Gays should not be allowed to adopt except in cases where there is extrme need.
Wow, the words that come to mind... ignorance, bigorty, intellectual laziness........
There is actually far more evidence that fundamentalist parents should not be allowed to adopt.
Perhaps you didn't know that gay adopters take many of the kids (special needs, problem behavior, etc) that no one else will take and would otherwise languish in foster homes.
# There are already thousands of children living in gay couple households. The 2000 U. S. Census reports 33% of female same-sex couple households and 22% of male same-sex couple households already have at least one child under the age of 18 living at home.
Ok, so we know this is already happening and has been for some time.
According to the American Psychological Association Policy Statement on Sexual Orientation, Parents, & Children, "there is no reliable evidence that homosexual orientation per se impairs psychological functioning. Second, beliefs that lesbian and gay adults are not fit parents have no empirical foundation."
Imagine that, those who actually care enough to do research instead of complain have found that your fears are unfounded and baseless.
The American Psychological Association also states "Research suggests that sexual identities (including gender identity, gender-role behavior, and sexual orientation) develop in much the same ways among children of lesbian mothers as they do among children of heterosexual parents"
# There is no conclusive evidence that homosexuality is linked to one's environment. In other words, growing up in a gay couple household will not "make" a child gay. Read Nature vs. Nurture: Born or Made Gay
LGBTQ Resources
Now.... How about those fundie parents?
Social movements by their very nature demand change, and Promise Keepers is certainly no exception. But exactly how the group's agenda would affect our nation can't be learned from PK rhetoric and maudlin ceremonies. Furthermore, the research community is only beginning to study the social consequences of this relatively new group. There is, however, considerable research describing the effects of Christian fundamentalism on personality and lifestyle. Given PK's underlying fundamentalist agenda, such studies are thus able to forecast risks posed by PK's way of life.
The most important value espoused by Promise Keepers is the building of strong marriages and families by the reestablishment of the patriarchal family structure. But such a structure -- prompted by PK's inerrant belief in the Bible -- has been linked to a variety of harmful behaviors.
The July 19, 1993, issue of Christianity Today cites the book Battered into Submission: The Tragedy of Wife Abuse in the Christian Home (1989) by James and Phyllis Alsdurf, whose research suggests that "the probability of wife abuse increases with the rigidity of a church's teachings, especially teachings pertaining to gender roles and hierarchy." Fundamentalism has also been found to hamper the process of helping battered women. According to Vicky Whipple in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy (1987):
Five major factors ... complicate working with
fundamentalist, battered women: (1) a strong "we versus them"
mentality, which encourages members to seek help only
from the church; (2) a reliance on faith, which leads to a
passive approach toward life; (3) an insistence on
forgiveness, which tends to countenance aggressive
behavior among family members; (4) the dominance of males
over females; (5) strong prohibitions against divorce or
remarriage.
Wow, that doesn't sound so good.... let's see more.
Although Marshall H. Medoff and I. Lee Skov of California State University found fundamentalists more likely to marry and have children, Thomas Snow and William Comptom of Middle Tennessee State University found that membership in a fundamentalist Protestant church is not a predictor of marital satisfaction. Even PK itself, despite its opposition to divorce, reports that 20 percent of the men who attended the group's first eight stadium conferences this year described themselves in surveys as either "divorced" or "remarried."
Within this rigid fundamentalist family structure, children also become victims. Researchers express alarm about the use of corporal punishment by fundamentalist parents, given its link to spouse abuse, sibling violence, delinquency, aggression, hatred, and a general pro-violence attitude. in Violence and Victims (1991), Harold Grasmick, Robert Bursik Jr., and M'lou Kimpel of the University of Oklahoma say, "In fact, the child abuse rate for parents who approve of corporal punishment is four times the rate of child abuse for parents who do not approve of corporal punishment." They also warn of court cases in which day care centers run by fundamentalist churches have insisted that hitting preschoolers is their religious obligation.
The corporal punishment of preschoolers is detailed by Christopher Ellison, John Bartkowski, and Michelle Segal in Social Forces (1996). These University of Texas researchers found that parents who hold that the Bible is inerrant spanked or slapped their toddler or preschooler (aged one to four years) .884 times more per week (or nearly fifty times more each year) and are 50 percent more likely to have spanked or slapped their grade-school-aged child than nonfundamentalist parents. They also found that boys of all ages receive corporal punishment more often than girls, and adopted children are 50 percent more likely than other children to be spanked or slapped.
In surveys of adults who were asked how frequently they had been spanked by parents as a child, H. Erlanger reported in the American Sociological Review (1974) that the strongest predictor of corporal punishment is religious affiliation, with Baptist affiliation having a greater direct effect on the frequency of spankings than gender, race, size of residence, age, and parents' social class.
This link between corporal punishment and fundamentalism builds on consistent findings that fundamentalists tend to be authoritarians. To measure this, Bob Altemeyer's Right-wing Authoritarianism scale is generally accepted as reliable. As discussed in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (1995) by Gary Leak and Brandy Randall, "individuals who score high on the RWA scale are prone to aggress against unpopular or unconventional groups, feel morally superior and self-righteous, possess a mean-spiritedness that is coupled with vindictiveness and a `secret pleasure' when others experience misfortune, and appear prejudiced toward out-groups."
Given the indiscriminativeness of authoritarians' prejudice, Altemeyer and Bruce Hunsberger labeled them "equal-opportunity bigots, disliking all `different' people regardless of race, creed, or color." Research by Linda Wylie and James Forest of the University of Manitoba also found that authoritarianism is highly correlated with religious fundamentalism and an important predictor of racial and ethnic prejudice, homophobia, and punitiveness. Lee Kirkpatrick at the College of William and Mary surveyed college students and found that "fundamentalism was correlated more positively than Christian orthodoxy" with discriminatory attitudes toward blacks, women, homosexuals, and communists.
To take this a step further, Deborah Byrnes and Gary Kiger of Utah State University studied whether religious affiliation and gender would impact a person's willingness to confront racial discrimination committed by authority figures, strangers, and peers. Their results, published in the Journal of Psychology (1992), found that women expressed more willingness than men, and nonfundamentalists expressed more willingness than fundamentalists to challenge discrimination. Such research foretells a losing battle in Promise Keepers' fight for "racial reconciliation."
Questia
I think that's enough....
You know what though? Even with all that evidence I wouldn't propose that fundamentalists not be allowed to adopt, because I'm not going to judge individuals by the reputation of a group.
Faith - open mouth, insert foot
(I held a lot of your views about 8 years ago when I was in my early 20s)
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