Dahlia Litwick has to know that legal permission for gay adoption knocks the pins out from under the legal argument against gay marriage. If courts find that it’s O.K. for gay couples to adopt, then how can they not accept the argument that parents need the legal privileges of parenthood, i.e., marriage?
I’m perfectly willing to put the interests of children first here. If Litwick were willing to concede (as she is not) that boys and girls are better off with both fathers and mothers, I would be willing to concede that gay adoption is superior to languishing forever in foster care. If she wants to argue that a minimum of support and stability is all that we can ask for when we’re talking about what’s best for the child, I can’t agree.
Let me state it another way. Asking what’s best for the child returns us to the natural standard of human flourishing that proponents of gay marriage and adoption want us to abandon. Within an orientation toward the naturally best, there’s room for considerations of second-, third-, and fourth-best. But advocates of gay adoption and marriage don’t really want to accept that. Their agenda is ultimately about themselves, and only secondarily about what’s best for the children.
I’ve always thought adoption was the best issue to emphasize in regard to gay rights, for the reasons Joe Knippenberg cites and because children cannot give informed consent and therefore the standard liberal criteria don’t apply to them.
A choice must be made on their behalf, and the best choice is a traditional family.
If we consciously uphold that determination in regard to adoption, the arguments against gay marriage, and against anti-discrimination laws for gays, are strengthened.
You are absolutely right. Michael Medved, who is usually sensible about these things, is soft on this issue. You can straighten him out. Boys and girls need real men and real women as parents, not ambiguous or confused ones.
A gay familly could only be best for a gay child. One must quickly find the gay gene, identify it and this would settle the matter. Gay children are better served by gay parents and straight children by straight parents. In other words what is naturally best depends upon the orientation of the child. But of course being gay is not genetic (at least not completely) it is also part choice, and part environment, and thus we see the futility of talking about Nature vs. Nurture in the entire debacle that is gay marriage.
Of course assuming then that a majority of children are born straight, or rather and even that what is naturally best assumes that they all must be (the existence of a misshapen oak tree does not negate the full potentiallity of the acorn) Then one is left up to judge whether or not a child is ceteris paribus better left to a rich gay Doctor couplet, or to a semi-coherent, low expectations/survival familly.
In other words does the scope of what is naturally best include (wealth, education, human sentiment, hope, positive expectations, as well as heterosexual parents...? For certainly neither the quality of the soil, nor the amount of sunshine, nor rain, nor wind, can be abstracted from the requisites needed by the acorn.
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