I just read this great article by a heterosexual, married man with three kids on why he supports "LGBT rights" - by which he is, as is usually the case, mainly talking about LG rights - in this instance, challenging North Carolina's justifications for wanting to make it constitutionally impossible to ever legalise same-sex marriage.

http://www.defshepherd.com/2011/09/why-heterosexual-married-north.html

One of the fallacies he sort of mentions, which gets some airplay in the comments on his article, is the whole "of course it must be better for a child to have one male and one female parent" dogma.

I've responded to that myself in the comments, but I thought I'd say something about it here too, as I feel quite strongly about it.

My feeling is that it is important to the emotional and psychological well-being of children to grow up with emotionally healthy adults around them of all genders, in order to teach them that there are good people of all genders in this world, and that being a good person themselves is something worthwhile and attainable, through learning by example.

the important point for me, though, is that it's not necessary for those loving, consistent adults to be the child's parents. It's blindingly obvious that there's a very high percentage of messed-up, abusive M+F parent combos in existence, and they're clearly not the ideal for a growing child. To me, what I want to see for any child is a network of loving, caring, emotionally healthy and available adults of all genders around them - and these can be their parents, or primary caregivers, or friends or relations of the parents, or whatever - and of course, those adults' sexual orientations are so irrelevant compared to their ability to be loving and emotionally available to the children.

A lot of us live now in cultures that have devalued the extended family model in favour of an unsustainable "nuclear couple" fantasy that puts enormous strain on the couple to be everything for each other and for their children. This is nuts.

My maternal grandfather Schmuel was the only person in my whole family capable of being loving (and non-abusive, unlike his daughter and her husband) - he was much more a parent to me than either of my (so far as I'm aware) heterosexual, abusive parents ever were, and I'm hugely grateful to him, and miss him a lot (he died when I was 12). I've recently taken his surname as my own (it's fairly irrelevant to me that it's also my mother's maiden name).

I do think it's good for the children of same-sex couples if their parents have friends of the other gender around too. From my observations, it seems to help the children get a better sense of themselves if they've got a broader range of people to reflect themselves off. I know an 8 year old boy with two mums who seems really hungry for more contact with men (especially men who are encouraging and friendly), as he hardly ever meets any (all his school teachers are women too). I don't know what exactly to make of this, I've just watched his face light up when he gets quality attention from men around him.

And I'm not making assumptions particularly about what this means in terms of gender identity either - I suspect if my parents had been better people, I might have been able to come out as a woman much earlier in life. but I do know I spent a lot of my adult years looking for some kind of love and approval from people to make up for what my parents didn't give me (and to make up for the unwanted stuff they did give me), and I had to face that and let go of it before being free to transition - which for me, lends weight to my feeling that children need as much love and encouragement from as many different adults around them as they can get. So if we have friends with children, we can all contribute to that, no matter how good the parents already are at this.

Wow. That turned out a lot longer, and more impassioned, than I intended it to. But let it stand. Clearly, my feelings are in some ways quite subjective. But I still think there's a big objective truth to my points.

I agree with this a lot. What annoys me most is that even though children can be much happier with parents who are of the same sex who love them, people would rather those children don't get adopted at all than have same-sex parents.

I remember that I saw a show once, I forgot the name of it but it was made by the same guy who made "Super-size Me", and he had people from certain viewpoints live in another person's perspective. The episode I saw (I actually think I saw it in Health class) was about a woman against gay couples being able to adopt, even though she was an orphan herself. She went to live with a gay couple that had two or three kids to see if she would change her mind. She was also brought to an adoption agency and a lesbian group, both of which attempted to change the woman's mind. The gay couple loved those kids so much, the adoption agency explained how any loving home is better than not having parents at all, and the lesbian group explained how many of them used banked sperm to get pregnant and have their own child.

Long story short, even after seeing how wonderful some of these kids had it, the woman said right to the camera, "I'd rather these children have no parents at all than have parents who are gay." Everyone in the class, including me, wanted to sock her one. Oddly enough, this mindset in my classmates gave me a shred of hope for the future.

You're also very right that every child should have a good number of people from all genders around them growing up, and it doesn't have to be just parents or relatives. For example, I had a large lack of males in my life (I only had my dad, who wasn't exactly around all the time), and it got to a point where I would love pretty much any older male I had to deal with on a regular basis (unless he was a total ass, of course). One of the big things for me was teachers.

I already had my mother and two sisters who I was with almost all the time, but some of the only other adults I ever had in my life growing up were teachers, which were mostly female. I would love it every time we had a male substitute or, in later years, a full-fledged male teacher. In high school I could even consider myself on friendly terms with many of my male teachers, especially in my senior year in which I had only one or two female teachers for the entire year (and even they were quite friendly with me). The point is that I craved, and in some ways still do crave, positive male attention, and I'm quite sure that other people growing up in that situation would as well. I think in some ways I tried to over-masculinize myself because of my lack of positive male influence, although it also gave me a very feminine perspective growing up.

A family that has a mother and a father does not make an ideal family alone, but for some reason a lot of people think this is the case, and this frustrates me to no end. People need to open their minds and hearts to possibilities besides their apparently fragile viewpoints if we truly want a world of peace, but I unfortunately don't see that happening any time soon. People are just too stubborn and close-minded to accept something like how a gay couple could be just as loving and supportive of their children, if not more so, than a heterosexual couple.

Obviously not a reader of the "Hobart Mercury", or they would have noticed the stories of parental child abuse that were carried most days last week. Not a gay couple to be seen.

Karen.