Wednesday, April 24, 2002
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Wednesday, April 24, 2002 |
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Stop pushing anti-gay agenda in the paper The opposite of "the gay agenda" must be "the anti-gay agenda." Just two months ago The Citizen published a guest column by Rev. Louis Sheldon on Feb. 13 that had a definite anti-gay slant. In [the April 17] Citizen, I read another anti-gay guest column written by Mr. Bill Maier from the Focus on the Family group. I have come to the regrettable conclusion that this must reflect the opinion of the Citizen's editorial staff. When you have a child that is gay that you love with all your heart, it becomes impossible to sit passively while seemingly respectable people write articles that stereotype one group so negatively. While I do not mind a healthy debate on this subject, in fact that is what is seriously lacking about this subject. Mr. Maier is guilty of the same sins he claims for his opponents. He claims the studies on gay adoptions suffer from numerous methodological problems, including inadequate sample size, biased sample selection, lack of proper control groups and the failure to account for confounding variables. To prove his point that gays are bad parents, he lists two books about children who suffered at the hands of two obviously mentally ill homosexual parents. His sample size is two and if that isn't biased sampling, I don't know what is. It also seems that the children's parents are their natural parents and not adoptive parents at all. I don't know of anyone that has claimed that homosexuals, as a group, don't have some mentally unstable people within that group. What group, of any size, do you know that could make that outlandish claim? However, Mr. Maier wants you to draw the conclusion that mentally unstable homosexuals would be the norm as adoptive parents. Being the adoptive parent of my second son, I know what scrutiny Patti and I had to endure by the social workers to prove our ability to provide a loving home. Whether gay or straight, adoptive parents are required to prove that they can provide a stable and loving environment for the adoptive child. While I believe that a mother and a father, providing that both are mentally stable, would be the best condition for an adopted child in a perfect world, we must confess that we don't live in a perfect world. There are many children today that lack for a loving home because no one is willing to take them. Therefore, don't automatically deem gays and lesbians as unfit to be adoptive parents before they have been given the chance to prove themselves. In the future, please refrain from pushing your "anti-gay agenda." Then I won't feel compelled to write you a letter in defense of my son and all the other moral, hard working, civic-minded gays and lesbians out there. Surely, you must realize that most of your readers are intelligent and fair-minded people that no longer judge homosexuals by those outdated prejudices of the past. They judge people by their character and the goodness in their hearts. Jeff Ellis Fayetteville www.familyacceptance.com
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