Another Ted Haggard

Ted Haggard lives again, nuff said - link

Dobson speaks (whoop te doo)

Mary Cheney's pregnancy seems to have brought all of the anti-gay industry leaders out of the woodwork. Last week, several of them (including our friends Peter LaBarbera and Paul Cameron) voiced their opinion on how Mary Cheney is harming her child by raising it "without a father by design."

I tell ya, you gotta love how they constantly push semantics.

Now, the grand poobah himself, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, has issued a column via Time Magazine on the situation. I guess he felt that since everyone else has something to say, why not him:

"With all due respect to Cheney and her partner, Heather Poe, the majority of more than 30 years of social-science evidence indicates that children do best on every measure of well-being when raised by their married mother and father. That is not to say Cheney and Poe will not love their child. But love alone is not enough to guarantee healthy growth and development. The two most loving women in the world cannot provide a daddy for a little boy -- any more than the two most loving men can be complete role models for a little girl."

This statement is not true, but I will let this link from Media Matters for America do the work in refuting it.

Dobson also distorts the work of Dr. Kyle Pruett of Yale Medical School. Media Matters does an excellent job in proving this point. I would just like to point out that distortion of Dr. Pruett's work is one of many times that the anti-gay industry has gotten in trouble for misusing studies.

In my book, I talk about the Pruett distortion, as well as seven others.

Dobson's comments point out one of the biggest problems with the anti-gay industry and their view of the world. They deal with aesthetics, not actualities.

Dobson and company seem to think that advocating for their view of family is the antidote for all societal ills.

This is not true. Dobson and company claim that gays raising children is an "untested social experiment," but this is also not true. According to the 2000 census, over 300,000 same sex households in the United States are raising children.

That doesn't sound like a social experiment to me.

Furthermore, what about the children who are taken away from their natural mothers and fathers because of abuse? Should they be kept in orphanages and foster homes until the "correct" type of family (not having anything to do with love and support but having two adults inlcuded) comes along?

What about single-parent families. My mother pretty much raised me alone. In the Dobson world, she is looked at in a patronizing manner; she would be tolerated but not looked upon as an actual good parent.

The fact of the matter is that this is a complex world. Man is not God, and therefore we cannot control the curves that life throws at us. All we can do is do the best we can with what we are given.

And personally, I think single parent families and same sex families are doing just that.

Dobson says "The traditional family, supported by more than 5,000 years of human experience, is still the foundation on which the well-being of future generations depends."

By this, he means a family led by a mother and a father. His claim is not necessarily true.

A good friend of mine (who I talked about before in this blog) is raising two children. He will probably adopt those two children. They refer to him as daddy. They aren't forced to do it and they aren't suffering from it. They would suffer if there was no one to give them love and support.

My friend didn't choose to be a father figure because of selfishness. He made the decision because he wanted the responsibility of supporting two children who needed it; that is the epitome of family.

My friend may not lead any nationally-known organization and may never get a column in Time Magazine, but I will tell you this:

Whenever I want to learn about family, I look at his example, not that of James Dobson.