Tag Archives: Supreme Court

Children of Same-Sex Marriage – Public Discourse, Witherspoon Institute

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Justice Kennedy’s 40,000 Children

by   —  May 2nd, 2013

During the oral arguments about Proposition 8, Justice Anthony Kennedy referred to children being raised by same-sex couples. Since I was one of those children—from ages 2-19, I was raised by a lesbian mother with the help of her partner—I was curious to see what he would say.

I also eagerly anticipated what he would say because I had taken great professional and social risk to file an amicus brief with Doug Mainwaring (who is gay and opposes gay marriage), in which we explained that children deeply feel the loss of a father or mother, no matter how much we love our gay parents or how much they love us. Children feel the loss keenly because they are powerless to stop the decision to deprive them of a father or mother, and the absence of a male or female parent will likely be irreversible for them.

Over the last year I’ve been in frequent contact with adults who were raised by parents in same-sex partnerships. They are terrified of speaking publicly about their feelings, so several have asked me (since I am already out of the closet, so to speak) to give voice to their concerns.

I cannot speak for all children of same-sex couples, but I speak for quite a few of them, especially those who have been brushed aside in the so-called “social science research” on same-sex parenting.

Those who contacted me all professed gratitude and love for the people who raised them, which is why it is so difficult for them to express their reservations about same-sex parenting publicly.

Still, they described emotional hardships that came from lacking a mom or a dad. To give a few examples: they feel disconnected from the gender cues of people around them, feel intermittent anger at their “parents” for having deprived them of one biological parent (or, in some cases, both biological parents), wish they had had a role model of the opposite sex, and feel shame or guilt for resenting their loving parents for forcing them into a lifelong situation lacking a parent of one sex.

I have heard of the supposed “consensus” on the soundness of same-sex parenting from pediatricians and psychologists, but that consensus is franklybogus.

Pediatricians are supposed to make sure kids don’t get ringworm or skip out on vaccinations—nobody I know doubts that same-sex couples are able to tend to such basic childcare needs.

Psychologists come from the same field that used to have a “consensus” that homosexuality was a mental disorder. Neither field is equipped to answer the deeper existential dilemmas of legally removing fatherhood or motherhood as a human principle, which is what total “marriage equality” would entail.

I support same-sex civil unions and foster care, but I have always resisted the idea that government should encourage same-sex couples to imagine that their partnerships are indistinguishable from actual marriages. Such a self-definition for gays would be based on a lie, and anything based on a lie will backfire.

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. 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!”

But I am here to say no, having a mom and a dad is a precious value in its own right and not something that can be overridden, even if a gay couple has lots of money, can send a kid to the best schools, and raises the kid to be an Eagle Scout.

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.

It’s also racist and condescending for same-sex couples to think they can strong-arm adoption centers into giving them orphans by wielding financial or political clout. An orphan in Asia or in an American inner city has been entrusted to adoption authorities to make the best decision for the child’s life, not to meet a market demand for same-sex couples wanting children. Whatever trauma caused them to be orphans shouldn’t be compounded with the stress of being adopted into a same-sex partnership.

Lastly, it’s harmful to everyone if gay men and lesbians in mixed-orientation marriages with children file for divorce so they can enter same-sex couplings and raise their children with a new homosexual partner while kicking aside the other biological parent. Kids generally want their mom and dad to stop fighting, put aside their differences, and stay together, even if one of them is gay.

In my family’s case, my mother was divorced and she made the best decision given our circumstances. Had she set out to create a same-sex parenting family in a premeditated fashion, I would probably not feel at peace with her memory, because I would know that my lack of a strong father figure during childhood did not result from an accident of life history, but rather from her own careless desire to have her cake and eat it too. I am blessed not to contend with such a traumatic thought about my own mother. I love her because I know she did everything possible to give me a good life. Still, what was best in our specific circumstances was a state of deprivation that it is unconscionable to force on innocent children if it’s not absolutely necessary.

Justice Kennedy alluded to the views of children being raised by same-sex couples as if our desires and concerns are identical to and uncritical of the decisions made by our parents. The reality is far more complicated than that.

Putting aside all the historical analogies to civil rights and the sentimental platitudes about love, the fact is that same-sex parenting suffers from insurmountable logistical problems for which children pay the steepest lifelong price.

Whether it’s by surrogacy, insemination, divorce, or commercialized adoption, moral hazards abound for same-sex couples who insist on replicating a heterosexual model of parenthood. The children thrown into the middle of these moral hazards are well aware of their parents’ role in creating a stressful and emotionally complicated life for kids, which alienates them from cultural traditions like Father’s Day and Mother’s Day, and places them in the unenviable position of being called “homophobes” if they simply suffer the natural stress that their parents foisted on them—and admit to it.

Same-sex marriage would pose no problems for me if it were simply about couples being together. As a bisexual I get that. But unfortunately the LGBT movement decided that its validation by others requires a redefinition of “marriage” to include same-sex partnerships. So here we are, stuck having to encourage problematic lives for children in order to affirm same-sex couples the way the movement demands.

That’s why I am for civil unions but not for redefining marriage. But I suppose I don’t count—I am no doctor, judge, or television commentator, just a kid who had to clean up the mess left behind by the sexual revolution.

Robert Oscar Lopez, PhD, is the author of Johnson Park and editor of the websiteEnglish Manif: A Franco-American Flashpoint on Gay Rights Debates. He is launching CREFA, or Children’s Rights and Ethical Family Alternatives, a new project to discuss the ethics of LGBT family-building, with Doug Mainwaring.

During oral arguments on Prop 8, Justice Kennedy alluded to the views of children of same-sex couples as if their desires and concerns are identical to and uncritical of their parents’ decisions. But the reality is far more complicated.

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

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

Wanting a Mom and a Dad: Children of Same-Sex Couples
By: Eric Metaxas | Published: June 3, 2013 7:00 AM

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 faNewsletter_Gen_180x180_Bther—will no longer matter. And more children will be left, as Lopez writes, “to clean up the mess left behind by the sexual revolution.”

New Republic: Affirmative Action

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New Republic: Affirmative Action

Race-Based Affirmative Action Makes Things Worse, Not Better

The Supreme Court made clear last month that it would keep affirmative action racial preferences on the front burner of the national conversation for at least the next year. This autumn, the Court will review a federal appeals court’s 8-7 decision striking down a 2006 Michigan voter initiative that banned racial preferences in state university admissions. Meanwhile, the justices are drafting their opinions in a reverse-discrimination lawsuit by a disappointed white applicant to the University of Texas that was argued last October. That decision, the first major constitutional challenge to racial preferences since 2003, is expected by June 28.

With four ardent conservative opponents of racial preferences likely to be joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy—who has never upheld a racial preference—the Court seems likely to strike down the Texas program but not likely to outlaw racial preferences entirely. The Court also seems likely to reverse the federal appeals court decision in Michigan and uphold the state’s 2006 initiative banning racial preferences in state programs. (The issue there is not whether it’s unconstitutional for universities to use racial preferences excessively, but whether it’s unconstitutional for voters to prohibit them entirely.)

The big question, however, is whether the Court will rule so narrowly that its decisions will have little impact outside Texas and Michigan, or will, for the first time, impose serious restrictions on the very large racial preferences that are routine at almost all of the nation’s selective universities. Will these cases mean a dramatic overhaul, and shrinkage, of race-based affirmative action as we know it?

The question has never been more important or more complicated. A rapidly growing body of social science evidence shows that admissions preferences cause great harm to many of the supposed beneficiaries, and that such racial preferences make socio-economic inequality worse, not better. Racial preferences typically produce freshman classes with big SAT and GPA gaps among black, Hispanic, white, and Asian students. At the University of Texas, for example, the black-Asian mean SAT gaps have run above 450 points out of a total possible score of 2400. And studies suggest that many colleges systematically discriminate against high-achieving Asians, as they once did to Jews, to hold down their admission numbers.

STUDENTS ARE MUCH MORE LIKELY TO FORM FRIENDSHIPS IN COLLEGE WITH OTHER STUDENTS WHOSE LEVEL OF ACADEMIC PREPARATION IS SIMILAR TO THEIR OWN.

The two pending cases, and others, have focused on universities’ discrimination against whites and Asians, but the justices must be aware of recent research that casts doubt on the traditional presumption that racial preferences benefit recipients. For example, studies have shown that disproportionate percentages of preferentially admitted black freshmen who aspire to major in science and other tough subjects are forced by bad grades to move to softer majors—and that they would be more likely to achieve their ambitions had they gone to less elite schools for which they were better qualified.1

As for the benefits to white students, I don’t doubt that exposure to people of different races improves everyone’s education if it occurs naturally. But engineering diversity through racial preferences aggravates racial stereotypes and resentments and often leads to self-segregation and social isolation, as detailed in Russell Nieli’s powerful 2012 book, Wounds That Will Not Heal. Another study by Peter Arcidiacono and colleagues shows that students are much more likely to form friendships in college with other students whose level of academic preparation is similar to their own.

Social science evidence now shows that while passed-over whites and Asians suffer (modestly and temporarily, in my view) from race-based affirmative action, the more seriously damaged victims of large racial preferences are the many good black and Hispanic students who are doomed to academic struggle, and damaged self-confidence, when put in direct competition with academically much-better-qualified students. Universities misleadingly assure these students that they will do well, while ignoring and seeking to suppress evidence showing the enormous size of their preferences and poor academic results. No university of which I am aware, for example, tells its racial-preference recruits that more than half of black students end up in the bottom twenty percent of their college classes and the bottom ten percent of their law school classes.2 Racial preferences as used today pervert a once-egalitarian cause by pushing many fairly affluent black and Hispanic students ahead of working-class and poor Asians and whites. So addicted are the universities to racial preferences, and so fearful are most politicians of being trashed as racists, that the Supreme Court may be the only institution that could restore the original ideals of affirmative action.

I hope that in the Texas case, or perhaps in a future cases, the justices will order two modest reforms: order schools to disclose data showing the size, operation, and effects on academic performance of their racial preferences; and mandate that universities stop preferring blacks and Hispanics over better-qualified Asians and whites who are also less well-off.3 The first reform would equip admitted applicants and policymakers alike to make better-informed decisions. The second would provide healthy incentives for selective schools both to enroll more outstanding working-class and poor students and to reduce the mismatch problem.

It goes without saying that educational gaps are the biggest reason for the racial and socioeconomic inequality that cause such deep wounds in our social fabric. But the evidence shows that racial preferences make things worse, not better, by setting up many of our best black and Hispanic students for academic frustration, by neglecting our most promising working-class and low-income students, and by papering over the real problem.

The real problem is the huge racial gap in early academic achievement symbolized by the undisputed fact that the average black twelfth grader has acquired no more academic learning than the average white eighth grader. The real solution is to improve the education received by these children from birth through high school. Every bit of energy that is now being spent on sustaining a failed system of racial admissions preferences would be far better invested in teaching kids enough to make them academically competitive when they arrive at college.

Stuart Taylor, Jr., a Washington writer, is the coauthor with Richard Sander, a UCLA law professor, of Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It. They also filed a brief in the University of Texas case.