Wanting a Mom and a Dad: Children of Same-Sex Couples — Eric Metaxas

The Supreme Court is deciding whether or not to redefine marriage—and we’re hearing a lot of claims about how well children do when they’re reared by homosexual couples. Sad to say, some of those claims are being made to the Supremes—and they are completely false.

One man who knows a little about this first-hand is Dr. Robert Oscar Lopez, who teaches at California State University at Northridge. Lopez, who says he’s bi-sexual, was raised by his lesbian mother and her partner. And while he’s for civil unions, he’s against redefining marriage.

At “Public Discourse,” a website run by the Witherspoon Institute, Lopez writes of the great professional risk he took when he and Doug Mainwaring filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court. Risky, because Lopez knows how vicious homosexual activists can sometimes be when anyone disputes their claims. Lopez is speaking out in part because he was asked to do so by others raised by same-sex partners, but who fear the repercussions of going public with their feelings.

Contrary to what the gay lobby claims, Lopez writes, children raised by same-sex parents “deeply feel the loss of a father or mother, no matter how much we love our gay parents.”

These children know they are “powerless to stop the decision to deprive them of a father or mother,” he adds. And this decision comes with serious and often permanent consequences. For instance, they “feel disconnected from the gender cues of people around them,” and long for a role model of the opposite sex.

While they love the people who raised them, they experience anger at their decision to deprive them of one or both biological parents—and “shame or guilt for resenting their loving parents.”

The so-called “consensus” by psychologists and pediatricians on the soundness of same-sex parenting is, Lopez writes, “frankly bogus.” The truth is, there is no data to support that assertion.

Instead, as political scientists Leon Kass of the University of Chicago and Harvey Mansfield of Harvard University note, “Claims that science provides support for constitutionalizing a right to same-sex marriage must rest necessarily on ideology”—and “ideology is not science.”

By contrast, we have a great deal of research proving that the best possible home for children is one led by a married mother and father. Two “fathers” and two “mothers” cannot begin to compare, because, as Professor David Popenoe of Rutgers University explains, “The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary—culturally and biologically—for the optimal development of a human being.”

This is more evidence that God’s plan for families—children reared by a married father and mother—is the best one. And it’s why, —no matter how well-meaning homosexual couples may be—it is “unconscionable” as Lopez puts it, “to deliberately force a state of deprivation on innocent children.”

If the Supreme Court decides to ignore biological and psychological reality and redefines marriage to include homosexual couples, adoption agencies will be under even greater pressure to place children with same-sex couples. What’s best for the child—a married mother and father—will no longer matter. And more children will be left, as Lopez writes, “to clean up the mess left behind by the sexual revolution.”