by: Harmony Grant Daws Excerpt:
“Every Child Deserves a Family,” HR 3827, is now before the US House. It would remove government money from American adoption agencies if they discriminate against gay would-be parents.
Many, many Americans believe kids do best with a married mother and father. But is it worse to have homosexual parents than no parents? Would it be better, as the Latina singer said, to die on the street? That’s the way the argument is framed by advocates of the bill. They say kids could grow up happy and well-rounded with homosexual parents but instead are aging out of adoption agencies and ending up on the streets.
Would kids fare so happily? Many governments say no. In many parts of the world including Florida and Utah, gay adoption is illegal. This isn’t old-fashioned prejudice or merely religious conviction. It’s also common sense. In 2005 before the Virginia Senate, Robert H. Knight testified to the obvious, saying, “children in single-mother homes can tell you that they don't crave another mom; they want a father. Kids in single-father homes don't crave another daddy; they want a mom.”
But there are far darker consequences. This year at a symposium in Mexico, research by neuropsychiatry and behavioral science Prof. George Rekers was presented which reveals that children adopted by homosexuals suffer from greater suicidal tendencies than in the general population. Presenters said “boys and girls adopted by lesbian and homosexual couples show a greater level of stress than that which is already generated by their status as orphans or children abandoned by their biological parents.” Rekers’ study comments on the well-documented fact that homosexual unions “are significantly and substantially less stable and shorter on average compared with marriages between a man and woman.”
Robert Lerner is a social scientist and author of No Basis: What the Studies Don’t Tell Us About Same-Sex Parenting. He says the documented greater instability of homosexual couplings is traumatic for children. In addition, “there is evidence that homosexuality, male or female, is associated with adjustment problems such as depression, anxiety disorders, alcohol and drug abuse, and attempts at suicide and, of course, there is the risk for gay men of venereal disease including but not limited to AIDS. It is not too large a stretch to conclude at least tentatively that high degrees of: family instability, sexual-orientation confusion, parental emotional probl ems including higher rates of mental illness, higher risk of disease from high rates of sexual promiscuity, may make gays and lesbians less fit as parents than heterosexuals…”
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