Friday, January 14, 2011

Tenth Post: Heterosexism


The article Taking the Gay Insults Personally, by Ellen Goodman, really hit home about the affects of homophobia and the church on children in today's world. I was shocked to hear that only 40% of adoption agencies place children with gay parents. This makes absolutely no sense to me, as isn't the point of being an adoption agency to find the children places to live? She mentions how 16 states are trying to ban gay adoptions. This news is just very upsetting, as I know there are studies where it has been found that the children of gay parents are completely well and fine. I have worked with people that live in placement homes and can just imagine the many kids that will not be allowed to be placed because of the hopeful couples sexuality.
                Goodman makes a very harsh point, "If gay parenting is harmful, do we take children away from their biological gay parents?". I hope that it would never come to that by fear and homophobia. If homosexuals are not allowed to be parents then who else does not meet the correct "criteria" for parenthood? I just wish that people would not judge others for who they love, especially when all claims against gay parents have been proven false.

4 comments:

  1. I'm glad you shared this article. I think it is horrible that some states are trying to ban gay adoptions. If that's not feeding the issue than I don't know what it's doing. I do know that is wrong though and for those states to say that gay parents can't be good parents like two heterosexual parents they should be slapped. What makes them different? Nothing, they'd probably be better parents.

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  2. I had to write a ten page research paper last semester on this, and I focused a lot on adoption and gay parenting. One quote that stuck with me was "Straight parents have gay kids, and gay parents have straight kids."

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  3. I will never be able to wrap my head around the idea of the nuclear family and why we try so desperately to hold on to an image of an American ideal that was never real in the 50's and isn't real today; it is about as true of an idea as the idea of chivalry in medieval times (believe me, no one was chivalrous). As long as homosexual couples can provide the love and support a child needs to grow up and have a good life so be all it takes for these adoption agencies. It is simply disgusting to me.

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  4. I agree with all of you, I don't understand why everyone has this set idea of a family, when in fact there are so many different versions of families, many which work better than that of the, as Kevin said, nuclear family.

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