danarhea

It isn't a social experiment at all. Fathers? The gay couples. The mother? The government, of course, and the government is the nanny too. What's not hetero about that? Pat Robertson would love it.

__________________
Jack Kevorkian for President's Physician: 2012

http://danarhea.blogspot.com

The silenced majority

Natural teleology prevents homosexuals from bearing children; not any public policy.

"Allowing" homosexual couples to adopt children or artificially conceive a child to raise is an experiment.

The above assertion is false of course if you can some how demonstrate when & where homosexuals were natural parents of children.

I'll stick with it being an experiment.

TheNextEra

Parenting is an experiment. Do all heterosexual parents raise their children the EXACT same? Nope. Are all heterosexual parents GOOD parents? Nope.

So parenting is an experiment because you never know what is going to happen. Seem like you are ok with heterosexual parents experimenting with parenting even though there are bad heterosexual parents out there.

The silenced majority

Well, you can see what the devaluation of the father has done to the black community since the Great Society replaced "dad" with a welfare check and food stamps.

Fathers and mothers play important roles in raising children. Marriage is in crisis in the west as is due to several reasons. The normalization of homosexual adoption says that there is nothing unique about a "father" or a "mother"; therefore it also says there is nothing "unique" about the relation between a man and a woman or mothers and fathers.

The plight of the black community - the absence of "dad", is something that has had a horrible effect. Doubtful anyone would argue that. This is what happened when the concept of "family" is taken for granted. 50 years ago, blacks suffered outright discrimination, but their neighborhoods were safe & there was a mom and dad in every family.

If gays want to live together; that's fine. You are breeching another's rights (in this case an adopted child) when you tell the child that being adopted by what could be defined as a sort of "social experiment" is the same thing as being raised by a mother and a father.

1069

When have black men in America ever had a CHANCE to be "dads"?
Dads protect their families. Black men have not been permitted by law to do so in the history of this nation.
First there was slavery; women were raped, men beaten, children torn from the bosoms of their families and sold away down the river, never to be seen or heard from again.
Then there was reconstruction and Jim Crow; more of the same. Blacks were disrespected as subhuman second-class citizens; if they tried to protest this degradation, they were tortured and lynched. Sometimes they were tortured and lynched anyway, just for the hell of it, even if they complied.
This only ended thirty years ago; some would argue it hasn't entirely ended yet.

Being a "dad" would be a perverse joke under these conditions.
Much safer and less hurtful for everyone- especially the children- for their fathers not to even embark upon attempting to maintain such a pitiful facade.

The silenced majority

Dad, Redefined - washingtonpost.com

roguenuke

Like allowing infertile couples to do it? Or how bout this situation, where a parent dies or moves out and the other parent moves in with a brother/sister who is a single parent and they share parenting responsibilities for each others' children? These things wouldn't be social experiments also? How "normal" do you really think an extended family is now days?

Also, you may have just worded it wrong but one of the partners in a homosexual relationship could easily be the natural parent of the children. Just like what you get with step-families. And I was unaware that the biological parents were the ones that adopted orphans. That seems a bit odd.

roguenuke

You keep overlooking the fact that many children are not raised by both their biological mother and father anyway. There are a lot of kids being raised by stepparents, adopted parents, foster parents, grandparents, guardians, single parents, heterosexual couples that adopt or surrogate, and extended families. Why would you not consider any of these a violation of the child's rights also? These are all different than the norm, and could be considered "social experiments". But really it's just life, and the fact that a true "normal" does not exist.

And another thing you overlook is that for a child who may have been removed from their home where they lived with both their natural parents for child abuse and/or neglect, I don't think they would personally care whether or not someone else thought they were being used in a "social experiment" as long as they have people now who are willing to care for them and love them.

The silenced majority

None of what you mentioned takes the position that: "there is nothing unique about the unique roles that "mothers" and "fathers" play in rearing children & 2 men or 2 women is no different."

What you've described are situations where one or both of the parental (meaning a father and mother) have been removed from the scenario and remaining family members pick up the slack.

It's an experiment, hardly in the same vein though.

I don't know what you're trying to say.

If you are implying that I think that a single parent who "turned gay" should not be able to raise that child or something to that extent, the answer is no - I don't.

I don't think that an orphan should be experimented with by being adopted by homosexual parents.

Singularity

Your argument fails on two fronts: First, in assigning a mysterious "right to choose" to a child, either adopted or natural, when you claim that his/her right's are being "breached...by what could be defined as a 'social experiment'". A child does not choose his or her parents, so there is no rights to breach in regards to parental choice. Children do not have the same rights or priviledges as an adult; the right to vote, for instance, or the priviledge to make autonomous sexual decisions, work without permission, or drive a car. Children are afforded the basic rights embodied by the Constitution as enshrined by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Equal Protection Clause of that amendment is to apply to children, born within a marriage or not, but excludes children not yet born. This was reinforced by the US Supreme Court decision of In re Gault (In re Gault).

Secondly, if homosexual adoption and child rearing is an experiment, fairness indicates that heterosexual adoption and child rearing be put to the same test. Many unbiased studies indicate that homosexual's raising children do, in fact, succeed when it comes to the child's well-being and adjustment (See Study: Same-Sex Parents Raise Well-Adjusted Kids). There are many studies that dispute this claim ( FOXNews.com - Homosexual Parenting Studies Are Flawed, Report Says - Politics | Republican Party | Democratic Party | Political Spectrum). However, this claim against homosexual adoption and child rearing would hold water if their heterosexual counterparts displayed a 100% baseline for a child's well-being and adjustment, and they do not. Furthermore, many children raised by homosexual couples do, in fact, turn out very well adjusted and "normal". By the same token, there are many children born or adopted to otherwise "normal" heterosexual parents who do not.

So if this really is a social experiment, it's succeeding.