Sunday, January 27, 2013

Having Two Mothers

This account of growing up as the son of two lesbians takes an unexpected turn or two.  Usually one expects to read either that the son is excessively normal and had a home life just like everyone else or that the son is a basket case whose life was ruined by not having a father.

Mr. Lopez says neither, but does say that he is weird, different, an outsider who fits none of the gender stereotypes or categories. He would seem to be a heterosexual since he is now married to a woman and has a child, however, Mr. Lopez calls himself bisexual.

He thanks Mark Regnerus for Regnerus's controversial study and seems to be saying that the very reason for which the Regnerus study was criticized--he compared children in stable heterosexual marriages to children of parents who may have had both heterosexual and homosexual relationships after having children--is the reason it is accurate and valuable. Lopez asks:
Where do children of LGBT parents come from? If the parents are 100-percent gay or lesbian, then the chances are that the children were conceived through surrogacy or insemination, or else adopted. Those cases are such a tiny percentage of LGBT parents, however, that it would be virtually impossible to find more than a half-dozen in a random sampling of tens of thousands of adults.
Most LGBT parents are, like me, and technically like my mother, “bisexual”—the forgotten B. We conceived our children because we engaged in heterosexual intercourse. Social complications naturally arise if you conceive a child with the opposite sex but still have attractions to the same sex. Sherkat [a critic of the Regnerus study] calls these complications disqualifiable, as they are corrupting the purity of a homosexual model of parenting.
I would have thought the Mr. Lopezes would be the exception when it comes to children of same sex parents and that the former category--children of what he calls 100% same sex parents would be the more prevalent type.  Lopez seems to be saying otherwise and praises the Regnerus study, I guess because it looks at the more common (and more difficult?) case of children raised by bisexual parents.  Lopez says this about "100 %" homosexuals vs. bisexuals: 
Those who are 100-percent gay may view bisexuals with a mix of disgust and envy. Bisexual parents threaten the core of the LGBT parenting narrative—we do have a choice to live as gay or straight, and we do have to decide the gender configuration of the household in which our children will grow up. 
Yes, but so do the "100-percent gay" parents.  They could decide that the gender configuration in their household would be unnatural with two men or two women raising children and decide not to have children.   
Mr. Lopez also writes about the opposition to same sex marriage in France and the homosexual men who oppose it.

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