by Robert Oscar Lopez
{An excellent 2014 article that exposes the insipidness of gay adoption: Lopez considers himself a
“children’s advocate” in rejecting gay marriage and gay adoption. In the process he is also addressing one
of the greatest threats to the survival of the family in recent history,
especially with the global explosion of gay surrogacy and gay adoption. Some of the dark “underworld” agendas he
hints at need more attention -- publicly.
Read his own story at:
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/08/6065. -- DNI]
S.E.
Cupp is one of the latest media figures to make a pitch on gay marriage and
adoption.
As is often the case, she throws out so many canards in this cocktail of
insipidness, one
scarcely knows where to begin.
I
will say conservatives have got to move on gay marriage....[and] on gay
adoption. If abortion is the
abhorrent option – and I believe it is – then adoption by
any two loving people has got to be the better
option.
First of all, the latest estimates indicate
that somewhere between 12-15% of heterosexual couples struggle with infertility.
Currently many of these viable homes, rather than adopting, are
being steered to the artificial reproduction market and contributing to the 1.5%
(and rising) of live American births tied to in vitro technology. The alternative to abortion is obviously to get more of these viable
straight couples to avoid sperm-banking or surrogacy, and to consider adopting
instead.
Anyone who’s lost a birth parent to death, divorce, or a tragedy knows
that a kid feels the absence of a father or mother. This is square one for adoptees, orphans, children of divorce,
or children of
same-sex couples – someone was there when you were born,
and now he or she is not there. That person is
a very real human being, tied
to you by flesh and blood. A kid mourns the missing person, thinks about him, longs to reconnect with him. It hurts to be cut
off from a mother or father
. I was cut off from my dad because he divorced my lesbian mother;
I was reared by two women.
It’s not a small thing to make a kid grow up
without a father because a bunch of self-centered adults can’t get their acts
together. I’ve had enough of pundits like
S.E. Cupp being so glib about things that are incredibly painful for people who
are actually in these situations, and powerless about it
to boot. If you haven’t been raised by a gay couple and you haven’t been
adopted, it might be hard to understand how offensive it is to hear people on TV
talk about fraught transactions like adoption and same-sex parenting with such
confident nonchalance.
One of the unnoticed ironies in the debate on gay adoption has to do with
David Brock, the chieftain at Media Matters, whose subdivision Equality Matters
has gone after me more than once for my views on a
child’s right to his mother and
father. Brock spent much of his 2002 memoirs, Blinded by the Right, on the pain he felt about
being adopted. In fact, his adoption weighed on him and complicated his relationship with his
father much more than did his gayness. You would think that Brock would understand why it’s not such a
simple thing to yank
kids from a birth family and toss him into a home with one or two adults
unrelated to him. Ironic self-awareness is
apparently lacking
on the left. {And with Child Protective Services who often remove children from their true parents with out sufficient justification. - ED}
The truth is that
adoption in the United States is too expensive, and many heterosexual
couples find the costs prohibitive, so they are priced out of the market by gay
couples, who have much higher incomes and are, 100% of the time, forced to take
babies from other people since they cannot conceive them on their own. In
fact,
gay
adopters have such an insatiable desire to parlay their
high incomes into cash-for-kids that
they waged a war against Catholic Charities adoption
centers, going as far as forcing many such
agencies to shut down as punishment for not giving gay couples other people’s abandoned
children.
The dirty secret about gay
adoption is that most often when homosexual couples adopt, one of their pair is
the biological parent. Usually the child comes from a former
heterosexual relationship that broke down. So when
they “adopt,” they typically have to put a bunch of people through
the mud fight that my dear friend Janna endured: they have to drag the opposite-sex parent to family court,
strip him or her of custody, and then force the poor little kid to submit to the
parental authority of a new, sometimes creepy, person who’s sleeping with a
biological parent and very likely caused the breakup of
that child's original family.
That’s the real-life adoption story that
doesn’t make for great gay headlines. Gay adoption has unfortunate
but ineluctable ties to divorce. In fact, by
encouraging gay adoption so much, we are encouraging a whole new
generation of homewreckers – gays who want to be parents
and figure out that the cheapest way to do it is to seduce someone of the same sex
who is currently in a rocky marriage with children.
You will hear, from time to time, about
hundreds of
thousands of children in foster care who can’t find families to adopt them.
This is a favorite statistic for gay marriage gurus to throw out as a kind
of emotional Shock and Awe, a debate-stopper of the
first order, especially if you can cough up an example of special-needs children being
raised by adorable lesbians in Michigan.
There has never been a backlog of infants, so these holdouts are typically
older children who
landed in the child protective services system because of a
crisis. Many of them are kids who don’t want to placed
with gay couples, or kids whom gay couples don’t want, either. What people don’t tell you – because they don’t want to and don’t
have to, until you push them on it – is that most of those children have
living parents, or living kin networks, and the foster care system has to work
on reuniting them with their struggling birth families.
Otherwise, the government would merely be an oppressive police state
taking people’s kids away and signing them over to rich folks in exchange for
cash, as happened in dictatorships like the kind that
governed Argentina in the
1970s.
Most people don’t have the time to work
through the nuances of foster care versus adoption. Fewer still are aware of how
many people in “Adoption Land” – the community of adoptees and adoptive families
– are calling for massive reform in both foster care and
adoption. What gay activists are asking
for, on both fronts, would actually be moving in the
precisely wrong
direction; gay lobbyists want agencies to speed up the process by which foster
kids are cut off from their birth mothers and fathers and subordinated
permanently to same-sex couples eager to acquire them.
On the international adoption front, even gay
adoptive father Frank Ligtvoet has faced the painful reality that adoption
systems are overemphasizing the desire of wealthy childless families rather than
the needs of impoverished communities that are struggling to provide for their
children (in the Huffington
Post, no
less).
It took a while for brave activists like Claudia
Corrigan D’Arcy to apply the same critiques on the domestic
fronts, but now, too, people are scrutinizing domestic
adoptions and finding much to improve. (The film Philomena,
ironically, humanizes the pain of a birth mother who is pressured to give up her
infant who turns out to be gay; despite the film’s sympathy for homosexuals, the
gay movement is pushing to create more Philomenas
nowadays so they can build their rainbow
families.)
Foster care costs the public money, whereas adoption is a huge moneymaker
for certain attorneys and even, in the United Kingdom and here, for social
service agencies (see this article on
the blowback that resulted from rewarding people too handsomely for placing
foster kids in adoptive homes). So the mentality that it’s always
best to get kids out of foster care and into adoption is a mixed
bag. On the one hand, we have ample evidence that
life in foster care is hard,
and we know that many adoptive homes are great places to save suffering children
from such instability.
(I should confess: when I was fifteen, there were
problems in my home, and my father did not want to take me in, so he drove me to
a “boarding school” in Maine, where I stayed while my
home situation might improve. It was very hard to feel
abandoned, essentially, at the moment that my dad
dropped me off at the main office with a check, but would it have made sense
for some couple to adopt me
at that point? In the end I returned to my mothers’ home
and finished high school early, going to college as
a de facto emancipated
minor.)
On the other hand, we have much to worry about
when we envision rushing kids out of foster care into gay adoption. Gay
adoptive parents have proved just as capable as straight foster parents
of kidnapping, murder, abuse, rape, child pornography, and neglect involving the children they acquire.
So everything that’s painful about foster care with straight people is
also painful about gay adoption; the difference is that in a gay
adoption, the child loses forever his chance at having a mom and
dad. Whether adopters are gay or straight, it’s
not a good idea to incentivize social services agencies’ power to remove
children from troubled homes and transfer all parental equivalence to a new home
without making a good-faith effort to repair problems with the birth
family.
It sounds ominous to be in the position of
“aging out” of
foster care without having been adopted. But it’s not necessarily as bad
as it sounds. You can still maintain contact with
foster parents, but once you are emancipated, it is your choice to do that (not
something forced on you by law), and you also have the choice to
rebuild your relationship with your birth kin network, the way I rebuilt a relationship with my
father as an adult.
My mother’s lesbian partner never adopted me, and that was probably the
right decision.
Robert
Oscar Lopez edits English Manif. [See
also his own “bio”:
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/08/6065/ The article first appeared here.