Down in the Brave New World post, my brother took exception to the following line:

“Additionally you’ll get the “I’m a mom” homosexuals who intend to further manipulate the concept of a family to cater to their political agenda.”

He took exception to gay couples being able to be a family, pointing to an example of a family we knew well growing up that consisted of a gay couple and their adopted son.

The problem here lies in the English language’s ability to let terms morph dramatically and that as a result the terms have a lack of precision. What defines a family? What defines a mom? What defines a dad? What defines a parent? What is a child? I could have been more clear in what I was referring to in this post.

For my purposes, unless I state explicitly otherwise, when I refer to a mom or mother, I’m referring to biological motherhood. I also mean the biological father when I refer to dad or father. I also mean biological child when I refer to children. The parent term has a more loose definition in my book, referring to the person or people who care for a child in a custodial sense. Finally, when I say family I’m referring to mom, dad, and their biological offspring. This is what I intended in the case referenced above. I refuse to qualify these terms with things like biological. I think it is a shame that these terms have been abused to such a degree that the qualifier needs to be put on the natural case, not the un-natural case. Nevertheless these term are widely over applied and this is why I probably shouldn’t have used them in the above case without a qualifier, ridiculous though it may be.

Now, there are many families out there, but many of them deserve a textual qualifier. Adoptive families are still families, but a family that needs the qualifier ‘adoptive’. For some reason as a society we’ve confused qualifier with decreased value. This is simply not the case. Sometime in the last century or two we changed from dropping these qualifiers in casual conversation because of convenience or simplicity to dropping them because it “devalues” them. This should not have ever been the case. The world is full of less than ideal circumstances and we shouldn’t fault those who are doing their best in less than ideal circumstances (minus their fault in the situation being less than ideal). Just because there is a qualifier that defines their circumstance does not mean that the people are bad nor that they are doing a bad job in that circumstance.

But all of this does not take away from, and it’s time to get religious with this discussion, what God intended. God created the family (yes, the biological one) and intended that it was the mechanism by which children were created and raised. There is a certain connection that exists between biological parents and their children that does not exist otherwise. While this connection is not necessary to be able to be a good parent, it helps in the parenting process. There are certain values and perspectives that mothers bring to a biological family that fathers do not. There are also values and perspectives that fathers bring that mothers do not. While these perspectives are not absolutely necessary for a child to have good parents, they help a great deal.

It’s because of the above truths that traditionally, adoptive parents and other non-biological families have done their best to mimic, to the best of their ability, biological families. One of the things I respect about our gay couple friends who adopted a boy was that they adopted a boy who sorely needed adopting. They did their best with a non-ideal situation. I would argue that the adopted son would have benefited more by having similarly committed heterosexual parents, but again they were doing their best to be parents in a less than ideal situation. Nobody else was going to adopt that boy. In that sense, what they were doing was very noble.

But this is not what I was referring to in my previous post. I’m referring to people who purposely abuse the creation process for their selfish desires (i.e. so they can be the real parents, not just adoptive ones). There are so many examples here, from the fairly extravagant (like attempting to create a baby without a biological father or mother) to the fairly simple (like having sex with a complete stranger to conceive a baby) and everything in between (like Invetro fertilization for both heterosexual and homosexual couples with either anonymous or provided sperm). All of these things purposely thwart God’s desire and intent. This is not the case of making the best of a non-ideal situation, it’s a case of purposely subverting God’s will.

I compare our gay friends and their adopted son to a couple of nuns who adopt a boy. Though there was sin in their lives, they were doing a good thing by adopting a child who needed adopting. The same can be said of the nuns who adopt a boy (although one assumes and hopes that their sins were of a less sexual nature). One difference might be that the nuns would have likely preferred to find a good existing biological family (childless or otherwise) to have adopted the boy. Nevertheless, I have the same respect for both actions because they are both rooted in the desire to care for a child who is not being cared for.

I do not have the same respect for those who abuse the creation process for their own ends.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2005 at 11:12 am and is filed under Catholicism, Catholicism - Morals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.