by Susan Fox
When I was living in the Alps in Grenoble, France, in 1974, a group of school children – following their adult teacher -- skied off a cliff and died.
So go the lemmings behind the American Psychological Association and similar organizations around the world, which say that same-sex couples can raise mentally healthy children equally as well as opposite-sex attracted married couples.
“The research shows that same-sex couples are similar to heterosexual couples in essential ways and that they are as likely as opposite-sex couples to raise mentally healthy, well-adjusted children,” the APA said in a brief challenging the California Marriage Protection Act, Proposition 8, which was overturned in the U.S. Supreme Court June 26, 2013.
The Supreme Court overturned the marriage act -- passed by a majority of California voters to uphold marriage between one man and one woman -- but it did not impose gay marriage on the entire U.S. population. Nevertheless, the court hinted that they might do so in the future – just as they did with abortion in 1973 -- if the right case was brought before them. Wink. Wink. It's coming soon Nationwide. Cases are winding their way up to the Supreme Court and 19 states have legal same-sex marriage.
BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?
Gay “marriage” -- right or wrong -- is a critical issue for our time because marriage always comes with the right to “have”
children. I say “have” and not “bear” because for obviously reasons, gay couples cannot “bear” children. Nature has not given them this ability.
So should they be allowed to marry and “obtain” children through in-vitro fertilization, surrogate mothers, sperm donors, adoption or inherit them as often happens when a divorcee moves in with a same-sex partner?
Increasingly, it is becoming more difficult to hold the opinion that gays should not be allowed to raise children. Witness what happened to Barilla Pasta when Chairman Guido Barilla said that children should be raised by a mother and a father. Now he is busy apologizing to the gay community while his pasta is boycotted.
Yet the people who are most outspoken against gay marriage and gays raising children are the very children the gays raised. “I have heard of the supposed ‘consensus’ on the soundness of same-sex parenting from pediatricians and psychologists, but that consensus is frankly bogus” bi-sexual Robert O. Lopez told Life Site News.
SAME SEX PARENTING IS CHILD ABUSE
Lopez – raised by two lesbians – says same-sex parenting is child abuse, nothing more, nothing less. “I don’t have a silver bullet for suddenly making low-information Americans aware that all the same-sex parenting propaganda is really a cover for systematic abuse (of children). My hunch, however, is that it might be time simply to drop all the masks, and just state the uncensored truth. If you think child abuse is wrong, then say so.”
“I am not saying that same-sex parents are automatically guilty of any kind of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse to the children they raise,” he clarified, but “even the most heroic mother in the world can’t father. So to intentionally deprive any child of her mother or father, except in cases like divorce or the death of a parent, is itself a form of abuse.”
Even gay parents are beginning to question the value of same-sex families. Stay-at-home gay father Frank Ligtvoet wrote a very courageous piece June 22, 2013 in the New York Times admitting that his seven-year-old daughter experiences both love and alienation when she calls him “mother,” using her pretend voice. “She can role-play the mother-daughter relationship, but she cannot use her real voice, nor have the real thing,” he said, explaining that he can fill their home “with nannies, sisters, grandmothers and female friends, but no mothers.”
OUT FROM UNDER
Dawn Stefanowicz certainly has done all she can to raise awareness of the danger of same sex marriage and adoption. Her website, http://www.dawnstefanowicz.org ,
is a haven for children of same-sex families, a place where they can get recovery information and tell their tragic stories.
Dawn Stefanowicz's book "Out from Under" is available at Amazon.com as well as www.dawnstefanowicz.org
Stefanowicz was raised by a gay father, his succession of lovers (all dead from AIDs or suicide) and a diabetic and passive mother. In Dawn’s book, “Out From Under,” she outlines her abuse at home, how her father dressed her immodestly and used her as bait for other gays, how she was afraid to bring boyfriends home because her father would hit on them, and the confusion she suffered about her own feminine identity because her father did not value the women in his life.
She and her two brothers were subjected to incredible neglect and degradation from birth. She remembers the time that her father toyed with the idea of killing her or one of her brothers to cash in on his new insurance policy, having to clean up feces and sperm on the family room couch, never having a coat to wear in the winter, but the worse suffering for her seems to have been the emotional isolation she felt from her father, who was in her life, but unable to emotionally connect.
“What makes it so hard for a girl to grow up with a gay father is that she never gets to see him loving or honoring or protecting the women in his life.” Dawn said in her book’s conclusion. “Before therapy, being a woman was like acting out a role for me, like being a person who just happened to live in a female body.”
“Now I understand … that being a woman is part of who I am.” But the story of how she reached that point is one of the worst I’ve ever read. It’s not for weak stomachs, but I highly recommend the book.
SO WHAT HAPPENED TO THE APA?
So what happened? How did we get to this impasse? The American Psychological Association used to identify homosexuality as a mental illness, and certainly never advocated gay adoption. But gays were declared no longer sick in the late ‘70s under the leadership of APA president Dr. Nicholas Cummings. “I made the resolution that being gay
was not a mental illness, that it was characterological,” he said, that is, it is related to personality and character. But it is “absurd” to say homosexuals cannot change, he added. He has helped no less that 2,400 homosexuals reorient during his 20-year practice in San Francisco.
At the time he removed the designation of mental illness from the APA he had hoped that the group would approve a resolution to continue unbiased open research on homosexuality that would demonstrate whatever the research would demonstrate.
But that never happened. Cummings says, instead, that the APA was hijacked by the gay movement, and no scientific research was done to understand the lifestyle and its implications for families. So now all that the APA has is the simple belief that homosexual relationships are normal with nothing to back it up. No science, nothing.
Yet the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco declared, “Children raised by gay or lesbian parents are as likely as children raised by heterosexual parents to be healthy, successful, and well-adjusted. The research supporting this conclusion is accepted beyond serious debate in the field of developmental psychology.”
Not so quick! The academic studies on same-sex parenting purporting to show "no differences" are “subject to severe constraints arising from limited data" and a lack of "replicable experiments," according to two political scientists, Leon Kass and Harvey Mansfield, who also filed a brief with the Supreme Court in the Prop 8 case. Numerous other sources confirmed this. It has been very difficult getting a statistically valid study because there are few gay-led families, and these generally are highly unstable.
REGNERUS: Finally, a study with a statistically significant population of gays
A new study conducted by sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas, Austin, is getting very positive attention in this discussion because it directly compares married opposite-sex families with same-sex couples raising children, and it uses a statistically significant study population, unlike previous studies, which supposedly settled the matter.
Imagine a young girl so insecure about her father’s responsibility that she hesitated to go to the end of a weak pier with him to take a picture.
And indeed, after he had the camera shot of his "make-me-look-good" daughter -- even though he knew his 9-year-old daughter was afraid in that location -- he turned around suddenly and abandoned her at the end of the pier.
Regnerus’ study found that children of homosexual parents
1) are much more likely to have received welfare
2) have lower educational attainment
3) report less safety and security in their family of origin
4) report more ongoing “negative impact” from their family of origin
5) are more likely to suffer from depression
6) have been arrested more often
7) if they are female, have had more sexual partners – both male and female.
It has been claimed that children of homosexual parents are no more likely to be gay than children of heterosexual parents, but the Regnerus study proves that is not true. Children of homosexual fathers are nearly 3 times as likely, and children of lesbian mothers are 4 times as likely to identify themselves as something other than heterosexual.
CHILDREN IN GAY FAMILIES ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE SEXUALLY ABUSED
That makes sense because a number of researchers have pointed out that homosexual adults are more likely to report having been victims of child sexual abuse. And this study shows that being raised in a gay home means you are more likely to be sexually abused.
Unfortunately, these statistics were replicated in Dawn’s life. Her father told her his father had sodomized him at least 100 times before he ran away at age 15. His father and older brothers also repeatedly raped his sister, who was handicapped because of the chronic abuse. One of Dawn’s brothers experimented briefly with a gay relationship in high school (the boyfriend she brought home) and then the brother brought a 14-year-old girl home, and proceeded to have noisy relations with her for several days as a way of telling his father he wouldn’t be gay.
And in the accounts I read, children of gays were very confused about how to act like a “woman” or act like a “man.” Lopez complained that in high school his mannerisms were female, and he didn’t know how to change them.
Another child of a homosexual father, Suzanne Cook, says that after she and her brother moved in with her gay Dad after a divorce, her father's partner molested her brother for the next several years. "I had to deal with keeping my brother safe," Cook says. "I had to put on the role of a parent as a little kid. I felt the whole world on my shoulders."
But she herself was victimized because she was confused about her sexuality and thought the only way to avoid being “gay” was to offer sex to men. As a result her life included adultery, group sex and an abortion. She now strongly supports a ban on gay adoptions.
WHY DO SO FEW CHILDREN SPEAK OUT?
Cook feels that children of gays often avoid criticizing their parents in research projects. It is taboo for a child in this situation to tell what is actually going on in the home, so research results tend to be abnormally rosy.
Dawn Stefanowicz added, “You’re terrified. Absolutely terrified. Children who open up these family secrets are dependent on parents for everything. You carry the burden that you have to keep secrets. You learn to put on an image publicly of the happy family that is not reality. With same-sex legislation, children are further silenced. They believe there is no safe adult they can go to.”
Lopez, who also does not support gay adoptions, said, “The richest and most successful same-sex couple still cannot provide a child something that the poorest and most struggling spouses can provide: a mom and a dad.”
But that reality seems unjust to gay couples that want to have children. “Having spent forty years immersed in the gay community, I have seen how that reality triggers anger and vicious recrimination from same-sex couples, who are often tempted to bad-mouth so-called “dysfunctional” or “trashy” straight couples in order to say, “We deserve to have kids more than they do!” Lopez said.
MY FATHER IS A DONOR; MY MOTHER AN INCUBATOR
If my Father is a "donor" or my Mother is an "incubator," what does that make me?
“It’s disturbingly classist and elitist for gay men to think they can love their children unreservedly after treating their surrogate mother like an incubator, or for lesbians to think they can love their children unconditionally after treating their sperm-donor father like a tube of toothpaste,” he wrote in a comment in LifeSite News on June 3, 2013.
Yes, from a Christian perspective that is the whole problem with this debate. Human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. They have dignity and rights even from conception. But when you deliberately make a baby using a father “donor” or an incubator (surrogate) mother, you do not see the opposite sex parent as having dignity and worth as a human being. The child of that unnatural union becomes not a person, but a commodity. In the case of Dawn’s father, he kept a wife and children as a means of hiding his addiction to gay sex. In many lesbian relationships the child becomes a “trophy,” demonstrating “Hey, we’re just like everybody else.”
And that brings me to a heterosexual woman I met in San Francisco many years ago. She was a financial planner and I was a news reporter sitting together at lunch. She told me that she shared a home with a woman named “Mary.” She said they were true roommates not lovers, and chose to buy a house together because the cost of housing was too high for one person’s income.
She said she’d never found a man she wanted to marry, but she wanted children, so she had gone to a sperm bank and had her daughter 10 years before. Unfortunately, her daughter was not happy with that arrangement and desperately wanted to know who was her father? This woman told her daughter that she went to a store and got some “stuff” and conceived her, but the little girl would not accept that. So when the little girl went to school she told everyone there, “Other people have Moms and Dads, but I have a Mom and a Mary.”
"OTHER PEOPLE HAVE MOMS AND DADS, BUT I HAVE A MOM AND A MARY!"
My father died when I was four, and I was raised in a loving home by a chaste mother, who tried to be both father and mother to me. Because she modeled the feminine virtues and she was opposite-sex oriented, I had no confusion about how to be a woman. But the lack of father in the home did harm me because for much of my life I was afraid of men. I was afraid of their voices. I have an elderly cousin who is very ill right now, and he was like a surrogate father to me. His children and I were raised as brothers and sisters. But he had a deep male voice and as a young girl I was always a little afraid of him.
One day one of us kids tracked mud in the house, and he demanded we all show our shoes. His children were all shocked and so was I when he wanted to see the bottom of my shoes because I always was the well-behaved one. I remember my fear of the male father figure was quite intense in that moment, but luckily I didn’t have any mud so my reputation remained intact!
Recently, as my dear cousin lies in the nursing home, I told him he was like a father to me when I was growing up, and his wife, my cousin, said I made him very happy. But it took – what? – 50 years for me to tell him! Just because I was raised without a father?
After hearing about Dawn Stefanowicz, Blog Writer Wintery Knight raised these questions: “Have you ever considered what effect it has on a child that they have to grow up without
their mother or their father? Is that something that we should be promoting so that there is more of it? It’s a sad thing to tell adults that they cannot do whatever they want, but it’s a sadder thing to harm children just so that adults can do whatever they want. We need to choose to be careful not to harm children by making poor decisions.”
