My background is in education and before retiring a few years ago, I had worked with children between 8 and 12 years old, for longer than I care to divulge.
I began at a time when separated and divorced families made up less than 10% of the population, today the numbers exceed 60%. When I began the numbers of students who had severe emotional, behavioural or academic issue WAS about 10% of the students, the rest were normal, competent and confident individuals. In my last few years of teaching the number of students presenting severe emotional, behavioural or academic issues grew larger than half of the classroom population, some years approaching 70%.
Ask any teacher with 30+ years experience in the trenches and get first hand reports before you go spouting ideological nonsense. Don’t pick the curmudgeons or the chronically angry, burned out ones. Pick those who have retained a sense of empathy and concern through their career. The first hand anecdotal evidence WILL shock you.
You think one way to repair social ills is to further destabilize society by further eroding “the pillar” that forms the basis for stability. I can assure you it won’t.
We are beginning to have the offspring from broken and dysfunctional families raising our next generation. Many of these new parents have not a clue about how to love, nurture and support their children BECAUSE their parents abandoned the task somewhere in midstream. The next generation will not “magically” become stable and functional precisely because their role models were incapable of doing so.
The two most tragic cases in my career were…
- A young boy being raised by a mother and her lesbian lover. The mother decided she was gay after giving birth to the child. The boy was chronically angry, insecure and emotionally crippled.
- A young boy suffering from “attachment disorder” brought on by a mother who abandoned him and his brother when they were under 3 years old. She kept enough contact with them to let them know she didn’t love them, just the opposite, actually. They were being raised by their paternal grandmother and the father when he cared enough to show up in their lives a few times a month. You have no idea what dealing with their emotional and behavioural instability is like for the grandmother, for their teachers and for anyone they encounter. The oldest of the two broke into a neighbor’s house and spray painted furniture, walls, appliances and windows when he was six years old.
You have all the ideological reasons for your position. What you are missing is front line data regarding the toll on society that destabilized families are having. It will only get worse - much worse - precisely because those now parenting were the products of relationships where one or both could not distinguish narcissistic love from true self-giving agape love.
Same sex “love” is by its very nature narcissistic because the individuals so engaged are seeking reflection, not complimentarity. They are seeking a love “like their own” that reflects back to them their own love for themselves.
Your advocacy will bear fruit - and it won’t be pretty. I fear for my own children because their expectations regarding what constitutes a healthy personal relationship will be constantly challenged and rarely fulfilled.
Your “grand social experiment” will come to a screeching end some 20-40 years hence. Be prepared. Those making political decisions will have not a clue what the well-being of society involves because for any right to obtain requires a concomitant responsibility on the part of others. When those “others” are an endangered species, “rights” will disappear quickly.
Wait and see.
