October 22, 2005

Even Catholic Charities knows the Vatican is wrong
by Jeff Langstraat

In today's Boston Globe, Patricia Wen describes that Catholic Charities is pretty much openly defying the Vatican and facilitating the adoption of foster children by gay folks. Despite the Vatican saying that allowing gays to have children does "violence" to those children, the people at Catholic Charities don't see it that way:

Peter Meade, who is chairman of the board, said he believes that the agency should welcome same-sex couples to adopt, and not just because of a contractual requirement with DSS.

''What we do is facilitate adoptions to loving couples," he said. ''I see no evidence that any child is being harmed."

Now, it's true that's not a universal attitude, and adopting to gay folks isn't a universal practice at CC nationally. However, some people working in this field recognize that allowing gay folks adopt is actually in the best interest of children. Maybe Catholic Charities has figured out something the Vatican hasn't. Keeping children from stable homes is what does violence to them, not allowing them to be adopted into gay households. Paying for tax cuts for the wealthiest by cutting services to children is doing violence to them.

The "every child deserves and mom and a dad" folks really have no idea what children need. Their fetishization of the nuclear family clouds the fact that children need stable relationships with adults that fulfill their physical, emotional, intellectual, and social needs, and that foster their development. There are a variety of arrangements that can fulfill this. It's not the composition of the family that determines whether these needs are met, it's the content of the relationships within that family.

This is one of the maddening things about the debates over queer families and gay rights. We don't focus on any of the real issues. We know that children from stable households with enough resources to meet their physical, emotional, intellectual, and social needs tend to do better on the traditional outcome measures (not using drugs, not getting into legal trouble, staying in school and doing fairly well, social adjustment, etc.) than those in homes without those resources. This isn't only about cash, though. It's about levels of care, type of time spent together, all sorts of things. Kids who get more of their needs met do better than those who don't get those needs met. Big duh, huh?

Well, for something that seems so self-evident, it rarely makes its way into political rhetoric in which The Children are invoked. Gay marriage is a threat to children becuase marriage is, by definition the only institution in which they are supposed to be raised. It supposedly exists for that purpose (a fine bit of historical revisionism that erases the fact that women and children were simply a married man's property). We ignore the fact that pleny of nuclear families do an abominable job of raising children. Instead of asking, "How can we better meet the needs of children?" the question is, "How can we maintain this social arrangement that we define as meeting the needs of children?" We ignore that often that social arrangement isn't meeting the needs of children.

This leaves children vulnerable. It leaves potentially excellent parents out of the potential pool of homes children can be adopted into. That is undeniable. By restricting childrearing to a particular form of family (or even childbearing via assitive reproductive technologies, as a Senator in Indian recently tried to do) we neglect what children actually need in favor of fantasies surrounding a particular social formation. We do children, and marriage, no service by basing policy on these fantasies.

Let's be completely honest. Gay folks have been forming families the same ways straight folks have (surrogacy, assistive reproductive technologies, adoption, and (gasp!) sexual reproduction). And the effects of being raised in those families has shown that these kids are almost identical to their counterparts raised in straight households. Well, duh. If those families are able to provide the same kind of stability, if they're able to meet those childrens physical, intellectual, emotional, and social needs, why would there be any difference? There is no reason, other than a rigid notion of gender and fetishization of the nuclear family, that these families should be expected to produce kids significantly different than each other.

If the Helen Lovejoy's on the anti-Gay Right (and yes, the institutional Catholic Church is part of this--if not all of its members) were actually concerned about the welfare of children, they'd stop yelling about same-sex marriage and gay parenting's "effects" on children (marriage equality actually provides a legally more stable environment for the children of such couples) and start yelling about things like cuts to Head Start programs. They might actually agitate for a health care system that makes sure every child, and every adult, has adequate health care coverage (it's hard for parents to adequately provide for their children if they're driven into bankruptcy by medical bills). They might actually start adressing the economic factors producing stress on American families--especially lower income famillies who have fewer resources to devote to their children to begin with--and start to adress those by doing something about the minimum wage or ousourcing. Instead of allowing corporate advertising to leak into our schools under the guise of lesson plans (see Juliet Schor's Born to Buy for a look at corporate marketing to children), they might adequatel fun public education. But they don't care about children. The Children and The Family are nothing more than rhetorical tropes to be deployed for political advantage.

Posted by in Culture War, Family, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, Gender, Kids, Marriage, Republicans, Sexual Politics, Welfare
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