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 Tuesday, October 25, 2005
The Adoption Thing/Maggie Gallagher
I've been described as "denigrating" marriage in adoption. Let me restate my position clearly a. Adoption, while a great thing, is an ameliorative social institution, not a normative one. By which I mean adoption is not ideal because it takes place only after a child has been placed in a situation in which neither of its natural parents are able or willing to take care of it. It's a wonderful solution to either a tragedy or a crime in terms of parental incapacity or irresponsibility. Its also not normative in the sense that if everyone did it, there would be no babies to adopt. Adoption is a great thing, but it is not the same thing, nor as core to survival of a civilization, as generativity. b. Because adoption is ameliorative, not normative, whatever rules we set up for adoption will tell us relatively little about how we should conduct marriage. Marriage's main social mission is managing the reproductive consequences of sexual attraction, through the creation of a social ideal. c. The stronger position in adoption law (that is the one that most strongly reinforces the marital norm) is that only married couples should be allowed to adopt. This is because adoptive married mothers and fathers replace what the state has taken away: a legal relationship to both a mom and a dad. A state who takes away a mom and dad from a child, should restore the loss to the best of its abilities. d. This legal position has been rejected, because (people said) adopting it would relgate children to "no families." Single parents, straight and gay, are better for children than no parent at all. OK. I"m not entirely convinced this is empirically true, (that is that we don't have enough married parents to adopt all children in a timely fashion) but I'm in no position to contest the empirical proposition. on the other hand e. I'm willing to say I don't think opposite-sex couples who are not married should be allowed to adopt. Because they could marry, and don't, they are making a clear statement: they don't consider a shared child a good enough reason to marry. Surely we can do better for this child in need of parents than that. So now what? Some people think that because I think unmarried opposite-sex couples should not be allowed to adopt, that must mean I think gay couples with children should be allowed to marry. They think this not only as a matter of substantive policy, but as a matter of logical necessity. (like I said, brainlock). I don't know if adoptive children with a gay parent would be better off if we changed our understanding of marriage such that that gay parent was allowed to legally marry. I can think of some reasons for imagining so. But marriage would not in itself establish any rights between the child and the stepparent. So if the issue is the child's right to a legal relationships with two adults, then second-parent adoption is the answer, one that is more targeted at the need of the child. I could be persuaded to make an exception at law to meet the needs of the small fraction of the population who cannot easily adapt to marriage norms. My doubts about whether marriage would help children living with gay couples much are increased by the way that people for many years made the same argument about remarriages: more remarriages means more married parents for kids which would mean children would be better off. Really smart people made logical connections just like that. It turns out the evidence just doesn't support this happy view. e.g. "[M]ost researchers reported that stepchildren were similar to children living with single mothers on the preponderance of outcome measures and that stepchildren generally were at greater risk for problems than were children living with both of their parents." Marilyn Coleman, et al., Reinvestigating Remarriage: Another Decade of Progress, 62 J. Marriage & Fam. 1288, 1292 (2000). but in any case f. Allowing the unproven hypothetical benefits of SSM to a tiny handful of adopted children to trump the broad mission of marriage in law and culture makes no sense, if children are your main concern. I'm primarily concnerned with what happens to the 99.5 percent of kids (or more) that are the products of sexual intercourse between men and women in a society that isn't dedicated enough to the idea that kids need moms and dads to preserve the historic understanding of marriage. 
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Did marriage help the child you had out of wedlock? Why would it be different for kids adopted by gay parents?
If you believe that kids are not helped by remarriage and therefore an argument can be made that the adopted children of gays wouldn't be helped by marriage, doesn't that mean your child wasn't helped by your marriage and maybe society should have stepped in to prevent that marriage?
Knowing that there is greater risk to kids raised step-fathers, would it have made more sense to prevent you from marrying to avoid potential risks to your child?
So if the issue is the child's right to a legal relationships with two adults, then second-parent adoption is the answer, one that is more targeted at the need of the child
Yeah, right. Because it's so much better for an adopted child and the child's new parents to have to go through two, separated, sets of legal applications before the child can securely have two legal parents, rather than having same-sex couples adopting as couples. That's targetting the need of the child: that's why adoption agencies, who put the needs of the child first, always insist that this is the way all adoptions should happen: one parent gets to adopt first, the second one a while afterwards.
Maggie, at least be clear about it: you're not interested in "targeting the need of the child" when you argue that children adopted by same-sex couples should be discriminated against. You're really, really not.
And again, I note that you evidently feel that the benefits of marriage for children stop the instant the child is born.
Waitaminit here. If the state through adoption would prefer, as Maggie said to replicate the Mother Father parental structure for the adopted childed, and if such replication is not neccessary, in your opinion, then why does the child need two legal parents?
Yes, it means unwed mothers who later marry an unrelated man, do not (on average) boost their first child's well-being. (I actually think sometimes remarried turns out to a benefit and sometimes it actually detracts from child well-being and the net result is zero. . .in spite of large increases in family income).
Future children, however, are better off if unwed mothers marry.
I'm not arguing that the fact that social science evidence shows no benefits to children of SS couples is the reason why I'm opposed to SSM. I'm arguing that the social science evidence shows the benefits of marriage to children aren't legal, they stem from teh law's ability to hold mothers and fathers together in reasonably harmonious unions.
Pietro: then why does the child need two legal parents?
Do you feel your children don't need two legal parents?
I'm arguing that the social science evidence shows the benefits of marriage to children aren't legal, they stem from teh law's ability to hold mothers and fathers together in reasonably harmonious unions.
So, you agree that children benefit from marriage, because it holds their parents together in reasonably harmonious unions: you just feel that the children of same-sex couples don't deserve to benefit by their parents being married?
Ah well. Eve too pretty much came out for discriminating against the children of same-sex couples: I haven't gone back to that post since to discover why she wants to discriminate against children because of the sexual orientation of their parents: it's too sickening to discover that she does, and frankly, though I'd hoped it wasn't so, that so do you.
SSM absolutism is prone to induce one to feel sickly.
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