Love 2 Lead Question 15

Question - Should Gay Couples Be Allowed To Adopt?

My answer - The needs of the child outweigh the rights of the potential parents.

Let’s get this clear from the outset. I’m not a homophobe although I’m sure there will be people who will disagree. Once again, I have to speak as I feel which will no doubt ruffle a few feathers. I’m not out to upset anyone but the question has been asked.

I do not think it is right for gay couple to adopt. There, I’ve said it. Now for my reasons.

Initially it won’t make any difference to the child but how will things be for them once they start school? Chances are once the other kids understands about their parents they will use it as an excuse to pick on them. Kids can be cruel and anything that makes one kid especially different from the rest is likely to be a trigger for teasing or worse.

I never fitted in at school because my parents thought that pop music was bad for us kids so we were fed a diet of classical music. Nothing wrong with the classics but it meant I couldn’t join in with the conversations my piers were having and so I became branded as being different. That led to teasing and later relatively mild bullying.

If something so minor can prevent a child fitting in how much more would having gay parents cause problems? I accept that this, with time and it becoming more common, would eventually be less of an issue but why should any kid be placed in that position? Do we really want our children to play the martyr now so that future kids will accept gay parents as normal? We must remember that the babies placed with gay couple won’t have had any say in the matter.

My other reason is more old fashioned. All primates, including humans, learn their parenting skills from their parents. In a similar way we also learn our family and relationship skills from our parents too. If we agree that you are either born heterosexual or homosexual how will this effect the child’s understanding of how to make a relationship work if the child is heterosexual?

You could argue that the same applies to heterosexual couples who go through a divorce when the kids are small or that have a violent relationship. Children do go on to repeat the lives of their parents in a high number of cases. Some situations, such as a break-up of a marriage, cannot always be avoided but when a situation can be avoided I think we owe it to the children to do just that. For this reason it’s not just gay couple who I feel should not adopt but single people as well. The adoptive family should be as near normal as it is reasonable to expect even though, I accept, there is no guarantee it will stay that way.

I do understand that some gay couples desire children just as much as non gay couples but the needs of the children do need to be put first even though this may be a very hard thing to do.