Back to the Future – Post Modernism and Gay Adoption

If society were based around human wholeness what would it look like?

I write this article in response to the commentary generated by my posts on gay marriage. It would be easy to have a shouting match which reveals nothing more than the fact that there is a collision of world views which, like giant icebergs in the ocean, sometimes bump up against one-another, their curious shapes colliding at the corners. The corners are an odd assortment of wedge issues. Gay adoption is one of these.

Really it’s about post modernism; whether human society is something we can invent, or whether there are some things inherent and innate that we can’t or shouldn’t change. Is there a plumb line for what it means to be human?

We can look from an evolutionary perspective to simians. Homosexuality occurs in simians to varying extents. Indeed I have been corrected on, and surprised by, the extent to which it occurs across numerous species in the wild. I have not done an exhaustive review to find out whether or not gay simian couples habitually raise young but if anyone has observed this they are probably describing an exceedingly rare event. Penguins and black swans often do form gay couples who raise young. What significance is seen in this probably depends on your world view. I suggest that raising a chick to be a swan is very different to raising a human baby to adulthood.

We can look from the perspective of the world’s great religious writings. This is a reasonable thing to do because, whether or not you believe them to be inspired, they do incorporate thousands of years of human experience and understanding. The Abramic religions do not countenance gay adoptions. I know of no religion that does, but someone with greater learning may enlighten us.

Every society makes provision for adoption – usually as a familial or tribal obligation to care for orphans. Other societies have variously tolerated, celebrated, or suppressed homosexuality. I know of none that tolerated homosexual adoption. Maybe there is an anthropologist out there who has found one. Again, they will be describing something very rare.

Perhaps this is because gay adoption challenges the most fundamental philosophical underpinnings of human society. If a mother and a mother are sufficient, there is no need or place for fatherhood. If a father and a father are sufficient there is no need or place for motherhood. If there is no need or place for either motherhood or fatherhood there is no need or place for the traditional family at all. It is a complete ‘free for all’. If two mummies are OK and two daddies are OK then any two heterosexual women and any two heterosexual men should also have the right to create a ‘family’ and adopt. On reflection, why stop at two daddies, why not have several….you get the idea.

This debate is only partly about equality. As the boundaries are pushed (and they will be) the debate will shift from whether a minority group should share in marriage to whether ‘marriage’, ‘motherhood’ and ‘fatherhood’ have any real meaning. There are some who see all three concepts as redundant. As a correspondent to a facebook friend of mine (who is a gay activist) wrote in relation to the gay marriage bills “Lets just get the fucking bills through and then get rid of the whole fucking institution [of marriage].” It is reasonable to ask whether it is wise to de-construct the foundational underpinnings of our civilization because some people within a minority group of less than two per cent of the population want to do something that appears foreign to human society.

 

There are practical issues also. If we have true marriage equality then any two men who register a marriage should have as much right to adoption as a heterosexual couple have to conceive. Let’s be real for a moment. If that ever becomes law the paedophiles will head to the registry office and down to the adoption office in very little time. I am not saying gay people are paedophiles. I am saying paedophiles are intelligent, strategic, and work in team to gain access to children. Allowing male unions to adopt gives them more opportunity.

Since the human question is one of identity, a logical place to start would be the story of traditional/indigenous societies for the last few thousand years. That is where we have come from, and as a species, that is really who we are. I am not an anthropologist but a good place to start is linguist, naturalist, anthropologist and author Jared Diamond. For the record, Diamond regards Christians and Christianity with withering contempt.

You can read Diamond’s books for yourself but in essence traditional indigenous societies tend to have the following key features:

• Babies are breast fed until at least the age of two but often much later
• Babies are in the immediate physical proximity of their mother, and usually in skin contact with their mother, until they can walk
• After they can walk they remain in close proximity with a close relative
• Children grow up in an extended family/tribe/village/clan
• There are rights of initiation into adulthood and they are different for men and women
• Gender roles vary according to need and custom by genders are clearly distinct. The means of distinction are as varied as the number of extant cultures in the world.
• Every child is given a value system and cosmology which forms part of their tribal/clan identity.

Thus by the time ‘normal’ homo sapiens become adults they have a family identity, a gender identity, a tribal/clan identity, and a cosmology. That was also the case in Western countries until the great cultural dismantling got underway in the 1960’s. It doesn’t take an anthropologist to figure out that all these essential aspects of human identity and wholeness are under systematic attack in the West.

In this context further deconstruction of 'marriage, gender, mother, father, and family' is unhelpful from a whole of society perspective. My reading of pro-gay rights blogs suggests that this social deconstruction is the next wave in the long march from "what consenting adults to at home is no one's business" to "We will close down your organisation or put you in prison if your clergy won't formalise gay unions, your school won't teach pro gay marriage propaganda, and your adoption agency won't foster children to gay couples; and we will fine you for speaking out on these issues and take your children off you if you object to them being taught pro gay school curricula." Hating Christians is not a crime and what was once a plea for tolerance and respect is now a no holds barred assault on basic freedom of conscience and practice. This militancy is perhaps understandable given the many injustices suffered by gay people from religiously inspired policies. That said, forcing people to take sides doesn't foster understanding. It leaves people who might support some but not all of the gay agenda with limited options.

I am not a fundamentalist because I am religious. I'm a fundamentalist because I think a line is the shortest distance between two points, 2 + 2 = 4, and people who wander off into the wilderness without knowing how to survive tend to die there. We can be more creative with social mores but I still regard post modernism, and many of the policies that come from there, as exceptionally silly. 

 

Tag line: gay marriage, gay adoption, family values, emily's list, postmodernism, deconstructuralism, Jared Diamond, gay rights, marriage equality