I felt compelled to write a response to a recent article titled “Same sex adoption is not a game”, written by Rick Fitzgibbons and published on The Prince Arthur Herald http://en.princearthurherald.com/news/detail/same-sex-adoption-is-not-a-game/?language_id=1
The writer of this article is taking a stand. He’s obviously sick to death of the way that good, moral, upstanding Christian organisations are being treated when they try to protect children from the horrors of the Homosexual Agenda. How dare those Homosexuals demand the right to adopt children, when it’s obvious that gay and lesbians do nothing but harm any child they come into contact with. Disgusting. Gays should not be allowed to adopt. It’s just common sense and besides, the research proves it! Rick uses many sources to back up his arguments. It’s an impressive list, so what he says must be true, right?
Well, let’s take a look.
1) Same sex unions are very fragile. The probability of breakup is high for lesbian couples. In a 2010 report, the US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, 40 percent of the couples who had conceived a child by artificial insemination had broken up.
Quoted source: Gartrell, N. & Bos, H.(2010) US national Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Psychological Adjustment of 17-year-old Adolescents, Pediatrics, Volume 126, Number 1, July 2010, 28-36.
It was not difficult to find a copy of this article online. What was difficult, however, was finding the figure quoted… what I did find was that 56% of the mothers who were co-parents at the beginning of the study had separated. On average, these couples had been together for 12 years.
That means that, according to this study, lesbian couples separate at around the same rate that married couples do. In the US, the chance of divorce is believed to be around 50% for first time marriages, increasing to 67% and 74% for second and third marriages (Source: Jennifer Baker, Director of the Post-Graduate Program in Marriage and Family Therapy at Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, MO). These percentages do not represent the breakup of non-married couples, though. It would be interesting if we could see the survival rate of all relationships involving children, regardless of marital status… but I digress.
Something interesting to note is that the average duration of these relationships was 12 years. That is FOUR YEARS LONGER than the average length of first marriages in the US (http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/p70-97.pdf). Those evil lesbian couples aren’t looking so bad when we put them in the proper context, are they?
Now let’s look at what this study actually had to say about the offspring of the couples who separated. The results showed that these children fared just as well as the children who had mothers in a continuous relationship. The authors of the study put this down to the fact that these women chose to retain shared custody arrangements, something that has been proven to promote more favourable outcomes following a divorce. Shared custody arrangement occurred in 71.4% of these families; an amazing number when 65% of heterosexual divorces result in sole custody being awarded to the mother. What’s that? The evil lesbians are acting in the best interests of their children? No, that couldn’t be right…
2) The couple may not necessarily be physically healthy. Dutch research has found that most new HIV infections in Amsterdam occurred among homosexual men who were in steady relationships.
Quoted source: Xiridou, M. et al.(2003). The contribution of steady and casual partnerships to the incidence of HIV infection among homosexual men in Amsterdam. AIDS 17: 1029-38.
I almost laughed out loud that this one. This source is one that is LOVED by the anti-gay crowd. It PROVES that gay couples are never monogamous. It PROVES IT.
Except it doesn’t. This study was only open to men who had had two or more sexual partners in the past 6 months. Therefore, any men who were in exclusive relationships were excluded from the study. Common sense tells us that STDs are more likely to be spread if you are having sexual relations with multiple people; gender is not a barrier to that. The results would be the same if it was a study of heterosexual individuals. The only difference would be that no one would try to use it as proof that all heterosexuals are promiscuous.
3) Research shows that same sex unions suffer a significantly higher prevalence of domestic abuse, depression, substance-abuse disorders, and sexually transmitted diseases.
I’ll admit it. This time I DID laugh. The source quoted for this over-arching statement was titled “One Man, One Woman: A Catholic’s Guide to Defending Marriage”. Hardly a reputable source, definitely not one that a so-called medical professional should be quoting!
4) Children who were deprived of maternal care during extended periods in their early lives “lacked feeling, had superficial relationships, and exhibited hostile or antisocial tendencies” as they developed into adulthood.
Source quoted: Kobak, R.(1999). "The emotional dynamics of disruptions in attachment relationships: Implications for theory, research, and clinical intervention". In J. Cassidy & P. R. Shaver.(Eds.), Handbook of Attachment (pp. 21-43). New York: The Guilford Press
I can see what old Rick is trying to get at here. Babies know. They can tell if the person caring for them and loving them is not their biological mother. They know, and it will mess them up. It will ruin their lives if they have two dads who selfishly devote all their time to raising a baby they stole from some poor, defenceless woman.
Er, reality check. This article actually talks about children who are denied the bond that comes from one-on-one attention from a primary care-giver. Gender is irrelevant. Nowhere in the article does it say that a man is unable to develop a secure bond with a child. If anything, this is an argument in support of same sex adoption; we need as many couples as we can get, so that more children can be raised by loving parents instead of shift workers in over-packed institutions.
5) In 1996 a well-designed study of 174 primary school children in Australia -- 58 children in married families, 58 in families headed by cohabitating heterosexuals and 58 in home with homosexual unions – suggested that married couples offered the best environment for a child’s social and education environment. Cohabiting couples were second best and homosexual couples came last.
Source quoted: Sarantakos, S.(1996) Children in three contexts. Children Australia, 21(3), 23-31
I was sadly unable to find a copy of this study; being that it was conducted in my land of origin, I must say I am very interested to examine it. I was, however, able to find reference to it in an APA document, which stated the following:
“An Australian study by Sarantakos (1996) of 174 children born into heterosexual relationships and later parented by their heterosexual married parents, or by co-habitating heterosexual parents, or by lesbian or gay step or blended families, found that although children being parented by lesbian or gay couples achieved slightly better in social studies and were regarded as more polite and reserved, children parented by married couples scored higher in language, maths and sport. Reviewers have pointed to the fact that this study is at odds with the body of evidence on children parented by lesbian women and gay men, but is somewhat consistent with other studies that compare children who have
experienced family conflict with those who have not. Like the author himself, these reviewers have urged caution on how to interpret the findings of the study (e.g. APA, 2005; VLRC, 2007)”
So it appears that we are not talking about children being raised by same sex couples; rather we are talking about children who have been through the divorce of their biological parents and are now living in various different family arrangements. This raises concerns over the validity of using the study in regards to gay parenting, as we are dealing with other issues that are already known to cause upheaval in a young child’s life. It is no wonder that the APA recommends caution in the use of the results. But Rick is obviously not looking for the truth; he’s looking to cherry-pick his facts to support his argument, whatever the cost.
6) Not surprisingly, there are scholars who oppose this weighty evidence. Two major studies published in 2010 are often cited by homosexual activists and the media. Nanette Gartrell and Henry Bos (10) and Timothy Biblarz and Judith Stacey (11) claim that children who were deliberately deprived of the benefits of gender complementarity in a home with a father and a mother suffer no psychological damage.
Oh, Rick, Rick, Rick. As I have already demonstrated, his ‘weighty evidence’ is shaky at best, downright lies at the worst. But in a last ditch attempt to add weight to his ideals, Rick makes the claim that every other study that says that same sex parenting is not detrimental to children (and believe me, there are many) is WRONG. Apparently, due to the ‘political nature’ of issues surrounding same sex parenting, the results that parents give during interviews are always lies, spoken to cast themselves in a better right. All of the methodology of such studies are plagued by ‘serious flaws’.
But, of course, it’s ok to exclude monogamous male couples from a study and then use it to prove promiscuity. That’s fine.
So what have we learnt today, boys and girls? It’s important to make sure that you quote your resources accurately, or they just might be used against you. It’s important to be accurate and honest, or you just might be made to look like a fool. And, most importantly, that it is true that Same sex adoption is not a game. It is something real that impacts on the lives of real children who are in need of and deserving of the love and stability that a family can provide for them. So Rick, stop using your unproven, bigoted, and incorrect opinions to score yourself points like messing with children’s lives is a game.
I have barely even begun to address all of the issues raised in this article. However, unlike Rick, who frequently quoted the abstracts of journal articles (making it clear that he did not read the articles themselves) I refuse to quote from a source that I have not examined myself. So if you are wondering why I have not addressed some points, that is why. If you have access to one of the missing sources, or if you have read them yourself, please feel free to contact me to have the information added.
