fully grown that we begin to incorporate fully, reflect deeply, & appreciate most gratefully the varied experiences of our childhood, the good as well as the bad, and how that combined good and bad have allowed us to fashion an integrated personality. That view & that vision is not available to us when we’re children, and not available to any observer on CAF before the completion of that journey.
Example: When I was a child and young adult, I had a fragmented opinion of my (heterosexual) parents. After conversations with others, it’s clear that I am typical. At any given time I focused on my parents’ individual weaknesses as people and as parents. Without going into an entire melodramatic story, there were heavy, heavy things happening in our household. My case was not exceptional, but our family was definitely more “extreme” in these problems than the average family. My gosh, had an outsider ‘looked in,’ they would have perceived from surface impressions that I should be removed instantly from that environment: in fact, that all of us should be released to Child Protective Services, & the heterosexual parents been declared unfit to parent. Perhaps some posters on CAF would have preferred to turn me over to a gay couple? Thank the Lord that none of you were in a position to make such a decision. I was fully formed by my imperfect, sometimes very flawed, often sinful, parents, who were troubled in many ways, both as individuals and definitely as a couple.
But these same parents gave me a depth of experience by virtue of their being first of all different genders. They tried to remind us of their previous genuine love, a model that became a pattern for me. They were very conscious of how their different genders contributed to the different strengths which they brought to the marriage & to parenting. They were people who deeply respected tradition, even in a secular way, & relived those traditions regularly, even when their marriage was in trouble. And even when their marriage was jeopardized (& they did eventually divorce, when we were virtually grown), we continued to benefit from both parents separately parenting us in a faithful manner. Neither one abandoned us when the marriage fell apart. This showed me an enormous amount about sustaining one’s values & commitments when life gets difficult.
In that respect, the bottom line is not that many homosexual couples appear to be better suited to parenthood than some heterosexual couples, because sexual tension (in the full sense of sexual) is far more operative in the latter than in the former. My mother once explained this to me when I declared that I was surprised at the occasional depth of hostility between her and my father. Or to put it another way, same-gender relationships, even nonsexual, are easier than different gender relationships. It is way easier for the vast majority of people to relate to someone of their own gender. There’s generally more harmony because the communication is instinctively understood & the behavior is not as difficult to “translate.”
This whole argument about “better” & “happier” couples is such a cop-out. It’s like saying you’d make a better Christian & a more loving, peaceful person if you didn’t have to carry a cross. Um, that’s the point: it’s the suffering that forms you. You should be grateful if the work is really hard.
I feel as if I finally truly honor my late father and my late mother. I did the best I could growing up, with my limited & more narcissistic expectations of what they would or should provide. Now I understand how my mother did darn well with her limited toolbox in extremely difficult circumstances. I have forgiven her for absolutely everything, & I will never criticize the past for whatever she worried, or I judged, she was unable to achieve. She’s achieved it now, maybe, in me.
Ditto for my father. My respect for him came much earlier, as my relationship with him was virtually seamless for most of my life, but now I place them equally on a pedestal & pray that God will reward them now for the efforts against their own personal demons.
that my single straight neighbor who never married adopted a boy from a war-torn country in the Balkans. I completely supported her decision, then, and now. He was rescued from severe violence & from being orphaned, both. He also does not have it as a pattern to model, that two parents will be of the same gender; he does not look upon 2 genders as parents to be the norm. He understands clearly that his situation of being raised by a single Mom is preferable to having been abandoned to whatever meager social services or U.N. agencies would have remained as an alternative.