Every once in a while, we need to be reminded of what’s at stake in the culture wars and that we can’t let ouor opponents have the advantage of framing the debate.
To wit, University of Arkansas professor Hillary Wilson reminds us that the issue of homosexual couples adopting children is not the rights of homosexuals, but the rights of children.
“The problem is not one of sexual orientation, but of the nature and purpose of adoption itself: adoption does not mean giving a child to any couple who wants one, but rather the seeking out a family for a child who needs one.”
“A child in need of being adopted is a child who is an extraordinary and abnormal situation: he or she is a child without parents. From a juridical and social point of view, the purpose of adoption is to ‘create’ a family relationship similar to one that is natural. Not, for example, like two fathers and one mother, or three friends, or a single person, because these do not exist as a natural biological relationship,” Wilson explained.
The point is not that kids can’t grow up in a single-parent households and be healthy, functioning adults in society, but that when society has a chance to do right by a child who has suffered a great loss and actually pick the family that will raise him, then society has an obligation to provide him with the best possible parents. And all of our history and everything we know about human development tells us that children need both fathers and mothers if they’re going to receive the best upbringing possible.
I guess adopting a kid is a status symbol. Like owning an H2.
Simply put, a child has a right to a mother and a father. The child has a right to be mothered and to be fathered. This is why I really dislike androgynous terms like parent and parented. Like you said hard cases donp:comment>
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2005-06-29 18:16:37
2005-06-29 22:16:37
I was threatened with failing a course in nursing school for saying what Dom says and others affirm in this thread. And the evangelical protestants in the class took me aside and told me to stop saying what I really thought or I would flunk; just keep quiet, put the “right” answers on the test, and get out of there.
(They also hinted I could fail for disagreeing with a girl that her grandmother who was dying in an uncomfortable and painful way should be just put out of her misery; the girl acted as if I were the cause of the grandmother’s suffering and the teacher seemed to agree. )
It is a miracle I ever graduated from that school.
Susan Peterson