As the cultural influence of Religious Right hate group leaders like Linda Harvey wanes, their waxing becomes ever more bitter. In a piece for the humorously named “American Thinker” website, Linda Harvey attacks a family led by lesbian moms that she has never met, and who likely would prefer never to meet her:
Former attorney general of Ohio Jim Petro and his wife have jumped on the “gay marriage” bandwagon because their daughter Corbin got hitched, so the fantasy goes, to another woman in Massachusetts.
Actually, the only “fantasy” here is Linda’s fantasy that her denial about the existence of married same-sex couples somehow trumps the reality of Corbin’s marriage.
He joins another prominent Ohio politician, U.S. Senator Ron Portman, in recently discovering human rights our forefathers missed.
They also missed the thing about how owning human beings is bad. Society evolves, Linda.
Many people don’t believe two females are an authentic marriage, no matter how sincere, but the Petros are fully committed, parentally and politically, to the so-called “freedom to marry,” as Jim said in recent newspaper editorials.
That couple’s marriage is impervious to what you believe, Linda. Sorry!
And he’s willing to endorse the effort in Ohio to deconstruct marriage, now named “Why Marriage Matters Ohio” by the Human Rights Campaign affiliate, Equality Ohio, despite the lack of Ohio citizen support in recent polls, and also despite current marriage freedom and equality for people in Ohio. People can marry someone of the opposite sex, a right suddenly discovered by many ex-homosexuals.
It’s amazing to me that the Religious Right continues to use that inane argument. I’m fully aware that so much of the reason they’ve lost this “culture war” is that their reasoning never had any merit in the first place, but you’d think that they would at least attempt to have enough self-awareness to trash arguments that leave them so open to mockery. When marriage equality comes to Ohio, Linda will be absolutely free to marry a woman if she so chooses. If she finds such a notion absurd, she might possibly begin to understand the gaping holes in her thinking.
Well, the Petros now have a grandson, and they are publicly cooing as most new grandparents do. Ecstatic or not, the reality is, this baby is actually the Petros’ adopted grandchild — no blood relation — because their daughter’s partner was the birth mother.
Oh, are adopted children lesser than blood relatives, Linda? Should we love them less? Please explain to us how “love” works in your hateful little world.
The father? At the time of this writing, no one has said. Friend? Sperm donor? Who knows?
Oh, well, not important.
Exactly, Linda. It is none of your business.
Oh, well, not important. An identifiable father in a boy’s life, offering heritage, caretaking, known genetic background, wisdom, financial support, spiritual guidance? Dispensable, just as mothers are in the minds of two men who decide to be “parents.”
Oh, the patriarchy! I’m guessing that anti-woman self-loathing is so deeply ingrained in Linda’s lifestyle that she doesn’t realize that mothers also offer heritage, caretaking, wisdom, spiritual guidance, and all the rest.
Just as children often are in the world of sexual liberals when they are not wanted.
Oh, the projection! I find the ignorance of that statement fascinating, as there is one thing about same-sex parents who choose to have a family that is true one-hundred percent of the time: when a same-sex couple starts a family, those children are wanted and planned. There are no “oops” moments. This is why it’s unfair to compare the planned children of gay couples to the children of straight couples without accounting for whether or not the straight couples’ kids were planned, because without that weighting, our kids do so much better! And all the credible research (read: not the Regnerus study that the Religious Right bought) shows that, when weighted equally, kids of gay and lesbian couples do just as well.
Linda is committed to her bigoted fantasy, though, as we will see in the next passage:
But even when they are convenient, the children and their needs and rights are really not where the story begins and ends. The adults are the central figures in a play about “making me happy according to what I think I want today.” The kids are essentially props to be trotted out, sadly, at events like “pride” parades. Yet at some point, children are not stupid and will figure this out.
Linda has absolutely no evidence for her insinuation that gay parents don’t really love their children, or consider them “props,” but she says it anyway. To me, she seems to be a mean-spirited woman with an axe to grind buried so deep that it would likely take a therapist years to diagnose and treat.
No one needs to care who the other parent is, we are told. Asking the question displays immense bigotry.
But will it be bigotry motivating the Petro grandson, who at age six or so will most likely ask that awkward question, “Who is my daddy?” He will see children at school with moms and dads, and despite the best efforts of granddad, he will figure out the “dad” figure is missing, and no one will give him a straight answer, so to speak.
Why does Linda assume that the parents would lie to the child? Perhaps Linda should consider the notion that gay and lesbian parents, as a whole, may have more integrity and commitment to the truth than the average spokesperson for the Religious Right.
Dadlessness is a significant deficit in a child’s life, but to do it deliberately, cavalierly, is close to child abuse. Every child deserves to know mom and dad. Homosexual parenting, deliberately excluding either a mom or dad, does not make sense, child-welfare-wise, and is frankly, cruel.
If any of that was true, the social science would bear that out. Even the laughable, debunked Regnerus study didn’t end up with results as dire as Linda’s prognostications.
We are supposed to buy the fiction that “love is all that matters.” But where’s the love for the child? The structure of mom and dad is a foundation that others only mimic. Yes, it’s a fact that moms and dads today too often do not stay together, but this doesn’t justify same sex marriage or parenting. Just because the Mercedes has a cracked windshield, does not mean we also take a sledge hammer to the hood.
But yet again, the social science shows that gay and lesbian parents, committed to each other, are just as good as straight parents. There is no “cracked windshield” here, and Linda’s belief that gay and lesbian parents don’t love their children is almost too horrid to dignify with a response. I hate to make the comparison cheaply, but the words she writes and speaks about LGBT people bring the phrase “blood libel” to mind.
Your children are learning in the classroom that husband or wife, a mom or dad for their children, may be optional in their own futures.While sometimes an opposing viewpoint is allowed, in states where same sex marriage is legalized, the balance disappears. Marriage change puts the “gay” school agenda on steroids.
The insidious thing about same sex marriage is that it quickly becomes a weapon to force cultural change on everyone and to mess with the minds of vulnerable kids as early as possible. Little Logan will learn when he’s seven that some people are born to be “gay” (despite a lack of science supporting this contention), that there’s nothing anyone can do, and when he grows up, he will date and marry a girl or it might be a boy, and he’s not supposed to stress out over the uncertainty of this emotional quicksand.
ALL the science supports the contention that sexual orientation is determined early, before birth, and that there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Moreover, the idea that a child could grow up to marry either a woman or a man is reality, and Linda has no say in it. She is doing nothing less than arguing against the idea that water is wet at this point.
At age seven, he really dislikes girls, so does that mean he’s “gay”?
Nope, if he thinks that girls have cooties at age seven, he’s probably straight. No one is pressuring that seven year-old to declare his sexual orientation. Gay and lesbian parents (and the majority of Americans who are on our side) believe that the child shouldn’t be pressured to conform to anyone‘s reality but their own. We on the side of goodness, fairness, equality and authentic morality believe that the child should be able to grow up to be who he or she is meant to be. People like Linda are the ones who are trying to impose their own discredited cultural norms on other people, which leads to depression and deep wounding for LGBT kids who grow up under the hateful strictures of Christian Right thinking.
Logan doesn’t know his future. Experimenting with the formative years like this is a recipe for deeply insecure children at a very basic level. Such insecurities won’t be disclosed by many of them, because they won’t know what “normal” is. They will have been taught that questioning the narrative means you are a hateful, horrible person, a “bully.”
But free-floating guilt and denial of basic reality are the end products of school activism on homosexual “rights.” Using the issue of bullying in school lessons, the ground is sowed with seeds of real and imagined mistreatment of past and future homosexuals. Simply punishing poor conduct of actual bullies isn’t enough for the activists. Only re-education programs suffice so all children will welcome homosexuality.
The only thing kids are being taught is that some people are gay, and that that is okay and normal. Science and reality tell us that that is true. Allowing kids to grow up understanding this doesn’t sow seeds of insecurity and confusion, but the exact opposite. It lets kids who will become straight adults grow up without irrational hatred for LGBT people, and it lets kids who will be LGBT adults grow up without self-loathing, self-destructive behavior and fear.
Linda’s meandering diatribe finally ceases here:
This propaganda, using children as guinea pigs, is the rotten fruit of same sex marriage as it has played out in Massachusetts and other parts of the liberal Northeast and West Coast and it may come to Ohio unless voters get wise. The daughters of future quasi-liberal politicians in Ohio and elsewhere will hear in school only one approved opinion, and it’s not one that reveals the harmful truth about homosexual conduct, gender change chaos, and — oh, yes — prospective parenting options.
Because if same sex relationships are all about love, why are people bringing a third, unknown party into a relationship to be the “father” or “mother” behind the curtain? When this kind of love means you can never conceive a new human with the person you love, isn’t this is a big clue that things were never supposed to be this way?
It’s the ancient story. Humans insist on writing adisjointed tale, no matter what it costs us or our precious children. Yet some will nod approvingly and call this “progress.”
There is no rotten fruit except that which exists in Linda’s imagination. She is fighting against kids being taught the actual truth, as opposed to The Truth According To Linda Harvey. Moreover, I don’t understand why she thinks that gays and lesbians are somehow secretive about how we grow our families, and I really don’t understand why she thinks that the ability to conceive is a necessary part of committed, undying love between two consenting adults. I almost feel sorry for her, as that suggests that she really doesn’t know what real, committed, equal love looks or feels like.
Or maybe she does know. Perhaps, on some deep level, she does know that happy gay and lesbian couples are every bit as devoted to each other as happy straight couples, and happy gay and lesbian parents are every bit as devoted to their children as happy straight parents, and it makes her angry because there is not a damn thing she can do about it.
The good news is that as equality spreads, happy, committed, loving gay and lesbian parents are becoming more and more visible to society at large, and the day will come when we don’t need to spend an hour, as I just did, correcting the lies and hatred being spread by people like Linda Harvey, as there will be no audience left for their vitriol.
That will be a good day.
