From Robert Oscar Lopez, "Growing Up With Two Moms: The Untold Children’s View" (via Darleen Click):
Between 1973 and 1990, when my beloved mother passed away, she and her female romantic partner raised me. They had separate houses but spent nearly all their weekends together, with me, in a trailer tucked discreetly in an RV park 50 minutes away from the town where we lived. As the youngest of my mother’s biological children, I was the only child who experienced childhood without my father being around.Continue reading.
After my mother’s partner’s children had left for college, she moved into our house in town. I lived with both of them for the brief time before my mother died at the age of 53. I was 19. In other words, I was the only child who experienced life under “gay parenting” as that term is understood today.
Quite simply, growing up with gay parents was very difficult, and not because of prejudice from neighbors. People in our community didn’t really know what was going on in the house. To most outside observers, I was a well-raised, high-achieving child, finishing high school with straight A’s.
Inside, however, I was confused. When your home life is so drastically different from everyone around you, in a fundamental way striking at basic physical relations, you grow up weird. I have no mental health disorders or biological conditions. I just grew up in a house so unusual that I was destined to exist as a social outcast.
My peers learned all the unwritten rules of decorum and body language in their homes; they understood what was appropriate to say in certain settings and what wasn’t; they learned both traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine social mechanisms.
Even if my peers’ parents were divorced, and many of them were, they still grew up seeing male and female social models. They learned, typically, how to be bold and unflinching from male figures and how to write thank-you cards and be sensitive from female figures. These are stereotypes, of course, but stereotypes come in handy when you inevitably leave the safety of your lesbian mom’s trailer and have to work and survive in a world where everybody thinks in stereotypical terms, even gays.
I had no male figure at all to follow, and my mother and her partner were both unlike traditional fathers or traditional mothers. As a result, I had very few recognizable social cues to offer potential male or female friends, since I was neither confident nor sensitive to others. Thus I befriended people rarely and alienated others easily. Gay people who grew up in straight parents’ households may have struggled with their sexual orientation; but when it came to the vast social universe of adaptations not dealing with sexuality—how to act, how to speak, how to behave—they had the advantage of learning at home. Many gays don’t realize what a blessing it was to be reared in a traditional home.
And from Darleen:
It is unfortunate that this man had been ill-served by his upbringing. I find myself discussing with same-sex marriage advocates about the issues of gender and how men and women are just not fungible. The advocates all fall back on that any differences between the sexes are “social constructs” nothing more. Even when I have brought up the fact that there have been widely different societies throughout history, but the male/female paradigm has remained constant (even if the numbers of partners within a marriage has not) … I actually got the jaw-dropping response that all that proved was “millennium of bigotry.”Well, you're not supposed to deviate from the accepted narrative.
Same-sex couples regardless of legal status, do commit and do have children. They will not do their off-spring any favors in buying into the myth that gender can be ignored.
Remember, "Progressives Attack Professor Mark Regnerus Over Same-Sex Parenting Research." And, "Why Are Progressives So Intolerant?"
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