Thursday, August 21, 2008

On Lesbian "parents"

Many of you have heard the story about the lesbian who sued a California Hospital because doctors, citing religious conviction, refused to artificially inseminate her. The story is here.

Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle published Gibbons' letter to the editor on the subject:

Right to a parent

Editor - The story "Gays get equal doctoring under ruling" (Aug. 19) plumbs the depths of narcissism. Guadalupe Benitez is deliberately violating the fundamental right of three children to a mother and a father.

Given the endless sociological studies showing the importance of a father to the proper socialization of boys, this is unconscionable. How is a boy to learn the proper and responsible way to treat a woman or children without a father's day-by-day example?

And how are Benitez's girls to learn the proper way for a woman to respond to men and to demand respect, without the day-by-day example of mom relating to dad? From TV? They'll be susceptible to the first smooth-talking "player" to come along.

Of course, many marriages collapse into divorce and the children are bereft of a mother or father. That's a bad thing, but at least it's the failure of an attempted good thing. Here, the bad thing, children without a father, is sought from the outset.

If "equality" means deliberately leaving children without a mother or father, it's time for people to start rethinking the importance of "equality."


Gibbons J. Cooney
San Francisco

2 comments:

BlackTsunami said...

Dear Mr Cooney,

what studies are you referring to regardiing fathers? I am curious.

Also, I would like to add that the studies that claim that children "do better with a mother and a father" never looked at children in same sex households.

Struggling Sinner said...

Dear Blacktsunami:

Just google "study absent fathers." You'll get 171,000results. Here's 3 from the first page:

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2007/03/teenage-delinquency-and-absent-fathers.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3724-absent-fathers-linked-to-teenage-pregnancies.html

http://www.dukemagazine.duke.edu/dukemag/issues/070803/depgaz6.html

As to your second point: a lesbian "family" is by definition a household without a father. Therfore studies, such as the three above, which shows the damage to children of growing up in a fatherless household apply to seme-sex households as well.