It appears that when confronted with the specter of a same-sex couple raising a baby, Focus on the Family has taken quite an “anti-life” position:
Focus on the Family, an influential Christian group that has provided crucial political support to President Bush, released a statement that criticized child rearing by same-sex couples.
“Mary Cheney’s pregnancy raises the question of what’s best for children,” the group’s director of issues analysis, Carrie Gordon Earll, said in a statement. “Just because it’s possible to conceive a child outside of the relationship of a married mother and father doesn’t mean it’s the best for the child. Love can’t replace a mom or a dad.”
I have a few questions for the FotFers on this one. Based on the statement above, I wonder if they would say that it would have been better for the child to have never been conceived than for it to be raised by a same-sex couple? If that is the case, isn’t that an incredibly hypocritical, anti-life position (using the terms of the “pro-life” movement)?
Disclaimer: I am anti-abortion but do not consider myself “pro-life,” which is a political word meant to vilify pro-abortion rights people for political gain. If you force me to apply the “pro-life” label to myself, then I would add that being truly pro-life requires me to be against the death penalty and also against war.
I’m not sure where to come down with regard to the argument that it is “best for the child” to have both a mother and a father. It all depends on whether there is something intrinsically good in having parents of opposite sexes, and I’m not sure where the science comes down on this one. I suspect there may be some value in an idealized situation, as there likely are lessons which are taught better by one gender or the other to the children. But I’m not willing to bet a whole lot of money on that suspicion, and am quite prepared to be wrong about it.
But how can anyone in their right minds NOT consider it to be better for a child to be raised in a loving gay or lesbian family than not to exist at all? And how can anyone even consider that it would be better for a child to live their life an orphan rather than be adopted by a gay or a lesbian family who will love him or her? It boggles the mind that anyone could think such things.
And yet for many in the Religious Right, who support bans on adoption for gays and lesbians, it is this outcome exactly that would be the result of those policies. More orphans.
Not exactly what I would call “family values.”
