Monogamy put the parents in the background where they belong and we children were able to hold center stage. We didn't have to contend with troubled, angry parents demanding that life be richer and more rewarding for them. We blossomed and agonized and fussed over our outfits and learned how to go on a date and order pizza and do the twist and neck in the front seat of a car back before bucket seats when you could slide close together, and we started down the path toward begetting children while Mom and Dad stood like smiling, helpless mannequins in the background.
Nature is about continuation of the species -- in other words, children. Nature does not care about the emotional well-being of older people.
Under the old monogamous system, we didn't have the problem of apportioning Thanksgiving and Christmas among your mother and stepdad, your dad and his third wife, your mother-in-law and her boyfriend Hal, and your father-in-law and his boyfriend Chuck. Today, serial monogamy has stretched the extended family to the breaking point. A child can now grow up with eight or nine or 10 grandparents -- Gampa, Gammy, Goopa, Gumby, Papa, Poopsy, Goofy, Gaga and Chuck -- and need a program to keep track of the actors.
Keillor goes on to explicitly condemn, in that rumpled, avuncular way of his, gay marriage. Now, I would agree with Keillor about the social benefits of the traditional family. But as Dan Savage points out in a profane, completely over-the-top but still hard to dismiss rant, Keillor is hardly in a position to lecture others about the benefits of the traditional family:
Keillor has been married THREE TIMES. He has children from two of his marriages, children who presumably need a computer program to keep track of their step-siblings, half-siblings, and sprawling extended families, children that have to be “apportioned out on Thanksgiving and Christmas.” Okay, fine, whatever. Keillor can recognize marriage, life-long commitment, and less complicated family structures as the ideal, even if he himself has failed—failed spectacularly—to live up to that ideal himself. It might have been nice, however, if the withered old hypocrite had admitted to Salon readers that he has failed to live up to the ideals he’s espousing.
As Savage notes, Keillor made his second marriage by leaving his longtime partner to marry a Danish woman he met at a high school reunion, and then broke that marriage up by having an affair with his Danish language teacher. None of which obviates Keillor's point, which stands or falls on its merits, but it does bring to mind that heterosexuals in the last 50 years have made such a hash of traditional values when it comes to marriage and family that we lack credibility when it comes to instructing gays. I suspect that has something to do with the fact that among 18-to-25 year olds, there's a lot more acceptance of gay marriage.
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john, teen abortion, pregnancy, sexual activity, drug use and alcohol use are all down, so I'm not sure where you are getting your info. Also, there have been NO legitimate study of children raised by same sex parents. All of the studies done have been done on very small, non-representitive groups which are self selected and often have no comparison group involved. The American Sociological Review, which says it is simpathetic to the idea of homosexual couples raising kids, nevertheless concludes that "impossible to fully distinguish the impact of parent's sexual orientation on a child" because most homosexual child-rearing homes didn't start out fresh from birth, but are clouded by the dynamics of divorce, re-mating, and step-parenting issues that are problematic in themselves and separate from issues related to gender of the parents. They "disagree with those who claim that there are no differences between the children of heterosexual parents and children of lesbigay parents ... .". The specifically point to more representative research which finds that 64% of children raised by homosexual parents have considered entering a same sex relationship as compared to 17% of those raised by heterosexual parents. Once again, the reseach completely supports the benefit of the nuclear family but has nothing really useful to say on same sex parenting, but it shouldn't take a brain surgeon to see that none of our other family form experiments have gone real well for kids. Everything we do knwo indicates rough seas ahead for kids raised in same sex households.
"john, teen abortion, pregnancy, sexual activity, drug use and alcohol use are all down," Are you sure? I thought I'd read somewhere that sexual activity among teenagers is up over the past 10 years. I think that may also be true for abortion. The rate of abortions was dropping in the 90's but has increased over the past decade. "nevertheless concludes that "impossible to fully distinguish the impact of parent's sexual orientation on a child" because most homosexual child-rearing homes didn't start out fresh from birth, but are clouded by the dynamics of divorce, re-mating, and step-parenting issues" Refusing to allow gays to marry each other only continues the likelihood that more families led by gay parents would come from re-mating or divorce or whatever else, because that tells people that relationships with gay couples are not worthy in the eyes of the law. "The specifically point to more representative research which finds that 64% of children raised by homosexual parents have considered entering a same sex relationship as compared to 17% of those raised by heterosexual parents." "Considered entering". They're being raised by 2 members of the same sex. Naturally, when they see that, they think about what lies ahead for them. That doesn't mean children of gay parents are any more likely to become gay, or enter same-sex relationships.
"Everything we do knwo indicates rough seas ahead for kids raised in same sex households." If life was that terrible for children in gay households, we would know it by now. Not to mention that many of the children raised in same sex households came from terrible backgrounds. Would these children rather have a life of abuse or group homes, no real family, or a family that loathes them, or would they rather have a family with loving parents?
When people talk about how awful life must be for children of gay parents, what they don't always realize is that part of the reason it's so awful (if it is) is because society is constantly telling them what a terrible burden they face if their parents are gay.
I haven't seen any evidence that children with gay parents have a disadvantage, and I've seen far too many abusive, unhappy, loveless heterosexual relationships where they think having kids means everything will be great.
Rod Dreher quoting Dan Savage? :jawdrop:
Hey, Dan Savage and I had a very nasty round back when I was a columnist at the NYPost, and he deliberately tried to make the GOP presidential candidate Gary Bauer sick with the flu, to stop Bauer's presidential campaign. I wrote several columns trashing him for that. But after 9/11 -- literally, on 9/12 -- Dan Savage e-mailed me to say he hoped that I was okay, and that his thoughts are with all of us NYers. Which said something to me about him.
Rod, thanks for telling us about that. I'd forgotten about that nonsense he did during Gary Bauer's campaign.
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