[sparky]

Originally Posted by Johnny Stew

I don't know... I kind of felt like what I said was a little different than your opinion that being raised by a same gender couple is only slightly preferable to getting poked in the eye with a stick.

That's a figure of speech and there's no slightly about it. If you're talking about idealism, and what's best for kids, BEST is the point. Ideal. We're talking about molding people's lives.

I know many people who were raised by one parent... some by their fathers... who turned out a lot more stable than many folks who had two parents.

That's such a pop psych cop out justification of an argument. I know people who have smoked cigarettes for 60 years and didn't get cancer. It's not a reason to take up smoking. You don't make decisions that affect people's entire lives based on an exception to a statistically proven rule.

We certainly know that growing up with both a mother and a father is no guarantee that a person will turn out "right."

So why bother doing it at all ? And people with seat belts still get killed in car accidents. While we're at it, let's all take off the seat belts. They're really no guarantee at all.

You referred to raising a family with a partner as the "new gay trend," so I was simply referring to the "old gay trend," which seems to be based on far more shallow pursuits.

I don't know that raising kids is any less shallow than going to Studio 54 and doing coke with Andy Warhol. A dominant paradigm is a dominant paradigm. People can go ahead and try and reclaim Leave It To Beaver and call it new and meaningful if they want to. It doesn't make it meaningful. Most people are lemmings. There's a certain element to the trend of gay parenting that is rebellious and is done with a real f-you to society. It's a knee jerk reaction to being told one can't do something and basically that people can do whatever they want to regardless of the consequences just because it fulfills their needs. That is self indulgent. That is coming from an inital statement of "I want" or "I need".

All I'm saying is that we can have a "husband" and children if we want them. We're allowed to "nest," if we wish.

"We" can do whatever the hell we want to with our lives. Life is really all about what we want, after all. Pity we can't consult the kids before they're drug into it. I'm sure most of them would have opinions.

Why accuse people who want something deeper and more meaningful in their lives, of copying straight people?

If the shoe fits.

"Husband" ? Figure of speech or not, that is downright creepy. In all this freedom and doing whatever we want, how about forming some new ideas ?
If people want to break the mold, I say build a new one. The demand to change the cultural/religious institution of marriage is exactly the wrong battle. The Right Wing used that preposterous issue as a barbed club in the last election and kicked the asses of the entire Democratic party into a ditch.
And the subtext of that issue was children. It is a hot button suicide of a political question and took the quiet, steady struggle for gay rights back 20 years.