Unprecedented experiment

The discussion of homosexuality in your June 15 issue by Eve Tushnet and Luke Timothy Johnson ("Homosexuality & Scripture") has prompted me to say a word on gay adoption. My wife and I have a "natural" child and an adopted child. We both feel deeply that the traumas of adoption--of lost or uncertain identity, of troubled relations with adoptive parents, as experienced at one or another time by virtually all adopted children, and as witnessed and experienced by adoptive parents too--are so grave and disruptive (and in some cases disabling for the child) that to add to this an arbitrary imposition of monosexual parentage is a very grave step, involving an enormous responsibility for the life of another human who has no say in the matter.

The issue is nearly always discussed simply from the viewpoint of the prospective parents. Rarely considered is the situation of the child who will bear the consequences. Objections are often dismissed with the argument that a loving home is surely better than an orphanage. No doubt it is, but it is my impression that most gay adoptions in the United States and in other advanced countries involve children who are deliberately conceived for adoption, with the help of a friend, a commercial sperm bank, or a young woman willing to bear the child, sometimes for a price--all of which dreadfully complicates the identity quest, as a number of recent personal accounts attest. (These children are not being rescued from Ceausescu-era Romanian orphanages.)

The question of origin and identity usually arises for an adopted child as he or she passes through late adolescence. In the case of our own child, raised in a "normal" middle-class professional family free of crises, with a loving and protective older brother as well as loving parents, our daughter came close to being lost to us, and to herself, during adolescence, when, as she told me recently: "I hated you even while I loved you. Who were you to do this to me? Where was my mother? Why had she abandoned me?"

She survived, as did we, and is now married with three young children of her own. But when each of her two daughters was born, she was thrown into a crisis of rejection and confusion for which she sought psychiatric counseling. At thiry-eight, after the birth of her youngest daughter, she approached her adoption agency to try to find her birth mother--so as to find closure, she said, even though she recognized that the search might fail, or worse. Then as the emotions provoked by her own daughter's birth eased--when she had again asked, how could my "real" mother have abandoned me, given me away?--she gave up the search, but the question stays with her.

Gay adoption is a privileged society's historically and socially unprecedented experiment with helpless lives, an experiment justified as affording "equality" for homosexuals. But equality is not equivalence. To impose on an infant a lifetime experience not only of the crisis of normal adoption but also of the absence of normal heterosexual psychological (and even physiological) parental modeling and influence is to risk inflicting a crippling wound on the victim of this experiment in order to provide adult homosexuals with the gratification of love. This gratification is real, of course, but for the child it means the artificial circumstances and social disadvantage of a simulacrum of heterosexual marriage.

This seems particularly grave in the case of male homosexual alliances. I believe that competent authority amply supports the common-sense conclusion that a man is not physiologically or emotionally equipped to be a mother. A man does not nurture as a woman nurtures, nor can a man substitute for a woman as a model for serious and balanced sexual maturation of the child. Children need both men and women as role models. I am reminded of the crisis of clerical pedophilia--a matter that is not, alas, wholly irrelevant to the adoption issue--in which church authorities willfully ignored the obvious for reasons of scandal-avoidance, priestly solidarity, convenience, cowardice, etc., until a disaster exploded in their faces. A generation from now, I am convinced, equivalent reproaches will be expressed with respect to the children made part of the experiment in gay adoption, which enjoys the endorsement of many well-meaning people today, including a significant segment of the Christian community. Of course, there are loving homosexual couples who are committed to responsible parenthood. But men and women have to take responsibility for what they are, and for the consequences of what they do, even when they do it with love.

Because the editors know my address and identity, I hope that for the sake of my adopted daughter and grandchildren's privacy I may be allowed to remain anonymous.

AN ADOPTIVE FATHER

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