The news now frequently explores the potential impact of gay marriage and families on society, a debate which in some ways has been running ever since the establishment of civil partnerships as it was inevitable that the legal and religious implications of a matrimonial union would clash and, by extension, the rights to have create a family.
Before I go any further, I feel it would be helpful for me to express that in "creating" a family, I do not mean the conception or birth of children, but the actual decision to have a child, whatever the circumstances of how it is born. Although I do acknowledge and value the importance that child should clearly know its heritage, I am currently in the same manner as a couple considering adoption "create" a family, or a conventional straight couple opt to consciously have a child, rather than an unplanned birth. To spin the alternative, that it is unnatural to bring a child into an environment without undergoing the actual birthing process and refute it is creating a family I feel is hypocritical, as would not one be able to make the same distinction when opting to bring a domesticated pet into a house for the first time? And do not pet owners, by and large, dote on their pets to the same degree as parents would?
I felt compelled writing something on the matter today as a friend showed me an article in the Pink Press whereby a participant in a debate, Lynette Burrows, commented in a debate that as follows:
" I want all of you need to consider the position of your mother in your
life. Would you be without her, even if she’s a slut?... Even if
she doesn’t fulfil any of the criteria of what somebody or other
believes is a good mother, she is your mother, she gave you birth, she
gave you life, and you owe it to her to vote against this rotten motion." (http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2013/01/30/lynette-burrows-children-should-be-with-straight-sluts-and-drug-addicts-rather-than-sodomites/)
I happen to watch The Jeremy Kyle Show frequently. Yesterday displayed the shocking and disgusting behaviour of one teen parent who, upon developing doubts his 3 month old son was his, took presents that he had given the child and walked in and out of the childs life until parentage was verified. The child was, rather fortunately for his sake, proven not to be related to the absentee father. Anyone watching the programme regularly, however, will know that there are regularly occuring negligent parents of both sexes taken to task on the show. The point however is that, in contrast to the comments above, broken heterosexual families are much more common and that the absence of a stable environment is in NO WAY an appropriate substitute or preferred outcome for any child. To draw a religious metaphor, just because the antiChrist would be spawn of Satan doesn't mean he would make a good Dad!
Lynnette Burrows has also gone on record to suggest that a gay parent with a child is prone to becoming a paedophile and, effectively, a present given by that parent is a precursor to rape.
I feel this is more sinister than her stance and preferences on parentage. In a desperate attempt from all such quarters for the anti-gay marriage, there is a wild-eyed hysteria to revitalise a McCarthyite irrational fear and panic about the potential threat of two men promising to each other before witnesses, be it in a Church or holy site or any form of public place, that this is the taboo that sends the whole of civilisation careening into oblivion. Forget drugs, corruption, slavery, poverty, famine, disease, terrorism and mass child labour, Gay Parentage is the foremost threat to undermining the world. I fail to see how encouraging love, however it is expressed, can equate to being anywhere near as destructive as any of these social ills to society as a whole, and to a childs life in particular. Would a child be better homeless than motherless or fatherless?
More importantly, the rallying cry against paedo/gays is no less than the dying breath of the radicals on this matter to re-establish the homophobic status quo and to drive homosexuality back into an underground movement; if they can successfully oppose and defeat gay marriage and parenthood, then they will rally to challenge civil partnerships to be declared and rendered null and void between same sexes. To play the Advocate, there is no escaping the fact that any individual may choose to become a paedophile and seek to gain access to a child- this has recently been proven with the recent Jimmy Savile scandal- but the distinction here is not the acid test that the same sex will result in child abuse, as Savile abused boys but mainly girls. By this reasoning, therefore, paedophilia cannot be introduced into the equation of gay parentage as a given as it is in no way a universal factor that a gay parent would seek to abuse a child. Personally, I'm not sure I would want to have the responsibility of bringing up a child, but I often think I would want to be a father. And with those thoughts, my first instinct is to protect the child and give him or her an upbringing equivalent to my own and plan days out and share both the triumphs and trials life has to offer and guide them to be a moral considerate person.
I would therefore conclude that I hope this current widespread debate does lead to gay families proving themselves to be more capable parents than is expected and that with it, all such irrational conservative notions of pundits advocating who should love whom will be finally and thoroughly quashed into obscurity.
