Mississippi Jumps on the “No Gay Adoptions” Bandwagon.
And much like Tennessee, they’re willing to screw unmarried straight couples in order to discriminate against gay couples.
A bill in the Mississippi state Senate would bar cohabiting unmarried couples, including gay and lesbian couples, from adopting children.
The proposed law is an effort to close a loophole that allows gay couples to adopt. WLBT-TV in Jackson, Miss., reports that the state’s department of human services has 533 children in its custody who are eligible for adoption. Current guidelines for a prospective adoptive parent are that he or she must be either single — sexual orientation is not mentioned — or married for at least two years, 21 years old and have sufficient income and insurance to care for a child.
“We’re talking about taking a child and putting them into an environment where they are taught habits and exposed to lifestyles that are clearly detrimental to the child,” state Rep. Phillip Gunn told WLBT in reference to adoption by gay couples.
Gunn said, however, he does not want to prevent singles from adopting. “Obviously there are a lot of single people out there with a lot of love to give an adoptive child, and we certainly don’t want to prohibit that, and that is not a bad way to raise a child,” he continued.
Here we have the typical convoluted RRRW argument against adoption by gay couples. The children will be exposed to harmful things with a committed gay couple that they wouldn’t be exposed to in another environment. This necessitates that they conveniently ignore several crucial arguments they typically make when clamoring for the welfare of children. It also requires that they ignore the very research they like to cite, in distorted form, against same-sex marriage and adoption as evidence that “children are better off with a mother and a father”.
Gunn’s argument that children placed with same-sex cohabitating couples will be “taught habits and exposed to lifestyles that are clearly detrimental to the child” is nothing but bigoted propaganda. He is preying on stereotypes and bigotries that suggest gays/lesbians are predators and engage in bizarre behaviors. He wants people to envision innocent children being made to watch their adoptive parents play wild sex games with each other in the middle of the living room. If he knew how ordinary and mundane the average gay couple’s life was he would know he doesn’t have a leg to stand on with that argument.
To make matters worse, his argument assumes that all married heterosexual couples are, by virtue of the fact that they are heterosexual, living lifestyles that are in no way detrimental to children. The many children abused by their heterosexual adoptive parents would be among those to disagree. (Of course Poisonous Parents come in all varieties, not just the adoptive kind.)
Gunn’s argument further breaks down with his assumption that because a gay person is not living with another gay person, they will not be “exposing the child(ren) to” that stereotypical lifestyle. It appears Gunn believes that non-cohabitating people never date or have relationships. For someone as uptight as he seems to be, I would think he’d prefer a cohabitating couple to a single person who could conceivably bring home a new date every few months, or even every few weeks. Gunn never seems to realize that the adoptive parent and any date s/he brought home would be engaging in the exact same “lifestyle” for which he harangues cohabitating couples.
Then there is the research. Studies have shown that overall it is best for children to be raised with two parents. Of course the RRRW likes to distort this to mean that children need a mother and a father, alleging that the research proving ill effects from not having a father mean children need both. What they’re not saying is that the ill effects are from the child living with a single parent (typically a single mother), and not from failure to have a parent of each gender.
Accordingly, Gunn’s claim that it is more acceptable to place children with single adoptive parents than cohabitating couples is patently false and based on nothing but bigotries. He is advocating putting children into situations that are less beneficial to them under the guise of protecting them from dangers that don’t actually exist.
Finally, does Gunn truly believe that children would be better off languishing in foster care, state homes or other alternative care environments just to keep them away from cohabitating gay couples and–in the case of this law–cohabitating straight couples? Does Mississippi have so much money that it can continue to provide for the children who will be left without parents should his hateful bill become law?
I hope the powers that be in Mississippi have more sense and less homophobia than Gunn. I also hope that they care more about the children than they do about punishing gay people.
Tags: Adoption Laws, Mississippi
