NOM's nasty attack on gay adoption includes race-baiting

Jennifer R. Morse doesn't like the idea of gay adoption.

I saw this monstrosity via Jeremy Hooper this morning. I think he understands why I am repeating it. It needs to be repeated.

The NOM affiliated Ruth Institute had some ugly, pointed words to say about the subject of gay adoption. Granted, the organization didn't come out and say that it was wrong. It just played around the issue in the snide way we have become accustomed to.

Via its head, Jennifer Roback Morse:

A friend sent me photos of street light posters he saw lining the streets of Hollywood. These posters were recruiting foster and adoptive parents in honor of National Adoption Month. What could be better than trying to recruit more foster and adoptive parents?

But my friend noticed something odd: there were absolutely no mothers in any of these posters. All posters featured pairs of men, smiling with their adoptive African American children.
...
What I want to know is this: Why aren’t we recruiting stable heterosexual married couples to be foster parents? After all, we know for sure that children do best in married couple low-conflict households. Same sex parenting is an untried social experiment. Parenting by male couples is especially unstudied, since it is exceedingly uncommon. Even the very pro-gay researchers Judith Stacey, could find only one study comparing gay male parenting with heterosexual couples that qualified for inclusion in her comprehensive survey of gay parenting studies.

Morse was speaking of  www.RaiseaChild.us, which is an organization which specifically encourages gay and lesbians to adopt.

Other than getting the name and the goal of the organization right, Morse gets everything else wrong. The idea that "gay adoption" is an untried social experiment is a talking point. And a bad one.

According to the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute:

. . . 6,477 same-sex couples had adopted children in 2000, but in 2009 the number swelled to 21,740, according to The Associated Press.

The analysis also showed that only 8,310 adopted children were living with same-sex couples in 2000, but the number grew to about 32,571 in 2009. The study suggests that almost half of adoptive gay families had adopted children from foster care as that provides for healthcare and higher education.

Furthermore, various studies - the most recent came last year - all say that children do rather well in same-sex households.

 And that point Morse made about Judith Stacey is a different turn. In the past, those supporting Morse's position have distorted Stacey's research verbatim to attack same-sex households. Morse sidesteps Stacey's research in general in a poor attempt to cast attention on numbers. She also omits the fact that Stacey's research actually supports same-sex households.

The grand irony is while Morse points out that Stacey could only find one study comparing same-sex couples with heterosexual couples, NOM was once caught citing a study having nothing to do with same-sex couples to make the comparison.

Hooper also pointed out a very offensive portion of Morse's words:

And look at the children in these posters. I wonder what the African-American community thinks about recruiting gay men to become foster parents for the children of their community who have been taken from their parents. Do the African-American pastors have any thoughts and opinions about this? I imagine they do. But I will let them speak for themselves.

Hooper takes Morse to task rather nicely. However, as someone in the black community, let me just say one thing. I sincerely HOPE that any black pastors commenting would focus on folks having children without any visible means to take care of these children. No one is stealing black children away to hand them off to white gay men. And anyone pushing this implication is cynically relying on hatred and fear to make their point rather than logic.

The irony of Morse's piece is that while she is accusing gays of using children as a prop, that is exactly what she is doing. Her piece does not talk about how difficult it is for foster children to be adopted. Nor does she offer any ideas regarding the recruitment of what she thinks are good homes.

All she offers is race-baiting with a hint of that "gays want to harm children" message that NOM seems to constantly rely on.