On Homosexuals Adopting Children

This summer, Russia passed a law, which criminalizes the display of public affection by same-sex couples, denouncing it as “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations.” In the United States, 35 states still ban same-sex marriage. Indeed, homosexuality is still a relevant issue. Especially, if in Hungary elementary schools are allowed to assign religion textbooks that teach homosexuality is mortal sin. During our first week here at the Central European University, several colleagues and I discussed the debate on homosexuality as it relates to adoption-rights for homosexuals. I’m hoping that this reaction to our discussions will help spark more conversations throughout campus:

There are some who disapprove of homosexual couples adopting children on grounds that homosexuals are aware that they cannot procreate with one another and should therefore deal with this consequence of having chosen to lead gay lives; and that it would be immoral to adopt a child into a lifestyle of being stigmatized and bullied for being members of the gay community. These are the two main reasons among those who disapprove that I've come across lately, whether in conversation or on blogs. What astonishes me is that, while my colleagues argue against gays’ rights to adopt children, they also make it clear that they see nothing wrong with the individual’s homosexuality. They do not consider their views discriminatory. In their opinion, they are simply concerned with the right of the child to be raised in an environment free of the forms of abuse he or she would be subjected to as a result of the sexuality of his or her parents.

The problem with their position is that 1) it does not consider adoption or any other alternative to procreation as being legitimate entitlements for a gay couple (as it is with a heterosexual couple); and 2) it legitimizes the gay-bashers and the miserable environment created by their discrimination. Certainly, gay couples are aware that they cannot procreate. However, there are legal alternatives for them to create families that include children. If it cannot be In Vitro, it may very well be adoption. And to reserve adoption as a right and legal entitlement for heterosexual couples but not gay couples is, irreducibly, discrimination. Also true, is the possibility of gay couples adopting  children  into a  life  of being stigmatized  and  bullied  as members of the gay community. And here, however, my colleagues have misplaced the blame. 

Who is at fault - the  homosexual  couple,  or  the  intransigent heterosexuals  practicing  discrimination  and creating the space of psychological and even physical violence against gays to begin with? Where is  the  immorality  –  a  dominant heterosexual  culture  creating  miserable atmospheres  for  gay-living  in  a  modernity axiomatically predicated on rational equality, or  the  gays  in  the  pursuit  of  happiness  and equality  in  accordance  with  the  modern ethos? Or perhaps I should ask whether black parents who had children in apartheid South Africa were to blame, and not the authors of apartheid, for  the stigma  and  brutalities suffered by their kids in that society. Or yet again, were  Jewish  parents  to  blame  for having children in Fascist Europe?

In the end, it’s all about the legitimacy of homosexuality. If you are for the equality and humanity of the human subject engaged in same-sex encounters, you will acknowledge the validity of homosexual agency and subjectivity  in  the  current  historical  moment.  You’d  take  it  for granted, as I have, that gays should be able to adopt children wherever adoption is legal, no questions asked. As it happens, homosexuality was banal in other historical epochs, in ancient Rome, for example, where the love of an older man for a pre-adolescent boy was a romantic ideal. If you  are  serious  about  children  in  gay  families  growing  up  in  rather positive atmospheres, you will make sure that gay-bashing  and  gay-bashers  are  legally  restrained, not homosexuals. 

Philippe-Edner Marius, US, Public Policy