I think it would depend on the couple. A few folks, both gay and straight, and both religous and atheist, I wouldn't trust with a goldfish, let alone a child.
Of course, this isn't because of their religious beliefs or their sexual orientation.
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LDS letter on same-sex marriage
- Thread starter 9-10ths_Penguin
- Start date
Of course, this isn't because of their religious beliefs or their sexual orientation.
Apex
Somewhere Around Nothing
FH, you do realize that statements like these make you just as intolerant as those who are arguing against gay marriage?
Starfish
Please no sarcasm
I've been away from RF for a few days, and my last posts in this thread are pages ago; however, I would like to say that I can't speak for others, but I've really tried not to do this.
I have repeatedly said in other threads on this subject that children in all types of families can be loved or unloved. A heterosexual family can a lousy family with lousy parenting, and a homosexual family can be full of love and nuturing. There are exceptions all around.
But I maintain that for the optimum situation, children need both a father and mother. This is simply because males and females are vastly different, and children need a mixture of both. They need the balance of both. Yes, children have been successfully raised without one or the other, but I'm talking about the optimum situation.
If you were given the opportunity to relive your childhood and could choose your situation entirely, would you choose anything other than the traditional mother and father arrangement? Would you not choose your home to be loving and stable, with both genders present? And for that matter, would you not choose your mom to stay at home to raise you and your siblings and your parent's marriage strong and unbreakable? (Another thread.) You have to think of this without any prejudices gained in your current life, because you'd be starting over with a blank slate.
My point is that it is our responsibility to do our darned best to give this to our kids. Give them the best possible. Give them what we would have wanted for ourselves.
Autodidact
Intentionally Blank
Apex: Do we have two? (Sorry if I missed it.)
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Autodidact
Intentionally Blank
Yes, I understand that you believe that this is optimum. However, in reality this is not the case, and it's not right to continue to believe things in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There's something too casual about an attitude toward truth in that practice, which tends toward immorality. The fact is that kids of gay parents do JUST AS WELL as kids of straight parents. So when you keep believing false stereotypes about groups of people to which you don't belong, well, that's just wrong. It's a huge chunk of what's wrong with the world.
Further, you have not responded to what I have said that is true, which is that what we know is good for kids is to be planned for and wanted, which is always true of gay parents, and sometimes true of straight parents.
Any set of parents who loved me and did a good job raising me would be fine.
There is no relationship between "stable" and "heterosexual." Heterosexual families can be, and often are, very unstable, and homosexual families can be very stable.
I assure you that my oldest is very happy with her lesbian upbringing, and would not relive it with different-sex parents. In fact, she thinks many of the different-sex parents of her friends are a bit crazy in one way or another, and appreciates our way of upbringing because it is rational and reality-based.
I agree. What is wrong is assuming that gay families cannot do this.
Do you know any gay families?
The reason I keep asking this is that my own experience, from knowing MANY gay and lesbian families, is that because they wanted kids so bad, they do an outstanding job. They're the ones taking their kids to oboe lessons and volunteering at the school and home-schooling and living on lower income so one of them can stay home with the kids and reading parenting books and signing their kid up for little league and all the things you think of as good parenting. That's why child welfare agencies are so keen on gay parents adopting--they tend to do a great job. That's not from the research now, that's my own personal experience. It's not because gay people are better than straight people, it's because biology self-selects for people who really, really want to be parents.
As I have said, I am caring for a child who was abused and neglected by her irresponsible heterosexual parents. Among my friends, I am not unusual. I know many gay and lesbian parents who are repairing the parenting disasters of heterosexuals. If you want responsible, caring, stable parenting, you should be supporting gay parenting--it's a good thing!
Father Heathen
Veteran Member
Honestly, neither a persons sexual orientation nor religious convictions should even be relevant. But since many in this thread are playing that game....
Autodidact
Intentionally Blank
Yay for you! Who's the third? Have you posted in support in this thread? If so, I missed it, or missed your affiliation.
What do you say to your co-religionists who call us evil and degenerate?
I would choose the parents I had because of the people they are, not because of their gender.
Loving and stable, yes. Both genders? Depends. I'm not adverse to the idea, but I don't think it's a requirement or even part of an "ideal" situation.
Both my parents stayed home. For most of the years growing up, my parents had a home-based business. In my mind, any situation where ten-year-old me wouldn't have been able to run down into the office and see my Mom or my Dad whenever I wanted would have been less than ideal.
Certainly.
Personally, I can't imagine any other parents being better than the ones I had. I'm sure many other people feel the same way about their parents. In my case, my parents were of opposite genders, but I don't see that in and of itself as a requirement for "ideal". My ideal is my Dad, period, and my Mom, period. I don't consider either of them replaceable with someone else for any reason, even if they're the same gender.
My parents have all sorts of characteristics that shaped how I was raised and in many cases gave me what I can see as great benefit. This doesn't mean, though, that some other set of parents that, for example, didn't have difficult upbringings themselves, or weren't made up of an immigrant and a my-family-has-been-in-this-country-longer-than-the-country-has-existed Canadian are any less ideal for some other person than my parents were for me.
The same goes for gender. Was I raised by a man and a woman? Yup. Is this necessary to be raised in the best way possible? I don't think so.
Heh... the only things I can remember wanting growing up that my parents didn't give me were an Atari 2600 and permission to drop out of school in Grade 4. In retrospect, I think they were right not to give them to me.
Seriously, though, I'm still not sure why you think there will be all these kids out there who will look back and wish that they had been raised by opposite-sex parents. For me, I see the parents I had as ideal. I'm sure that for many, many children of same-sex parents, they'll feel the same way: to them, nobody other than the two specific people they got would have done.
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Apex
Somewhere Around Nothing
And you wish to lower your self to that level why?
Father Heathen
Veteran Member
I'm hoping that by putting them on the receiving end, it might offer them a new perspective.
Autodidact
Intentionally Blank
My hope is that it will shock them into realizing that what they are doing as wrong. Some people have to experience something directly to see how it affects others.
It would be nice of their fellow Mormons would point this out to them, as it would probably carry more weight. *hint*
Apex
Somewhere Around Nothing
We have. Read the threads I posted for you. They are well aware of how we feel.
Magic Man
Reaper of Conversation
An attempt to communicate with them in a language they might be able to understand. The "I can't believe you'd say something like that about Mormons! You're bigotted!" response is the desired one, so that those saying the same thing about homosexuals might possibly realize that their comments are no different, and have a new, personal understanding of how people on the receiving end of their own comments might feel.
Autodidact
Intentionally Blank
Needless to say I'm not familiar with threads in LDS-only fora. It would have been nice to see such rebukes here in this thread. We're on p. 46. The gay-proponents have been verbally smacked for calling Mormons immoral, but no Mormon has told another Mormon that stereotyping and denigrating gay people is wrong.
Starfish
Please no sarcasm
Oh, then you haven't been reading them all. There's been plenty of "smacking".
Starfish
Please no sarcasm
I appreciate your good parenting and efforts to help abused children. That's wonderful and generous of you.
I do wish we could in this conversation, get past the reality that there are lousy heterosexual parents out there. I fully realize that. What I'm talking about is the optimum, and that means responsible, loving parents. I'm not talking about the lousy ones. Yes, unplanned children happen to heterosexual couples, but again, I'm talking about responsible, loving parents who accept every child that comes into the family and raise them as if they were long sought for and planned for. So when you continually point out that there are many lousy heterosexual parents in the world -- I know it, I've seen plenty of them, and they bug the heck out of me.
I grew up without my mother. My dad was wonderful. But I needed a woman. Yes, I had grandmas, mothers of my friends, aunts, and even a step-mom. And I needed them all. If my dad were gay and had brought another man into our home, I would have missed out on something vital. I needed a woman who loved me and could address those female issues that I couldn't not have talked to my dad about. My step mom filled that void that another woman or man couldn't have. And my relationship with my dad was life-forming for me. It taught me to choose a wonderful man for my husband. It taught me to trust men, and to respect and honor them.
And I know without doubt that no matter what kind of mom I was to my own kids, there is no way in this world, I could have filled in for their dad. He gave them what I simply didn't have to give. He balanced me in our parenting. My sons could not have received from a woman, the kinds of lessons and example that they got from their dad. My sons would have missed out on this, had he been their second mom. Boys need a man. If they don't have one, they often go looking for one and that can be dangerous. Again, for the optimum, that man needs to live with them for maximum exposure, and love them unconditionally. Like a dad should.
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Autodidact
Intentionally Blank
Yes, I understand that you're talking about the optimum. And my point, which I keep repeating, is that two same-sex parents are every bit as optimum as 2 different sex parents. That is reality. If you believe different, you are mistaken. My guess is that you persist in this error because:
1. Your own limited experience.
2. You don't know any gay families.
3. You haven't read the research.
4. Your church teaches that it's wrong.
There are a lot of families that are lousy BECAUSE they're heterosexual, and therefore have unwanted children. Gay families tend to do BETTER than straight families, because they want and plan for their children.
Although you might think that having one of each makes a huge difference, what we have found over the last 30 years is that it turns out that it doesn't. It turns out that, contrary to what you might think, it's not gender that's hugely important. What's important is quality parenting. And gay parents provide that as well as, or better than, straight parents.
Those are the facts.
Autodidact
Intentionally Blank
Mormons: I suppose you would be opposed to large families, not that they're horrible, but certainly not optimum, because the total parenting per child is reduced? What about polygamous families, where the time with the dad is greatly reduced? Didn't many of your ancestors grow up in such families? Was it less than optimum?
I'm feminine enough to play the role of both father and mother if I needed to.
Star, while I do understand your experience, it was unique to you. I, too, was raised primarily by my mom, and only saw my dad every other week, since they got divorced when I was seven. Trust me, whenever my dad tried to talk to me about puberty and what was happening, I just ignored it, because I knew I'd figure it out on my own. I knew I was changing. I knew it was inevitable. Now, I know women have it a bit harder than that, especially... ahem... monthly (), but it's not like I don't know anything about that.
And so we're clear, I would not trade my childhood for anything. It had its share of problems, like all our childhoods, but it shaped me into who I am now, and I frankly like who I am now. I have my problems, yes, but I am working on them... so I should probably get some breakfast before noon.
Star, while I do understand your experience, it was unique to you. I, too, was raised primarily by my mom, and only saw my dad every other week, since they got divorced when I was seven. Trust me, whenever my dad tried to talk to me about puberty and what was happening, I just ignored it, because I knew I'd figure it out on my own. I knew I was changing. I knew it was inevitable. Now, I know women have it a bit harder than that, especially... ahem... monthly (
), but it's not like I don't know anything about that.And so we're clear, I would not trade my childhood for anything. It had its share of problems, like all our childhoods, but it shaped me into who I am now, and I frankly like who I am now. I have my problems, yes, but I am working on them... so I should probably get some breakfast before noon.