tags: gay adoption, United States, equality, religion, children, religion, hypocrisy, Dan+Savage, streaming video
Unlike straight parents, gay parents cannot go out one night, get drunk and adopt. Unlike straight parents, gay parents have children because they are wanted and planned for. Certainly this was the situation for my (straight) so-called parents, who not only didn't plan for me and didn't want me, but they were horribly abusive and neglectful after I was born, and after they'd finished trying to destroy me, they gave me up to the state when I was a teen-ager. I would love to have had Dan Savage or someone like him as one of my parents instead of the violent, hateful wackaloons that I was born to. If anyone is "destroying the fabric of society," through their behavior, it's all those people who thoughtlessly pop out unwanted kids.
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I've loved Dan Savage for years, ever since I discovered him in the Seattle Weekly when I first moved there. Now he's reached the level of people I respect highly, not just are entertained by (cough cough 'Santorum' cough cough), because of the causes he takes on and the way he pursues them.
A brilliant man, I'm sure a great parent, and oh how I wish there were loads more just like him. The world would be a better place with people like this in such strong numbers that they can no longer be ignored or marginalized.
Well, that's not totally true. If you live in a repressed world where gay people don't get to acknowledge they are gay, they can, since that's pretty much how my lesbian mother had me ;-). She married my Dad, had 3 more kids and 7 years of unhappiness and then left him for another woman, my beloved step-mom, who she's been with for 30 years. Not that I regret my conception, or anything, but it does seem that for Mom, it would have been easier to go the considered route, but not possible in the early 70s.
Sharon
*grin* You put life in perspective... Just when one things things are or were awful someone comes along with a better (a.k.a. worse) story! :)
I don't understand what the crux of this issue is.
If we came up with a word other than "marriage", and gave gay couples all exactly the same rights and privileges of heterosexual spouses, would that be acceptable to all parties?
So gay partnerships would be *precisely* the same in *every* way, except for the name.
@joshua
No, that wouldn't be acceptable to all parties, because the fact that it would be the same as marriage but STILL NOT marriage is what makes it unequal.
It still classifies gay people as second-class citizens ("You can have the same rights we have, but you have to call it something else because you're NOT like us.").
If it were a simple matter of semantics, of a silly name for the exact same rights, then why are straight people so worked up over it? If we're willing to "award" the rights of marriage to same-sex couples, why not just call it what it is: marriage? To say that gay people shouldn't be so worked up over a name is hypocritical when straight people seem to be just as (if not more) stuck on the terminology.
Natalie,
I don't know why straight people are worked over it. Just as I don't know why gay people would be worked up over my solution.
It is a matter of semantics. We use different words to describe different things.
Should we rename football to baseball? Or for that matter, should we just get rid of "homosexual" and "heterosexual", and just call everyone "sexuals"? After all, they are different names, and that fundamentally implies inequality, right?
-j
The same reasoning from Brown v. Board of Education applies. Separate institutions are inherently unequal.
joshua---
I see this solution as analogous to "separate but equal" facilities that were supposed to be provided for black people in the Jim Crow era.
I seem to recall that "separate but equal" emphatically did not ensure equal facilities or treatment and was eventually struck down for precisely that reason.
I am not convinced that your solution will be different. I suspect there are a lot of gay and lesbian people feel the same, and who want real marriage instead of a stopgap that might be a blind alley that will prevent equal treatment for another fifty years.