Even homosexuals want to be parents

One question that often comes up in discussions of gay people's lives is "Don't you want to have children?" -- the assumption being that to be gay or lesbian is to be forever bereft of the patter of little feet.\nIt was never a safe assumption. If only because many gay men and lesbians explore the heterosexual lifestyle rather extensively before coming out, a good many of us have always wanted to become parents. More recently, many of us have chosen to become parents after escaping heterosexuality, whether through adoption or other means too varied to detail here. Memoirs such as Jesse Green's "The Velveteen Father" and Phyllis Burke's "Family Values" are good introductions for the curious.\nBut it seems we're damned if we don't and damned if we do. If we don't have children, we're objects of pity; if we do, we're accused of being bad for them. We will supposedly deprive them of suitable sex-role models, which by remarkable coincidence must be heterosexual; worse still, we will influence or even pressure our children to be gay too. Courts acting on these principles can and have children forcibly removed from their gay and lesbian parents, natural or adoptive, so it's not surprising that gay and lesbian parents have claimed defensively that their children grow up just like everyone else: heterosexual, and sex-role conformist.\nNot all have said so, of course. I was very impressed by a lesbian mother who told an interviewer around 1980 that all the influence she might exert on her daughter would be countered overwhelmingly by the heterosexual society in which they lived; naturally she would make sure her daughter knew that there are viable alternatives to heterosexuality. In 1986 lawyer Nancy Polikoff wrote, "As a lesbian, a feminist, and a mother with a vision of an entirely different way of raising our children, ... I am not pleased to discover that my lesbian sisters pose no threat to the perpetuation of patriarchal childrearing."\nAnd now, two sociologists from the University of Southern California have published a survey of research on children of gay and lesbian parents, which suggests that such children might not be quite like the children of straight parents. According to an Associated Press story, Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz found that children of gay and lesbian parents "show more empathy for social diversity, are less confined by gender stereotypes and are probably more likely to explore homosexual activity themselves."\nThese are tentative findings, like all findings in the social sciences. The AP story, in an all-too-typical display of "journalistic balance", quoted a "policy analyst" with the Christian-Right group Focus on the Family who called the report "alarming" and declared, "Kids do best when they have a married mother and a married father."\nWhen you think about it, Stacey and Biblarz' findings aren't such a shock. Would it be "alarming" if it were discovered that the children of Jewish parents were more likely to become Jews rather than Christians, were more empathetic with the problems of minorities and more open-minded on religious questions? Would news stories quote Christian extremists to the effect that kids do best when they have a Christian mother and a Christian father?\nSome students in a class I was talking to once asked if the majority doesn't have the right to impose its standards on parents. I asked rhetorically what they would think if (for example) a predominantly Episcopalian community decided that it wasn't good for children to be raised by Evangelical Christians, and took such children from their parents for their own good. This analogy threw the class into a tizzy. The same kids (evidently religious "conservatives") who didn't mind forcing gay parents to be childless were angry at me for following their logic to its conclusion. Even the instructor complained I was being combative.\nWell, that much is true. Too many Americans believe it's OK to be different as long as we're all the same. (That includes many GLBT people; we are, after all, Americans.) Even if it turned out to be true that children of married heterosexual parents had it the easiest -- which, given the realities of majorities, is probably true -- that wouldn't mean that gay people should not become parents; it would even be an argument for legalizing same-sex marriage. In a decent society people who care about children would be asking how to make things better for minority children, instead of penalizing them for the choices of their parents.