What’s wrong with gay adoption?

Answer: there’s nothing wrong with it. It improves the lives of children by bringing them into loving homes. Where’s the problem with that?

Apparently conservatives (such as luckily-not-president McCain) believe that allowing gay and lesbian couples to adopt is somehow bad or immoral. McCain had this to say about it:

I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no, I don’t believe in gay adoption.

So, better to leave them in an orphanage rather than to let them be adopted by what he think is a less than ideal family? I’ll even agree with him that having two same-sex parents rather than a traditional mother and father could potentially be detrimental in their development (traditional psychology places importance on both parental figures), but not nearly as detrimental as, say, having a single parent, or having one or both parents be assholes, or living in a poor family, or any number of things — big surprise, not every single child has a perfect life. It’s certainly no-where near as bad for the child as having neither a mother or a father. In fact, there’s plenty of research that shows that children of gay parents turn out just fine.

When The Daily Show covered this issue a while ago, Samantha Bee jokingly referred to “gay parents and their soon-to-be-gay children,” and I think this might actually be the problem conservatives have with this issue, deep down. I’ve seen research going either way about whether children raised by homosexual parents are more likely to identify later in life as homosexual (most of what I’ve seen says it isn’t true), but in some ways it makes sense — they’re already exposed to it so they know it’s “okay” and are more willing to accept their own sexual orientation, rather than trying to repress it or attempt to deny it. If this were true I’d have no problem with it, and neither should you, dear reader; there’s nothing immoral about being homosexual, so a higher chance of identifying as one is not important. I think some conservatives take this way too far, and incorporate it into their “gay people are trying to corrupt our culture” conspiracy, thinking that homosexual parents are out there infecting innocent children with “the gay.” That whole world-view is so absurd (and popular) that I try not to think about it.

So, I’ve done my best to imagine the point of view of someone who opposes gay adoption. Short of Christian fundies that think gays are evil or homophobes that hate gays irrationally (those two groups overlap a lot), I don’t see any reason for a rational person to oppose gay adoption. But, I don’t see any rational reason for anyone to oppose gay marraige either, so I guess the two go hand-in-hand.