Sunday, January 26, 2014

Thoughts on Gay Parenting



So I have a question.

If you find yourself opposed to gay parenting, would you be willing to look the children in the above video in the eye and say to them, "your life experience is fundamentally flawed and should never have happened. The person you are and who you will become is a problem that needs fixing through social policy. The family you love is something wrong with the world and ought not to exist."

For some reason, I don't think so. It just feels intuitively wrong. And yet, whenever people argue that gay people shouldn't be allowed to have children, that is exactly what they are saying. They are saying that children raised by gay people deserve something more than the family they have and argue that children raised by gay people will have a disadvantage in life. In essence, they are saying that these children will have a life flawed so deeply that it would be better for social policy to prevent their existence.

One of the biggest problems in the way we approach people, I think, is the assumption that there is something wrong with them that needs to be changed. And it's not just with gay people and their families. I think the application of this attitude to gay people comes from a deeper problem with the way we approach life. We look at life and people as if it's filled with problems that need preventing and stress ourselves trying to gain control over life and people. Most often, I think, this is because it's the way we treat ourselves. Too many people believe there is something fundamentally wrong with themselves that needs changing and perfecting.

I've never met anyone whose ever been able to rid themselves of what they think is wrong inside of them. And the most miserable people I've encountered have been those most obsessed with changing who they are. The path to progression, it seems to me, is counter-intuitive. It comes not by rejecting our flaws, but by embracing them and seeing them for what they are: the very building blocks of our virtues.

Virtue is constructed of vice. Our weaknesses enable our strengths. A deficit in one area transforms itself into a surplus in another. In trying to rid ourselves of all vice, we also rid ourselves of our greatest virtues. The maximization of virtue happens when we see our weaknesses for what they are and embrace them with love. Compassion for self and others arises from imperfection, and it is generally compassion and love that we most admire in people.

As we truly accept ourselves, we begin to see others more clearly as well. We see that their flaws enable their best qualities. We begin to fall in love with their fears and insecurities and see beauty in them exactly as they are. To me, this is the deepest form of love: one that does not require any change at all, but embraces everyone equally precisely because of their faults and imperfections.

Could it be that the way we approach social problems like gay marriage and the families of gay people originates in how we treat ourselves?

If we see ourselves as possessing fundamental flaws that need to be eliminated, and we believe that there is something sub-optimal about gay parenting, we'll apply the same outlook. Eliminate it. If, however, we stand back and see our true nature--that nothing good about us could exist without the parts we think are bad, we'll begin to see things more clearly. We'll begin to understand that the optimal is impossible in all cases, and that what we call sub-optimal comes along with unique benefits.

Humanity's greatest strength is its diversity. We need our transgender people. We need our straight people. We need our asexual people. We need our single people just as much as our married people. We need our atheists just as much as we need our theists. We need our blind, deaf, and physcially impaired people as much as anyone else.

We need the children who were raised in homes with same-sex parents because they have a unique perspective to offer us.

My deepest hope is that we can all accept ourselves just where we're at. I hope that we can all become well practiced in self-compassion, and then apply this outward. Instead of engineering the perfect society by eliminating sub-optimal family combinations, we should embrace every family as they are. Instead of asking the question, "how can I make myself and others perfect," perhaps we could ask, "what can I learn from my own flaws and the flaws of others?"

Does every child really deserve two opposite sex parents? What children really deserve is our affirmation. They deserve to know that they are okay, loved, and welcomed in society whether they were raised by a single mother, single father, two men, two women, a grandparent, or in an orphanage. Every child deserves to feel like they and their family belong.

5 comments:

  1. I've been to church this day. Thanks, Josh. "Humanity's greatest strength is its diversity." We need our Josh DeFriez.

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  2. "We must change anything we can change that may be part of the problem [of not seeing his promises fulfilled in our lives]. In short we must repent, perhaps the most hopeful and encouraging word in the Christian vocabulary. We thank our Father in Heaven we are allowed to change, we thank Jesus we can change, and ultimately we do so only with Their divine assistance. Certainly not everything we struggle with is a result of our actions. Often it is the result of the actions of others or just the mortal events of life. But anything we can change we should change, and we must forgive the rest." -Jeffrey R. Holland, 'Broken Things To Mend', April 2006 General Conference

    Humanity finds its greatest strength in God, in keeping his commandments and repenting when we find ourselves out of line with eternal truths. When the Lord says, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as I am", does that really mean, "be as perfect as you think you can be, but it's okay to keep whichever sins and weaknesses you favor"? Our weaknesses become our strengths only as we try to rid ourselves of them, through the redeeming grace of our Savior.
    My deepest hope is that I can grow grace by grace to become perfect like him, that I will not become discouraged or apathetic along the way, and that I can learn from and help others on the way.

    Every child of God deserves to feel like they and their loved ones belong to Him who cares most about who they become.

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    1. This is the core problem:

      You may be right. But many, many people in society disagree with you deeply (myself included). And so the question is not about what God wants or what you or anyone else believes eternal law to be. Rather, it's a problem of practicality: how do we make decisions in a society where people disagree about morality? For you, this is a moral issue; but for me it's a moral issue, too. I do not believe that you or anyone else should have the right to enforce your view of morality on anyone else through the instrument of the State. That, to me, is morally reprehensible.

      Again, I think you are ignoring the point I made about arguing from the optimum. You are saying that the best possible thing is for every child of God to feel like they and their loved ones belong to God. So are you arguing that atheists should not have the right to adopt or reproduce? No one has the right to impose their view of the optimum on anyone else. Instead, we have to approach the world from where it is, not where we think it ought to be.

      And the reality is that there are millions of children who live out their lives in orphanages that would be better off in same-sex families than in orphanages. We cannot make the world align with our view of "best," but we can make it better than it currently is.

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  3. This seems like a huge jump: " Virtue is constructed of vice. Our weaknesses enable our strengths. A deficit in one area transforms itself into a surplus in another. In trying to rid ourselves of all vice, we also rid ourselves of our greatest virtues. The maximization of virtue happens when we see our weaknesses for what they are and embrace them with love. Compassion for self and others arises from imperfection, and it is generally compassion and love that we most admire in people."

    I'm sure you have quite well-founded reasons for believing this (which maybe I catch a glimmer of in the last sentence), but that is quite a lot to take for granted in a post like this without further explanation. Maybe that's a good topic for another blog post...

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    1. Yes...I've been thinking about the vocabulary I use to express this idea, and I think that "vice" is the wrong word and not exactly what I mean. I just like the alliteration :) I'll discuss this more in my next post, I think. Thanks for the comment.

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