one got to me. The Washington Times, in an article titled
“Growing
Up Confused,” reported Sunday on the memoir “Out From Under:
The Impact of Homosexual Parenting,” by Dawn Stefanowicz.
Stefanowicz is the daughter of a gay father who was married to her
mother. She says that because of her father’s sexual orientation,
she “experienced insecurity, depression, anxiousness, sleeplessness
and sexuality confusion, and her psychological well-being and peer
relationships were affected.”
Stefanowicz has been
speaking up for the ultra-right for several years now. The book
itself reads like a text for the Family Research Council, whose
vice president for policy, Peter Sprigg says “It’s a very moving,
brutally honest, first-person account of what it is like to grow up
with a homosexual parent.” Perhaps one of them, but let’s not
overgeneralize here.
The Washington Times relates:
[Stefanowicz] “thinks that monogamy is not typical in
gay relationships. . . . Mrs. Stefanowicz’s father, president and
owner of his own executive recruiting service, wanted the normality
he thought marriage could bring, using it as a cover for his
homosexual lifestyle, she said. He brought her along to gay meeting
spots and porn shops, though she was still a child, and introduced
her to explicit sexual practices and exposed her to the health
risks of the gay lifestyle, she said.
Ugh. The article uses Stefanowicz’s individual experience to give
voice to the likes of Sprigg and Arthur Goldberg, secretary for the
National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality
(NARTH). The paper does quote Steve Ralls, director of
communications for PFLAG, who says:
There is no evidence in the research to support a
general claim that same-sex couples cannot raise children. In fact,
exactly the opposite is true. There are many children who grow up
in heterosexual households who are abused and unhappy. We won’t use
those cases to say that heterosexual parents wouldn’t make good
parents. We shouldn’t apply that here.
Still, the overall article is very skewed towards the right, not
surprising to those who know the paper. A balanced article on the
children of LGBT parents should have quoted from the many respected
professional
organizations who have studied the matter. It could have cited
Abigail Garner’s
Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is
daughter of gay dads. What I like best about Garner’s work is that
while her message is unequivocal in its support of LGBT parents, it
does not gloss over the difficulties our children may face in
coming out about their families to friends, dealing with an initial
feeling of betrayal if a parent comes out later in life, and the
like. These are problems generated by society, however, not by the
fact of the parent’s sexual orientation.
The Washington Times needs to realize that by publishing
such a biased article, it distorts the truth about the majority of
LGBT parents. The harm of that is not only to us, but also to our
children.