Positive Liberty

Imagine that any time you saw “family” issues mentioned, the groups described as most concerned… were usually anti-Semitic.

Imagine a great many people thinking that the biggest issue in preserving the family… is what to do about the Jews.

Imagine that being “family-friendly” meant — besides no violence or sex… that there would be no Jewish people.

Imagine that politicians were rated as to whether they favored the family… or whether they favored the Jews. (Those who claimed to favor both are eccentrics at best and hypocrites at worst.)

Imagine that your parents had covered your eyes the first time you’d gone by a house with a menorah in the window. From that day forward, and wherever the issue came up, you found the same dichotomy — family or Jews. Take your pick.

Now imagine starting a Jewish family.

That’s roughly where Scott and I are right now.

We’ve done a fair bit of research on adoption, taken an in-depth class about our various choices, and even — you heard it here first — bought a house in the DC suburbs. (Jason, what about your academic career? Are you really going to end up a housedad? If I don’t get hired in the next year or so, you bet I will. Life’s just like that; sometimes it doesn’t deliver on its promises. And come on, it won’t be that bad. For one thing, it’ll mean a lot more blogging.)

So yes, we bought a house in the suburbs, and we’ll be moving in late summer, once the current occupants’ new home is ready. Owning the house also makes it possible for us to take the first real steps toward adoption. (With no thanks, by the way, to adoption.com, which still summarily purges all discussion of same-sex parenting from its forums. Classy, that.)

We chose to live in Maryland rather than DC or Virginia because the legal regime in Maryland is vastly more friendly toward same-sex couples — and particularly so toward same-sex couples who wish to adopt. (Virginia forbids second-parent adoptions, meaning that only one of us could ever have legal custody over a child; DC has only a token domestic partnership law; but Maryland adoption law explicitly welcomes nontraditional families, and the state may well enact further legal protections in the coming years — potentially including same-sex marriage, which would among other things streamline the adoption process considerably.)

Of course, I still fully expect it all to be a bureaucratic nightmare. And if there’s one thing regular readers know about me, it’s that I. Don’t. Do. Bureaucracy. It should make for interesting reading.

Beyond the bureaucracy, however, I’ve got other concerns. I know that a lot of people will emphatically not support our decision. Some people reading these lines will actively fear for the safety of our children — and theirs. They will think that what we’re doing is an abomination, and they will make great efforts not to call our social unit a “family.”

Some of these people are members of my own, er, family.

To put it delicately, it’s not yet clear whether the children will have two sets of grandparents — or just one. A lot of issues remain in the future, and they will be played out in what is for me an agonizing slow-motion crawl.

For the moment, however, my thinking on the issue is still fairly abstract, and the “fear of gay families” is still something I can look at without any fierce paternal instincts kicking in.

First, I’m struck by what seems like a common pattern among conservative cultural critics, and it relates directly to same-sex families, parenting, and adoption. The thought may be stated imply enough: When conservatives take on the cultural left, they are quite often fighting the battles of at least a decade ago. They assume that the gays, the feminists, the religious skeptics, and so forth, all hold opinions and positions that these groups have mostly abandoned in the 80s or even earlier. It’s as though liberals were still carping about Reaganomics, while the GOP has undoubtedly abandoned the whole idea (if ever, that is, an idea it was).

Now here’s where the conservatives really get interesting: Not only are we assured that the liberals are still up to their old tricks, but any change in “their” opinion — as if “they” were not a moving target — must be a front for trying to achieve their original goals though other means. Liberalism only ever meant one thing, ever.

Consider women’s separatism. In my experience at least, relatively few feminists actually want to move to women-only communes. They aren’t interested in getting rid of or living apart from men. The old slogan — Feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice — was quaint ten years ago when I first heard it (uttered by a conservative). As feminist theory goes, it’s ancient history now. Feminists thinkers these days more and more want to discuss gender systems, that is, the actual facts on the ground of gender, and these most emphatically include men. Besides critical studies of masculinity — all the rage right now — they also have begun to doubt just how much mileage can be gotten out of gender in the first place: Is it not just a lot of stuff we do to ourselves? And if so, then what do we really get out of all-woman or all-man communities? Not much, the answer would seem.

Yet the fascination with separatism lives on for much of the right, which still saws away at it as though it were somehow a current issue. Look at Free Republic, where not so long ago we found the following shocking — but mostly quite dated — quotes:

” In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them,” Source: Dr. Mary Jo Bane, Feminist and Assistance Professor of Education, Wellesley College.

” We finally realize that recruitment is the only answer…lesbian goals must be to recruit more lesbians.” Source: Lesbian activist Kathy McDevitt, in an appearance before the Davis City, California City Council in 1980. Davis Enterprise, October 2, 1980.

” Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession…the choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that should not be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that.” Source: Vivian Gornick, feminist author, University of Illinois, The Daily Illini, April 25, 1981.

There’s also the usual Paul Cameron stuff, a few studies that are so poorly sourced as to be unverifiable, the common health problems of all unmarried women and men — here dressed up to seem as though they belonged to homosexuals alone — and number of other superficially frightening claims that are in fact equally true of gays and straights (for instance, how damning it is that lesbians are more likely to experience violence from a romantic partner than from a stranger. Well, that’s sadly true of everyone)…

Plus there’s the following shocker:

78% of lesbians value highly “Dildos” and regularly engage in stimulation inside the vagina by manual or oral means. Source: K. Jay and A. Young, The Gay Report, ( New York, Summit 1979 ), p. 544, 388, 414.

Lesbians having oral sex. And they like “dildos.” Who knew? But I’m getting off the subject.

Consider the so-called gay agenda. Jokes about it aside (no, I didn’t get a copy either), the agenda seems to be as follows, with apologies to South Park:

1. Destroy the family.
2. ???
3. Everyone turns gay and has a big old orgy.

No matter what we do, we’re doing it for these reasons. Or, as James Dobson puts it,

We must all become soberly aware of a deeply disturbing reality: The homosexual agenda is not marriage for gays. It is marriage for no one. And despite what you read or see in the media, it is definitely not monogamous.

What will happen sociologically if marriage becomes anything or everything or nothing? The short answer is that the State will lose its compelling interest in marital relationships altogether. After marriage has been redefined, divorces will be obtained instantly, will not involve a court, and will take on the status of a driver’s license or a hunting permit. With the family out of the way, all rights and privileges of marriage will accrue to gay and lesbian partners without the legal entanglements and commitments heretofore associated with it.

Whenever gays or lesbians try to have families, raise children, and conduct themselves within the legal regimes that are established for such things, it is clear that their real intent is to arrive at stage three, the big gay orgy, as quickly as possible.

I’d be furious, if I weren’t so puzzled. Fancifully, I’d love to resurrect the radicals of the 1970s and let them fight the Dobsons of today: They started it, and, in a way, they and the Dobson faction deserve one another. Best of all, it would leave the rest of us to get on with ordinary life.