Thirty years of research and every mainstream child welfare organization have said time and again that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender parents are raising happy and healthy children.
Focus On The Family says that’s not good enough.
Because they are convinced that no one can turn out to be a happy, well adjusted adult unless one conforms to their narrow definition of morality and citizenship, raising happy, healthy children doesn’t make you a good parent in their eyes.
You have to raise children that they will approve of:
“We already know that girls who grow up without fathers are more likely to be sexually adventurous, and it has a lot to do with being fatherless,” Stanton explained. “Two lesbians can be the most loving moms in the world, but they can’t give a girl the kind of positive attention and other-gendered affirmation she needs from a dad.”
While girls raised by lesbians tend to be much more sexually experimental than their peers, boys tend to be more sexually reticent.
“Boys without male role models tend to be either overly super-macho, trying to see how many girls they can get, or wallflowers,” Stanton said. “They’re not necessarily more sexually virtuous than boys raised by heterosexual parents, but they haven’t developed emotionally and psychologically in the same ways. It’s not that they don’t want to go in the water — they’re not inclined to go anywhere near the water.”
None of the above statements has been proven. Zack Ford at Think Progress takes them to task:
Not only is he regurgitating the debunked “fatherless” meme, he’s relying on a self-reinforcing argument. Stanton opposes same-sex couples having families because it might lead to more same-sex couples having families, and somehow that’s a “problem.” He seems to think it’s downright shocking that a child might grow up exposed to a loving and committed same-sex couple and actually feel comfortable considering such a possibility for herself, even though she’s no more likely to be gay than a child of opposite-sex parents. In fact, Stanton is contributing to the stigma that is actually the only thing that sets apart the life experiences of children raised by same-sex couples.
Focus On The Family’s tagline is “helping families thrive.”
We have living evidence that our families are thriving, despite organizations like FOTF working every day to make life harder for us. Fact is, there are 2 million children in the United States being raised by LGBT parents, and these families are not going away.
Every single day, in every state, these parents are successfully raising their children to love their country, stand up for their friends, treat others the way they want to be treated, and tell the truth.
The next generation is going to blow the lies about their families out of the water.