With respect to adoption, it is a matter of opinion what the motives of same-sex couples might be.
Like many people these days, I participate in email political discussions. Sometimes they get rather brutal. Even when I do not bring up religion, I get accused of religious bigotry in my opinions. Fortunately, I find this more ironic than hurtful. Why will become clear.
What was the subject of my latest email discussion? It happens that our courtrooms are highly secularized institutions these days. So whenever some group wants to march into a new era of civil rights, that is where they go. The rage these days is for homosexual rights. Hence the courts in Florida are trying to overturn that state’s ban on same-sex adoption (see here). The court’s effective rationale is that discrimination against homosexuals is religious bigotry.
Religion is often treated as a matter of “faith” and therefore not logical. In past times, very logical people would have thought that belief quite odd. We have a problem. We have to find some basis for appropriate behavior. What basis do we use? Any logical structure must rest on some axioms or postulates.
Whether they realize or admit it, almost all the people in our nation use Christian ethics as their point of reference. Christianity either was or is the religion of our parents and grandparents, and it provided the basis from which we learn right from wrong. What we value today, we value because of our Christian heritage. This is true even of those who level the charges of religious bigotry.
Consider our legal system. We have these things we call rights. We presume that everyone has rights. Why? When we consider our ancestors in eras past, did not the rights of the sovereign surmount all other rights. What rights did a peasant have? Where have all the slaves gone? What makes us different? It seems that we have this notion that people are endowed by God with certain inalienable rights. Does that not mean we begin with a religious basis to justify our rights? We use a belief about God to provide a foundation for our nation’s laws, an axiom from which we form almost every other logical construct in our legal system.
Nevertheless, we speak of our government as secular. We do not permit our government to establish a particular religion and impose that religion upon others. However, even freedom of religion, the choice to believe what we wish about God, is Christian concept.
Our nation’s founders approached religion from different points of view. They admired the Roman republic and many of them emulated the gentlemen of that time. Yet when they began the revolution upon which the staked their lives and fortunes, they justified their right to do so in God’s name. The vast majority of these men married Christian women, attended Christian churches, and received Christian funernals at the end of their lives.
So when we talk about homosexuals raising children, about what do we debate? The problem is perplexing. We must weigh our responsibility to protect each others God-given rights. What rights do children have to a decent home and upbringing? What criteria should we use when considering adoption?
When the subject is ethics and our nation was founded on Christian religious beliefs, why should any consider it strange that Christians refer to the Bible? Don’t we have the right to do so? What else should a Christian use? Science provides only disputable facts. Science provides no basis for right and wrong.
Consider how one might approach this problem based upon science. Would not the secularists would consider the following as given?
- We evolved.
- Homosexuality is a genetic aberration, that is, a dead-end mutation.
Don’t we know for a reproducible fact that it takes both a man and a woman to produce a child? After birth, it is now medically demonstrated that women should breastfeed their infants. Until recent times fathers protected and cared for mother and child. Otherwise the child would most likely die. Even in our era, unmarried women with children tend to be the most impoverished.
Where do same-sex couples either fit into that arrangement or how could they improve upon it? Which of two men will breastfeed a child? When so much of our behavior is learned, is it logical to say a child misses nothing important when it does not have both a mother and a father? Don’t we expect children to learn from their role models?
What if we believe there is no God? Then there is only what little we know of the natural order of things. In fact, without God, our knowledge of the natural order must of necessity become our bible. In the natural order of things, what place does homosexuality have? Didn’t the Nazis begin from this belief to justify exterminating homosexuals (see here)?
Without the Bible, God’s Word, and the belief in a Divine Creator, we can and would justify much brutality, and it would take very little proof.
Currently, same-sex marriage is legally meaningless. How much will that change if it is legalized?
What makes marriage significance is the difference.
