Robert Oscar Lopez, the clearly self-loathing bisexual man groups like NOM like to trot out when they’re working their “See, here is an LGBT person who agrees with us!” angle, has a new piece up where he seems to be wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’ that the current kids of gay and lesbian parents will be damaged and abused so that one day, everybody will see he was right all along. Lopez had a bad experience growing up with same-sex parents, and he deflects his pain onto the entire LGBT community, much as “ex-gay” spokesmodels blame all their poor choices and experiences on their sexuality. Of course, on some level, he must know that his poor upbringing is no more a model of gay parenting than the myriad stories of abuse of children at the hands of traditional-married people are a model of straight parenting. He also clearly disbelieves all the credible science (Regnerus doesn’t count, because I said credible and science) that shows that kids of committed same-sex couples do just as well as kids of committed opposite-sex couples, as he is tying his hopes and dreams to the idea that one day, there will be a flood of people ready to turn against LGBT people and parenting.
His entire premise starts out flawed, of course:
In debates about parenting there are countless times we hear of people being called “antigay” for stating that children deserve a mom and dad; we also hear that disregarding such a right is “the right side of history,” with history favoring such growing acceptance of gays and lesbians that motherhood and fatherhood will be made optional to please the gay and lesbian lobby.
I’m not so sure. See what we hear about today’s situation, regarding abortion:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2542654Almost two thirds of Americans believe abortion is morally wrong, with 53% now believing that life begins at conception. Over 80% of Americans support parental notification laws for underage females seeking abortions.
The shift in public feeling about abortion took shape gradually from the mid 1990s until today. Part of the shift, I believe, comes from women who have had abortions themselves, and later waited too long to have children. Their emotional distress is enough to make many who know them reconsider what seemed, in the early 1990s, a straightforward position on women’s rights.
While there is some support for certain restrictions on abortion, mostly engendered by right-wing disinformation campaigns, support for reproductive rights and Roe v. Wade is actually at an all time high. The idea that the younger generations are turning in favor of giving control of their bodies to old white men may have entered the wingnut canon, but it’s not true.
His premise is that, because wingnuts believe that the younger generations are itching to overturn Roe, so, too, will a new generation rise up to join him in self-loathing anti-gay land:
Right now, for same-sex parenting, it seems very bleak to someone like me. There seems to be an overwhelming tidal wave of support for gay parenting arrangements, from divorce with custody going to the gay ex-spouse, to gay adoption, to gestational surrogacy. I cannot lie–I feel extremely alone and isolated sometimes advocating on this issue, because so few children of same-sex couples are willing to offer critical opinions about gay parenting.
Because maybe the science is true, Robert, and kids and young adults aren’t so stupid as to think that their parents’ sexual orientations really played a role in whether or not they had a good home life. I certainly don’t attribute any of the failures or successes in my upbringing to the fact that my Mom and Dad are each into the opposite sex.
The gay lobby moves swiftly and totally, destroying any dissenters in their path.
Professional victim gets paid for being professional victim.
But the flame is flickering, it has not gone out. I ask readers to take heart in the movement in opinion on adoption. As time goes on, there will be many gay couples raising children who will themselves regret the divorces, fraught adoption decisions, and third-party reproduction contracts that have made parenting possible for them.
Wut is he talking about? And where is the evidence that any adoption undertaken by a same-sex couple is “fraught?” In reality, one of the reasons the children of gays and lesbians tend to do so well is that, more and more, the children raised by couples in the LGBT community are 100% wanted and planned for. I say “more and more” because, as society more fully embraces LGBT people, the number of closet cases entering sham marriages, which often result in divorce, is going down.
More children will come of age and speak more freely. Yes, some will remain devoted to defending their guardians’ choices, while others will slowly understand what I have been saying.
He hopes. Oh God, he hopes! “Please, please, please, let those gay and lesbian couples abuse their kids!,” Lopez seems to be praying. How sick.
Communities will start to feel the loss of the erased mothers and fathers. Millions will be searching for who their mothers and fathers were, or agitating against gay guardians to have more access to their birth parents. Like the transracial adoptees brought from Asia in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the generation of same-sex-household kids will have time for more complex discussion.
Is he saying that people shouldn’t adopt outside their race?
I believe that whatever happens down the road, it will look somewhat like America’s reversal on abortion.
Which hasn’t happened outside Wingnut Imagination Land.
If in the future, same-sex marriage is legalized and same-sex parenting is held in check by ethical safeguards, I won’t complain.
Yes you will. But what if the science and the current, growing body of research showing that same-sex couples are capable of creative, loving, awesome families continues to be true (which is far more likely than anything Lopez is begging for) and the adult children of today’s same-sex parents have nothing worse to say than the adult children of great, straight parents? Will you have spent your life wisely, Lopez?
