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Gay Couples Should Be Allowed To Raise Children Essay, Research Paper

Despite Ignorant Beliefs, it is Alright for a Gay Couple to Raise a Child

In the small town that I grew up in just outside of Boston Massachusetts everything thing seemed normal, mothers were at home raising their children, taking them to soccer games and little league, while fathers went off to work every morning only to return home to have dinner with the family. It seemed almost all families were like the Cleaver family.

In August of 1986, a new family, the Buchanan’s, moved into the Morrill’s, right next door to my parents. New families in the neighborhood usually meant new kids to play kickball with and flashlight tag with. To my dismay, there was only one new kid in the neighborhood joining us his name was Earl.

Earl was cool, he liked baseball cards, swimming, riding bikes, and causing trouble, all the same things that I liked. But the adults found Earl to be strange, making comments and funny faces as we passed. Some parents did not even allow their children to play with him. As an eight year old nothing seems visibly wrong with him. Out of curiosity I asked my mother what was wrong with Earl. At first she played as though she did not know what I was talking about, until it became a daily question that I needed to know the answer to. Then my mother told me, Earl’s parents were different, he did not have a mom and a dad, he had two fathers, and she told me that Earl’s parents were gay. I didn’t care because I didn’t even know what “gay” meant.

A few weeks later while sleeping over Earl’s house, I learned the meaning of the word gay. I saw Rick, Earl’s Dad kiss Mike, his friend goodbye as he left to go to work. “Man your Dad just kissed Mike”, I said. “I know” Earl began to explain, “both of them are my dads.” In an eight year olds’ terms said that he has a dad and a daddy, unlike a mom and a daddy. He didn’t know why, but he was fine with it, as was I.

As I got older, I thought that Rick and Mike were the best. They always took us to air-shows, car-shows and parades. Doing things as a family and being able to share it with friends a number one priority.

Not everyone thought the way that I did about Earl, I looked up to him, and he was a great person. Earl today is the nicest most compassionate person that I know, because of how he was raised. Earl’s fathers raised him to believe that a family has no boundaries as long as there is love.

In today’s society it’s sometimes hard to believe that two men are capable of falling in love with one another. It’s even harder for some to believe that two men might want to have a child and start a family. It’s almost impossible to imagine that in a country as free as ours, that it is getting harder and harder for a gay couple to raise a child because of the restrictions that society puts on the gay community in raising a child, and providing the necessary support a family can demand.

According to social norms that have been pressed into ours brains, a family consists of a mommy and a daddy with traditional values, not a daddy and a daddy. But a family consists of love, with one or more consenting adults regardless of gender that provides support and unconditional love to their children with compassion and understanding. Because many controversial issues such as interracial marriages, abortion and divorce have been accepted through past years, it is now time to get rid of our biases and recognize that a gay couple can raise an emotionally healthy child, who has no prejudices, without the influence of a mother and without forcing a gay lifestyle upon their child.

Many people believe that a child raised by a gay couple will be psychologically impaired because they are being raised without a motherly figure. In others words these people think that gay couples cannot provide role models to children in the same way that “traditional couples” can. Some people think that gay couples will only provide role models for one sex and that children of these parents will later be disadvantaged when dealing with the members of the opposite sex. Thinking that a child needs a motherly figure while growing up, is a strong belief because early psychologists only studied children who may have lost their mother due to death or abandonment.

The early studies of children who grew up without mothers never involved two men acting as parents to one child. “Today there are between six and ten million daughters and sons that have been raised by gay parents in the United States.” Studies recently conducted by Dr Rees Green show that in many cases “no difference between a child that has grown up with heterosexual parents than a child that has grown up with homosexual parents.” But what has been found is that boys and girls that grow up with homosexual parents pay no particular interest to “sex-roles or even gender roles.” They just think of everyone as an equal who share all the same roles of a family. In fact “the boy that has grown up with two fathers is more likely to be sincere and less abusive in a heterosexual relationship than a boy that has grown up with heterosexual parents.” Girls that have grown up with gay parents “have been found to have more self-esteem than girls of heterosexual parents.”

Another mistaken belief that people try to use as a reason to prevent gay couples from adopting is that they are going to force a gay lifestyle upon their children. The assumption from that statement is that sexual orientation can be chosen or induced, and that gay parents want their children to be gay and will do whatever they can do to give them a gay lifestyle. Maybe it’s possible that a child of gay parents might be gay, and that gay parents could want their child to share the same sexual orientation. Most heterosexual

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