Mar 22nd, 2006
Two Commentaries Re: Kids’ “Best Interests”
Two publications on opposite sides of the country highlight the impact of homophobia from the perspective of the children. It’s really important that these views get into mainstream papers to reach citizens who are not personally connected to the issues.
From the independent campus newspaper in Eugene, Oregon:
Newspaper policy shows bias against gay couples
By Emerald editorial board
March 20, 2006
The Register-Guard’s “policy” regarding baby announcements is that it will not run names of non-biological unmarried parents. How convenient, since that really would only apply to, um, same-sex couples. A highlight of what the Emerald editorial board had to say about the other paper’s policy:
The blow that The Register-Guard’s policy deals is particularly stinging because it strikes at the very core of human existence. A baby girl experienced discrimination within her first few days on the planet. Hailey is too young to understand it now, but some day she is bound to discover that people tried to tell her parents that they are abnormal and that she and Rebecca and Sharon shouldn’t be recognized as a family.
I’d love to know if someone on the editorial board is speaking from personal experience. I don’t know many non-queerspawn who really get this — the idea that when our parents are made invisible, we are made invisible too. And to attack our parents’ rights to equality is to attack our very right to exist.
…refusing to print the names of gay parents does not change the fact that they exist, regardless of the social feelings of a paper’s management.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
(For more on the journalism perspective for this particular incident, see an earlier article in Poynter Institute’s “Everyday Ethics”)
And from Elmira, New York:
Gay bias devalues children
Kathleen Costello, Star-Gazette
March 20, 2006
Costello points out the statistics that can’t be over-exposed: too many kids in foster care with states trying to restrict gay people from providing homes for them. Denying the right for gay people to foster and adopt is actually denying children their birthright of a stable family and a place to call home.
She also reminds readers what anti-gay activists conveniently overlook when they argue that children in need of loving parents are “better off” with heterosexual parents: these neglected kids were all obviously created by, ahem, heterosexual sex.