Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Rod Dreher has an interesting column at BeliefNet about his own support for gay adoption and how personal relationships with gay parents who adopted changed his mind on the issue despite his religious views on homosexuality. He starts by telling the story of a friend of his broaching the subject with him:
A conservative Catholic friend e-mails this morning with news of a gay couple she knows having adopted an orphan from overseas, and how she supports what they're doing. She says that she accepts the Church's teaching about homosexuality, but considering the life this orphaned child faced in his home country, and knowing her gay friends to be of sterling character, she believes the child ended up in the best possible situation for him.
And then discusses his own views on the subject:
My friend feared that I would be horrified by her support for gay adoption, but in fact I'm pretty much where she is, though I'm not entirely comfortable with that. What changed my mind was a story a gay friend in New York (who started out as an antagonist, but we became pals) told me about his gay friend N. It turns out that N. is a fairly well-off executive living in a partnered relationship. As part of his corporate job, N. had a driver, an older black man from Harlem. They got to be friends, N. and his driver. At some point, the driver started telling N. about his daughter and her children. His daughter was a drug addict, and had bad men in and out of her life. She also had two little children, whose welfare consumed the driver and his wife. Eventually the children came to live with their grandparents, who struggled hard to care for them, but who couldn't bear the thought of the little ones living with their dissolute mother and the string of men she dragged through their lives.But the old man and his wife were worn out, trying to care for two little kids, and pressed to the breaking point. He didn't know what he was going to do.
N. and his partner offered to adopt the children. And, after the appropriate authorities investigated the situation, the adoption went through. The kids are now living in a loving home.
"You tell me," my friend said. "Are those children better off in a stable home with N. and his gay partner, or are they better off living with their druggie mom? Because that was the choice. Nobody else was lining up to adopt two poor black kids from Harlem."
I had no answer to that. Yes, these children would have been best off in a stable home with a mother and a father. But I could not deny that, based on the facts as given, those suffering children found safe harbor. I have a partnered gay friend in Dallas who recently adopted a child from, I believe, a similar set of circumstances. My friend is a good man, and I'd bet my paycheck he's a terrific dad. Like the pal who wrote me this morning, I find myself convinced of the truth of the Church's teaching, but also without a good argument for why orphans are better off languishing without loving parents than they are being in a nurturing home with a same-sex couple. I do believe heterosexual couples seeking adoption should be privileged, because I believe a mother and a father are in principle the best arrangement for children. But I can't say I have any real objection to same-sex couples adopting, even though I have a somewhat guilty conscience about that. If you do have solid, sensible objections, let's hear them.
This isn't perfect, of course. I would much rather Dreher and others would drop their anti-gay religious views entirely and just recognize that gay people can be every bit as good or bad as parents as straight people can be. But it's still important. This is how major victories are won, by evolution rather than revolution. And it happened because of personal relationships. As I've been saying for a very long time, that is the key to overcoming bigotry.
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Some of the comments on that column are truly horrifying. I sincerely hope they are Poes and not real....but it's truly hard to tell sometimes.
Posted by: Adrienne | December 3, 2009 9:24 AM
[citation needed]
Surely if mother and father are good, mother and mother and mother and father and father and father are better? After all, that's how children were raised in Hawaii before the Europeans dropped by - there's no words in the language for "aunt" or "uncle"; everyone is just "mother" and "father".
Posted by: Tacroy | December 3, 2009 9:46 AM
Silly Tacroy! Everyone knows that Europeans and their descendants are the moral paragons of humanity!
(heavy sarcasm here)
Posted by: jws | December 3, 2009 9:52 AM
Here's the situation in all its simplicity: two very close friends see a child in need, and no one else able to meet that need; so they adopt the kid and do their best to give him/her a good home. In this situation, does it really matter if the two close friends might also be having sex when the kid's asleep? Of course not -- anyone who actually gives a shit about the kid can tell you there's a MILLION factors more important than that.
And yes, baby steps are better than none at all. This person went from "I accept the Church's teachings that homosexuality is bad" to "Yes but there's more important things to worry about here." It could be a fairly easy step from there to "Why are we getting so hot and bothered about homosexuality anyway? Shouldn't we be dealing with more horrendous sins, like kids without good homes?"
In the meantime, he can start askng himself why he's having a "somewhat guilty conscience" about supporting two people who are clearly doing the right thing for an innocent child.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 3, 2009 9:52 AM
It's refreshing to see this attitude. What I don't get about the resistance to gay marriage, parenting or adoption is the complete wall that is drawn by those who oppose it. Even if you believe that "these children would have been best off in a stable home with a mother and a father" on average, how does that make it aceeptable to restrict adoption to only heterosexual couples? The same argument could be made with any number of biases that may even be accurate. (These children would be better off with parents who do not drink alcohol, earn more than the poverty level, have IQ's greater than 120).
But none of these factors should be limiting in an all-or-nothing matter of law. We could legislate down to the point where only the top 2% (calculated by statistical probability of various demographics) of potential child-rearing couples were allowed to adopt children. That wouldn't mean that the country would be better off, nor would it mean any specific couple from that group would be more loving, capable parents than a couple (or individual) outside that group.
What drives the thought process that children are best off with a mother and father is stereotypes, and fighting to stigmatize gay couples is meant to reinforce those stereotypes and justify a decision already made rather than allowing individual gay couples the opportunity to show themselves to be fit parents on their own.
Posted by: Odie | December 3, 2009 9:55 AM
I think the key here and why I follow Dreher's blog is because the reasoning portions of his brain are increasingly switching on when confronted with facts he'd prefer not be true relative to his religious faith's dogma. Cognitive dissonance is far better than sheer avoidance.
I've encountered him being nailed by commenters for his hypocrisy on constitutional matters where he's not had an arguable rebuttal where he just shuts down the comment thread. However, I've see this less and less, he's actually adapting like a remedial critical thinker would, which is marked progress for a social conservative.
This gives me hope that the mass delusion we observe amongst social conservatives is curable. Being confronted with actual gay people seems to be helping by forcing them to switch on the reasoning part of their brain.
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 3, 2009 9:56 AM
It's interesting that the comment thread over there immediately became a discussion about gay marriage, all commenters apparently obsessed about the "roles" of women and men. It reinforces my belief that the left and right are, as usual, talking about different things when discussing the same subject. In the case of "family", the left simply means a group of people that love and care for each other. The right, on the other hand, is really talking about the traditional gender hierarchy. Gays upset them because they represent an affront to male dominion.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | December 3, 2009 9:59 AM
[citation needed]
Anything by Paul Cameron. (It's also like citing whale.to to Orac.)
And yes, baby steps are better than none at all.
OK, I'll admit microevolution exists, but God still created Adam and Eve 6037 years ago.
Posted by: Uncle Glenny | December 3, 2009 10:08 AM
Yes, exactly! I've been making this point for a long time. Homophobia is really tangled up with misogyny and strict gender roles. Of course there's more to it than just that, but it's a big factor. A normal person in a stable heterosexual partnership wouldn't be affected in any way if two people with the same type of genitals got married. It almost seems ridiculous to even suggest that legal gay marriage would somehow ruin straight marriages, seeing as gay marriage wouldn't be mandatory or something like that. But, even though gay marriage doesn't threaten straight marriage, it does threaten "traditional" marriage, which is based on strict gender roles, with the justification that it just has to be that way for the world to continue working. When traditional wives see a successful marriage where roles aren't based on genitals and the world doesn't end because of it, they might start to question how necessary it really is to have their crappy traditional marriage. They might start to demand that they become and equal in their marriage, and that's what really scares those men, because they can no longer give an easy excuse to get out of it.
Posted by: catgirl | December 3, 2009 10:29 AM
This is exactly what I've been saying for years. When it comes to gay adoptions it's not about the choice between a child being raised by a homosexual couple versus being raised by a heterosexual couple. It's about the child being raised by a homosexual couple versus living in a horrible home or being shuffled around foster homes until they reach 18.
Posted by: Iason Ouabache | December 3, 2009 12:05 PM
This is refreshing. There's at least one anti-gay bigot out there with a semblance of humanity and empathy. Hopefully his fans will take note.
Oh, and the comment up-thread about homophobia being primarily informed by patriarchal notions of male hegemony is spot-on.
Posted by: Sadie Morrison | December 3, 2009 12:10 PM
Ridiculous!
Heterosexuals are sinners and blasphemers and commit abominations all the time. Just like homosexuals do, which is why homosexuals deserve our scorn and should not be allowed to adopt children.
But heterosexuals deserve twice as much scorn, for they have twice as much opportunity, as a couple, to commit sexual sin. After all, gay men will only commit sins worthy of being stoned to death with other men. But a heterosexual couple will commit the same offenses not only with men, but with women as well.
Not only should hetero's not be allowed to adopt, they shouldn't be allowed to procreate, as we are being overrun with sinners. And they most definitely should not be allowed near impressionable children, otherwise their opportunities for heterosexual proselyzation would be too tempting. They would essentially be a two-person tag team, able to pervert and confuse a child of either gender.
The only people pure enough to be allowed to adopt children and to procreate are, therefore, celibate Catholic priests, who, as we all know, are as pure as the driven snow when it comes to matters concerning children, and they alone should serve as the moral models for adoption agencies.
Posted by: Gingerbaker | December 3, 2009 12:33 PM
I personally know one family in the UK that has two mothers and two fathers. The gay couple actually went looking for a lesbian couple to have a family with, and now have two biological children -- one each. They don't all live under the same roof. I believe the girls live with the mothers and the fathers live next door or very close by, but by all accounts they form an extremely loving and caring environment for their two children.
Interestingly enough, the father of one of the guys involved is very conservative (by British standards anyway) and only tolerated his gay son so long as his partner stayed away from family gatherings (he even had to bring a female date to his sister's wedding). But when the children were born, the father changed his attitude entirely, deciding that life was too short to allow his prejudices to force him to miss out of the chance of being a grandfather to them.
So it's not really surprising to me that Dreher has changed his tune regarding gay adoptions. There is no better way to see that gay people are just normal people than seeing how children react under their care. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that people like Dreher feel ashamed of their own prejudices when they witness children in a loving relationship with their gay parents for themselves (not that they would ever admit it, of course).
Posted by: tacitus | December 3, 2009 1:22 PM
Dan Savage has a recurring series of blog posts on The Stranger called "Every Child Deserves A Mother And Father" which chronicles child abuse, neglect, and death at the hands of straight, married parents. "Yes, these children would have been best off in a stable home with a mother and a father." My ass. The quality is important...the gender configuration irrelevant.
Posted by: Paul Lundgren | December 3, 2009 1:57 PM
I found Dan Savage's Book about his experience adopting a kid (the Kid) to be really eye opening. It's not necessarily the perfect place for a bigot to start (some of the language is a bit risque) but I cried at his descriptions not only of his and his partner's experience, but also that of the birth mother.
Posted by: JustaTech | December 3, 2009 2:13 PM
as long as the kids are loved and cared for anything else is NO ONE ELSES business , . if a child needs to be adopted and their is a Gay couple , a straight couple or a single Person who si capable of rasing them and showing them love and Support . then By all means these people should be able to adopt .
Posted by: Vic Vanity | December 3, 2009 2:57 PM
There was one very good point made about the connection between the issues. If you're going to support gay adoption, even in limited circumstances, then you should also support strengthening the rights of the adoptive parents as they raise their children by affording them the same rights as married heterosexual couples have. After all, it's just as much in the interest of the children with gay parents as it is for those with straight parents to grow up in a strong and stable family.
Like it or not, the acceptance of gay adoption is paving the way to accepting gay marriage sooner or late.
Posted by: tacitus | December 3, 2009 3:10 PM
@15 JustaTech,
Me too....me too. I've been reading Dan Savage's stuff since '96 and am admittedly a fangirl, but his book The Kid (and later The Committment) was definitely an eye-opener, and a very moving one at that. Definitely recommended reading.
Posted by: Gretchen | December 3, 2009 3:12 PM
There are some rather bizarre notions enshrined in some laws; in adoption laws for example only heterosexual couples can adopt. Singles and homosexuals need not apply.
Posted by: MadScientist | December 3, 2009 3:36 PM
One of my biggest problems with these inane arguments against Teh Gays is that they reduce the relationship between two men or two women to f+++ing. Love encompasses a hell of a lot more than mere sex. How would straight people like it if their relationships with their significant others were reduced to f+++ing? Wouldn't straight people object to being reduced to genitalia?
The real reason religious people have a problem with homosexuals is f+++ing. Simply put, they think its icky. Has absolutely nothing to do with theology, religious belief or "faith." But it sounds better to dress it up as such (for others and for themselves) because it sounds better than "its icky."
When people start thinking of love simply being between two human beings the world will grow up.
Posted by: We Are The 801 | December 3, 2009 6:14 PM
This is how minds, communities, and societies evolve: a bit at a time.
He has gay friends and he sees gay adoption as better than no adoption at all. Give him a few years and he'll start seeing that these good, honest people really deserve to get married if they want to, as well.
Thinking like this really needs to be encouraged.
Posted by: DexX | December 3, 2009 6:41 PM
It isn't the case that only married heterosexual couples can adopt, it varies state to state. Although, when my husband and I took custody of our son in FL, we had to sign a piece of paper that said we weren't gay or bisexual. It p*ssed me off as why is it anyone elses' business? But FL is a state that doesn't allow homosexual couples to adopt, whereas in CA (where we live) they can and do.
Posted by: Elly | December 3, 2009 8:03 PM
Meh. As long as he has to throw in that one of the gays mentioned is "of sterling character" and that "Nobody else was lining up to adopt two poor black kids from Harlem," how is this helpful?
Also, echoing a trope in another of Ed's posts today, I'm gonna need a template for my "why did they not already know this before having 'personal experience' with [fill in the blank]" reply. In the information age, those who remain purposefully clueless & just follow the party line, be it conservative, liberal, or "progressive," until something directly affects/touches them need to be completely tuned out until they get a clue.
Posted by: Diane G. | December 3, 2009 8:28 PM
And then kicked to the curb with no resources & no way to navigate.
Posted by: Liz Ditz | December 3, 2009 10:38 PM
"You tell me," my friend said. "Are those children better off in a stable home with N. and his gay partner, or are they better off living with their druggie mom? Because that was the choice. Nobody else was lining up to adopt two poor black kids from Harlem."
Of course, the wealthy exec could have just paid the old man more money, so that having the kids at home wouldn't have been such a drain.
Adrienne #1: Some of the comments on that column are truly horrifying. I sincerely hope they are Poes and not real....but it's truly hard to tell sometimes.
Adrienne, without even reading the comments, I can promise you - they are not Poes. Beliefnet, a.k.a. "Spirituality for Dummies" - like so many other sites, has become a haven for the stupid and uninformed who seem to feel they have a right to an opinion.
Dianne G.: In the information age, those who remain purposefully clueless & just follow the party line, be it conservative, liberal, or "progressive," until something directly affects/touches them need to be completely tuned out until they get a clue.
I agree wholeheartedly. Forgive me for not being all that impressed with Dreher's article, and for not seeing it as a reason to have hope for the future.
Posted by: Jeff Eyges | December 4, 2009 8:53 AM
"They might start to demand that they become and equal in their marriage, and that's what really scares those men, because they can no longer give an easy excuse to get out of it." - catgirl
Why assume that it's just men that it scares?
Posted by: Captain Mike | December 4, 2009 12:45 PM