J.B. said:
It is funny how we are taught that our behaviour will influence our childrens behaviour.
But, for some reason when it come to homosexual behaviour some people want us to believe that this will not effect children at all.
There is a difference, J.B., between "it won't make them gay" and "it has no effect at all".
What effect might gay parents have on children? Well, the children might be more tolerant of people in general. The children, facing the possibility of their own homosexuality, might avoid the ego dystonic phase that the APA refuses to classify as an independent psychological disorder since it seems most gays go through it in response to homophobic societal conditioning.
And tolerance and calm thinking just might have its benefits. I have a friend, for instance, a bright young woman of a quarter-century, who tends toward a more acute form of self-destruction than many, though in the grand scheme it ain't so bad. Nonetheless, it's cause for concern; in terms of damage done, she's still in the "lucky" column. The emotional seed of her discontent, though, has very little to do with her lesbian mothers. Rather, it has to do with her father, who learned of his wife's sexuality at a time when the last thing in the world that would have occurred to him was that there was nothing anybody could do about this outcome. It would be nice to ask him his thoughts, but we can't. Blaming himself for his wife's lesbianism, or at least inasmuch as anybody can figure, he would put on The White Album and take his own life, leaving two young daughters to wonder what the hell just happened.
If we lived in a tolerant world, one in which homosexuals are free from harassment, and need not fear their neighbors' irrationality any more than the next person, we might find some blame for the lesbian mother. But no, a culturally-prevailing homophobia and a ridiculous standard of manhood are the satellites orbiting the nearest thing to a reason anyone can give for his passing. Just like some men marry bulimics, some marry alcoholics, some marry sluts, &c.; just like some women marry wife-beaters, just like some women marry pedophiles, just like, just like, just like--he married someone whose psychology he didn't understand well enough. Perhaps in a more open world, he would have had the cultural knowledge to recognize it. Perhaps there is no consistently reliable gaydar. Perhaps
she would have known sooner, and spared him the heartache. If, if, if.
Ob-la-di.
If we wish to draw a direct connection between the sexualities of parent and child, we may be able to establish that the daughter of a lesbian might put a skilled and nimble tongue on the list of qualities that make up a good man. See, the thing is that said daughter also might develop a revulsion for receiving oral sex. So we might point to both cases hinging a decision about oral sex--putting a focus on oral sex so that there's a decision of any given significance to be made at all--as a possible direct result of a daughter having lesbian parents. But you know, if you're religious enough and in the correct vein, there are church-approved catalogs you can order from that include devices to stop pre-pubescent children from touching their genitals, much as they are predisposed to do. There are books that recommend parents check the underwear of their teenage children to make sure they're not masturbating. That kind of parenting creates a focus, arguably unnatural, on sexuality as well. Even something less severe, like the traditional anti-sexual line given daughters: town slut, bad reputation, living in sin. In history it has gotten so bad as to drive women insane with the guilt of having felt lustful desire at all. Freud's focus on sexuality, while psychology would eventually have tapped that same vein eventually, was in part a byproduct of the conventional social antisexual mores. In the modern day, or at least into the 1990s, our American culture was such that rape survivors agonized over elements of the antisexual mores: "I'm a slut, a bad person; I've done something to deserve this. This is all my fault." How did this happen?
If we make it important, decisions will hinge on it.
Ob-la-da.
I would say it's interesting to me how we focus so much on the potential behavior of homosexuals despite the appropriate professional opinions to the other: this topic worries about issues that, for instance, the American Psychiatric Association, does not see reflected in reality. Children of gay parents do as well or better than their peers on average.
As a child of the 1980s heavy metal censorship wars, I am firm in my assertion that music does not carry such influence as to be a primary factor in a suicide. It might serve as a symbolic catalyst, a point of nihilistic catharsis, but in a violent home with substance- and spouse-abusing parents, the problem must necessarily be the music that a child is listening to?
Bearing that in mind: Britney Spears does more damage to sexuality in the United States than gay parents could ever do as an independent subclass. Parents in general--hetero- as well as homosexual--will continue to screw up their children for generations. We're at a point where we can start fixing one of those problems. Sure, there's a thousand others, but this is the one the fearful have chosen to put before the public: homophobes would hear less from and about gays if they just let it be.
I understand that the crumbling of one's political foundation is a scary experience, but this is what homophobes and traditionalists choose. The reality is that the homophobic, traditionalist argument is conceived of a mixture of exaggerations; at this point, some of those exaggerations seem programmed into people's brains, so it's hard to decide whether they're victims or predators. But I must stress that this discussion can go nowhere, whether here at Sciforums or in the culture at large, until the homophobes stop living on histrionics.
I don't know, J.B., whether your question is an intentional exaggeration or something you can't see, but the issue is only valid if we presume that the genders of our children's sexual partners is the only way in which a gay parent's homosexuality will affect the child's process of making decisions. See, that part is actually a non-issue. The American Academy of Pediatrics says there's no difference; a homophobic organization called
NARTH disagrees:
Generally, ratings of 2 through 4 are considered descriptive of bisexuality. When documenting the self-labels of the participants, they found two out of 25 children raised by lesbian mothers to be bisexual or gay. None of thechildren raised by straight single mothers self-identified as gay or bisexual. Statistically, this difference is unrelated to the sexual orientation of the mother.
However, when the Kinsey ratings are examined, there are four participants with Kinsey ratings of 2 or higher, thus indicating at least bisexual levels of same sex attraction. There is no explanation in the article for this discrepancy in the report. This suggests the need for a re-examination of the differences between groups. If one asks the question: "Does having a lesbian mother make one more likely to experience same sex attraction?" then one may reanalyze the Kinsey ratings to answer that question. Indeed, there is a statistically significant difference between the two groups when one compares ratings of same sex attraction.
NARTH.com
There is no explanation in part because none is needed. Or, at least, for psychologists and even the armchair pundits who aren't already sold to a counterintuitive model such as Christianity. (The website for the author, one "
Dr. Throckmorton" (professor of psychology, Grove City College; it should be noted that the slogan on the
GCC website is "Challenging Academics, Authentically Christian, Amazing Value") is hilarious.
There's a reason Doc Throckmorton doesn't see it: it's subtle, but intuitive. Regardless of the raw number of homo- or bi-sexual compulsions two different children might feel, child A, whose parents are gay, might give that higher rating because s/he does not reject or demonize or hide from them as often as child B, whose parents have inherently taught him/her to fear the homosexual impulse. It could be that the children in column A have just as few or many impulses as those in column B, but respond to it differently. In terms of psychology, the mindset of column B is more problematic to the self than column A.
Something I've mentioned before, but serves well to recall here, is that while even my mother thinks I'm gay, my brother won't consider the question unless I drop it on the table. I'm closeted only in 10% of my life, and I figure I'll take care of that when I get around to making a real decision about it. In the meantime, none of my friends have any pretense that I'm straight, and my rule is to generally only acknowledge it when it comes up so directly that I must. However, the curious and even creepy reality is that, for all the climbing of the walls I do, I can't tell you when I last had another man. Seriously, I can't even pin down the year for you right now because part of the interim has become blurred. But it's something like five or six years, I think. I couldn't even tell you
who right now.
And you know, I hear from all these conservatives how slutty gay men are, and it's
bullshit. Seriously, I don't go out trolling for men because it's not worth the effort. For whatever reason, I'm just not attractive to gay men. Seriously, I can remember one particularly shameful night in which I couldn't
beg a lay. I don't mind being some closet case's drunken last resort, but it just doesn't come up that often.
The larger point of that extraneous detail is that mere lack of fear does not consistently translate into action. That lack of fear must also be combined with the socially-prevailing capitalist notion that we do something, climb something, take something, &c., because it's there, that we make something because we can. Dr. Throckmorton, for instance, doesn't seem to understand this, and perhaps that's just a random circumstance, or perhaps it's caused by his predisposition for the counterintuitive. ("Exaggerated diversity", a simplistic caricature of a "diversity mindset", a failure to understand even the most basic subtleties of human internalized classification, seems to be the problem. It's the result of generalizing too many factors as dualisms instead of accounting for the subtleties of a diverse but thematically-predictable humanity.)
As a last anecdotal note, the only reason I'm closeted in 10% of my life is that I never did answer for myself the question of whether or not I was gay before I decided that it didn't matter. Perhaps that does make me unique; certainly there were certain signs, although I don't know what the outward and public signs were, but people have presumed me gay since I was in the second grade. When the issue finally came up in my life, the effect of years of homophobic insults classifying me as a faggot was to not run screaming from it. Rather, I internalized it, chewed over it for a while, the situation passed, and when it came up again a few years later, the transition was natural. And the crude intimacy of that particular occasion actually seemed familiar.
Perhaps if I wasn't so used to the idea that I was a faggot, I would have recoiled, or at least hesitated. Maybe not. But it wasn't gay parents, or pinko teachers who softened up my regard for gays. It was homophobes. In fact, to be more accurate, there was no regard for gays to soften up. It was homophobia that introduced me to the idea, that placed the association within my familiarity, that made homosexuality something I could
accept as part of me.
I suppose I should thank them; life goes on.