To follow up on my recent post about why, on average, gay parents are better than straight parents, I want to point you toward a terrific blog post by my cousin Erika's daughter Lia. (Because I was born a Mormon and have genealogy in my genes, har har, I must point out that this specifically makes us first cousins once removed.)

Anyway, Lia's post is dedicated to answering the stupid questions she gets asked about having two moms. Here's a sample:

Q:  Did your mom become gay because your dad was a jerk?
A:  Even though that is more a question for her, I'm going to go ahead and answer: NO. Being gay is no more a choice than being straight. Every person has natural attractions. Some people are naturally attracted to the opposite sex, and some to the same sex. It's really simple. You can't just "become" or "turn" gay, it's kind of built in. Someone could get into a terrible car accident (God forbid) and become paralyzed, but as far as I know, there isn't an event that can subsequently change your sexual orientation.  [read more]
I've always been proud of my cousin Erika for the way she's lived her life and raised her kids, but now it's obviously past time to be proud of the next generation too. Just more anecdotal evidence for my original thesis.


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill
That nasty Rick Santorum is at it again. He likes to think of himself as a culture warrior, but I see him more as the kind of infectious culture that requires a good shot of penicillin. The poisonous idea he's spreading this time around is that children with fathers in prison are better off than children of gay parents.

This notion is so offensive and counter to all that is rational that it shouldn't require demolishing. But unfortunately, in our political landscape it's the kind of junk-scientific argument that people who don't know any better (and many who do) will seize on and spread. It a notion that needs inoculating against, and I can't think of any inoculation better than this video clip of Zach Wahls testifying before the Iowa House of Representatives in opposition to a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage:



Yes, Zach is only one example of a child of gay parents, but he's a powerful example, and if Santorum can misuse scientific studies to jump to unwarranted conclusions, I can generalize from this one example through a simple thought experiment to prove that gay couples are, on average, better parents than straight couples.

What I want you to think about are the barriers straight couples face in conceiving or adopting children versus the barriers gay couples face. Okay? Okay.

Straight couples have, by and large, an easy time conceiving*. They're biologically built to produce offspring. It's so easy for straight couples to conceive, in fact, that it happens unintentionally all the time. Some of these unintentional pregnancies are welcome surprises, of course, but not all of them are. Many of them result in unwanted children, and many of those end of being raised in poverty by single mothers, especially in communities where access to birth control is limited. For every child of straight parents that was brought into the world deliberately, according to plan, into a welcoming, prepared home, I think you'll have to admit that there is at least one who was not planned for and not wanted.

Gay couples, on the other hand, have a much harder time having children. Unless they're bringing kids from a previous heterosexual relationship, male couples need to either adopt or find a surrogate mother. Female couples need to adopt or find a sperm donor. Gay couples may be blocked from any of these avenues by local laws, and in any event they're going to face significant hurdles in having children. The long and short of it is, gay couples don't accidentally have kids. They have to make a conscious choice, going far, far out of their way to get it done.

I think it's only reasonable to presume, because of the difficult of clearing those hurdles, that the percentage of gay couples who end up being conscientious, responsible parents is far higher than the percentage of straight couples who become the same. It only makes sense.

Now, I'm not saying that all gay parents are better than all straight parents. But I am making the case that, as a kid, you'd have much better chances of getting a good upbringing with gay parents than straight. I think any of us would be lucky to grow up with conscientious, loving parents like Zach Wahls had, of whatever orientation. So there.


*I'm talking on average here. I don't mean to discount the difficulty some straight couples, for whatever reason, have in conceiving, nor to discount the heartache this can cause.


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill
No politician more consistently makes me yell at my radio than Rick Santorum. Every time I hear him frothing at the ass mouth, I fly into an apoplectic rage which can only be vented by abusing the poor inanimate device that channeled his spew into my house. Now that he's come within a devil's whisker of winning the Iowa caucus, it's worth reminding ourselves that—just as we must remind ourselves that Newt Gingrich is crazy, and that Mitt Romney is a shapeshifter—that Rick Santorum is evil.

I'll say it again. Santorum is evil.

It's not just his determination to further cripple America's technological future by degrading our science curricula with more creationism. It's his insistence that morality can only be learned from an ancient, irrelevant book, and that rational thought can only lead us into disaster. It's the dangerous belief that we can do whatever we damn well please to the planet and it's all fine because Jesus will be coming soon anyway to establish his kingdom and roll the earth up like a happy scroll, so we may as well just go ahead and enshrine our Christian extremism in the Constitution.

And it's not just his frothing, kneejerk hatred of homosexuality. It's his desire to use America's irrational fear of gay sex to wedge his way into your home and your bedroom, to legislate against any type of consensual sex that makes him uncomfortable and even to roll back your right to contraception.

Make no mistake. Santorum's fight against gay rights is the opening salvo in a war on all pleasure, gay, straight, sexual, or otherwise—the opening salvo in a war on privacy itself. There's a reason, after all, that it was Santorum and not some other right-wingnut who was chosen by Dan Savage as the beneficiary of a hostile redefinition of his surname. It's because Rick Santorum is evil, and is a deadly danger to far more than just gay people. If he becomes president, he'll make George Bush look like a Unitarian.

After hearing him interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition back in 2005, I was so offended by his assertions that atheism leads to immorality that I had to vent my bile to the world at large. I said then, in part, in an open rant to Santorum:

Compassion and tolerance are so much more important when life on this tiny rock is the only life we'll ever have, but your only idea of compassion is to force the 14-year-old girls you've rendered ignorant into bringing more hungry, poverty-stricken babies into the world, and your only idea of tolerance is to slither your way into one of the most powerful posts in American government and then whinge endlessly about how so-called Christians like you aren't allowed a place in the public discourse. I may not believe in God, but I do believe in evil, and you're its simpering mug.  [read more]
I worry that I might give myself a stroke yelling at the radio during the rest of this election season. We're not stupid enough here to actually elect Santorum, right? Right?

Well, if his educational standards should become the norm, we sure will be.


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill
Laura: [waving across street] Hi, Russ!

Russ: [waving] Hi! How's Ella?

Laura: Great! Where's Marty?

Russ: With his other dad. Gay joint custody! Yay!
Almost exactly five years ago, I called your attention here to a brouhaha in the small town of Kanab, Utah, over the adoption by the city council of a non-binding resolution defining the family as "one man, one woman" with a "full quiver" of children. A few months later, Laura and I visited Kanab (a town founded by Mormon polygamists), where we were pleased to see many businesses opposing the resolution with "Everyone Welcome Here!" stickers in their windows.

I wish I'd known sooner, but I've just learned that there's a documentary out about the whole controversy:

Natural Family Values

I can't vouch for the quality, not having seen it yet, but you can be sure I'm ordering a copy and will watch it with interest.

I note also that major funding for Natural Family Values was provided by the B.W. Bastian Foundation, an organization that supports issues of LGBT equality.

The B.W. Bastian in question is my former boss Bruce Bastian, co-founder of WordPerfect Corporation. I like what he's been doing with his fortune in the days since WordPerfect Ruled The Earth. Another documentary that Bastian produced is 8: The Mormon Proposition, which I watched recently. It's an investigation into how the LDS Church secretly led the successful effort to pass Proposition 8 in California, which outlawed gay marriage, and, more generally, into the hideous ways gays have been treated by the Church. It's an excellent film, and is available to stream from Netflix, but be sure to have a box of Kleenex and a punching bag handy when you watch it.

I want to say more about 8, but I'm still trying to calibrate the shotgun blast that post will be.
I busted a gut watching Marc Shaiman's short revue "Prop 8: The Musical." Among the many celebrity cameos herein, my favorite is Jack Black's, who may be my favorite Jesus since Graham Chapman didn't play him.

Oxymormons

Jun. 12th, 2006 09:42 am
I'm drowning in work—was at the office for more than 12 hours yesterday—but I wanted to surface for a moment to point out this fine 10-minute Nightline Online report on being gay and Mormon:

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2051907

The couple that are the focus of the story strike me as pretty damn brave. I hope the story has been aired on actual television.

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