DescentBB

Lothar wrote:One of those properties is that the child has a mother and a father. That's part of the ideal -- it's REQUIRED to have the best theoretically possible situation in terms of the child's happiness, virtuousness, education, etc.

How do you justify this though. Specifically, how do you justify that having a father and a mother is required to have the best theoretically possible childhood situation in terms of the child's happiness, virtuousness, education, etc. Copy and pastes are fine if I'm missing something, but this doesn't seem immediately straightforward to me.

Jeff250 wrote:how do you justify that having a father and a mother is required to have the best theoretically possible childhood situation in terms of the child's happiness, virtuousness, education, etc.

Children need both male and female adult role models who are consistantly present throughout childhood in order to develop a proper understanding of the world and their place in it. In particular, they need role models who are very close to them, and in the ideal there's nothing closer than "mom" and "dad".

Again, we all deviate from that, and for some children the best they may be able to get is grandma and grandpa, or mom and some male family friend, or mom and another mom.

Yes, of course, I certainly realize how having a mom and pop childhood situation can be beneficial (and usually is), but I'm trying to get a handle on what your exact argument is as to why it's absolutely required for what we explained. Say on the childhood situation scale (figures measured with respect to conduciveness to the child's happiness, education, etc.), a mom and pop childhood situation can score a 10. Are you suggesting that there's some limit (perhaps 8) to which all other conceivable childhood situations will be bounded? Or are you just saying that it's easier for a mom and pop childhood situation to get a higher score than other situations? Or something else?

Jeff250 wrote:I'm trying to get a handle on what your exact argument is as to why it's absolutely required for what we explained.

Because if you're missing either a mother or a father... you're missing either a mother or a father.

That's all there is to it. Not having one of those things means you're missing something important. No matter how good your situation is apart from that, you're missing one or the other of those things, which does mean there's a cap on how good things can get for you. I don't know if it's 8/10 or 9.99/10 but it's definitely not a perfect 10.

It also happens to be true that it's generally easier and more likely for children to fare well with both parents, but that's not what I'm arguing.

Lothar wrote: Now, each and every family deviates from the ideal in some ways. None of us can have the best theoretically possible situation, we can only have the best-we-can-reach-from-where-we-are situation. And in some situations, the best you can reach is a single parent or a loving pair of same-sex parents or even a foster home. The argument you suggested ("heterosexual parenting tends to promote the ideal childhood situation") isn't valid because the ideal is never reached, but a slight modification ("encouraging people to form stable mother-and-father families tends to promote better childhood situations") is both good and true.

How Thomistic of you. (Oh jeez I made a pun)

Personally I think you're splitting hairs a bit here, is not the best childhood situation one that approaches the best possible?

Anyway that's getting hung up on semantics. The truth is that we have no definitive idea about what comprises the best childhood, but we do know that certain things tend to positively or negatively affect a child's development. I'd say having homosexual parental figures falls on the negative side, but is arguably superior to being shuffled around from relative to relative.

DCrazy wrote:is not the best childhood situation one that approaches the best possible?

"approaches"? No.

The truth is that we have no definitive idea about what comprises the best childhood, but we do know that certain things tend to positively or negatively affect a child's development.

I think we do know some things that comprise the best childhood situation. We don't know all of them, but we know some, based on our experience of the way certain factors positively or negatively affect children.

I'd say having homosexual parental figures falls on the negative side, but is arguably superior to being shuffled around from relative to relative.

Yes, I think I've said as much. I'd much rather have every child born into a mother-and-father family, but given the reality that they're not, I think there are times when being raised by a same-sex couple is the best available situation for a particular child.

Recall how we got here: I made a simple, 2-part argument. Part 1 is that having both a mother and a father is part of the ideal child-raising situation, which Jeff seems to take issue with. Part 2 is that, while most people fall short of the ideal, there are various ways to encourage people to come closer to it, one of which is the government giving special recognition to what we presently call marriage. (I personally think the government does and will always do more harm than help, and should just get out of the marriage business. My wife thinks the government recognizing marriage does more good than harm, and should keep doing it.)

Bettina wrote:When there is an open house at school, or some other activity, and a 12 year old girl comes in with two men who she calls mom and dad she will be ridiculed by her peers. I don't know the physcological impact it will have on her, but she will have few friends.

Kids with handicapped parents get made fun of. Kids with mixed race parents get made fun of. Kids from parents from a minority religion get made fun of. Kid's with dorky parents get made fun of. This argument just won't hold water Bettina, you have to eliminate to many unusual families.

Mine would certainly qualify as unusual. I'm from one of the smaller religions (SDA). We don't smoke or drink. We go to church on Saturday instead of Sunday. We are vegetarians. My son doesn't watch very much TV. What he does watch isn't commercial TV, but carefully screened and selected by his parents. He doesn't know who Barney is. His Dad is a major nerd, his mother kept her maiden name. And speaking of his mother, she is currently reading Beowulf to him as a bedtime story (he loves it). And trust me, any 7 year old who starts talking about Beowulf, even in a PRIVATE school, is going to get made fun of.

So what? Normal people are BORING.

Bettina wrote:Every child belongs in a normal home for the reasons I gave even if they have to wait to get one and the waiting list isn't very long.

Newborn babies can be adopted almost instantly. There is a long, long waiting list. But for older kids, especially kids with legal complications, the waiting to be adopted can take forever.

I have shirt tail relatives who are professional foster parents. They keep an entire household of kids, trying to give them a loving home while they wait for the legal system to work things out. Some of the kids they raised all the way to their majority because they couldn't get adopted. The kids loved their foster parents. The kind of affection that was there could not be faked (and they had no reason to fake it) but they all wanted to really BELONG somewhere. They all knew that they might be yanked out of the foster home at any moment due to some quirk in the legal system. They wanted to be someplace PERMANENT.

So I can tell you from my personal experience with foster children, that even when they have an exceptionally loving foster home, they want to be adopted into a family permanently. And that is not an easy process. My understanding is that most foster homes are not nearly as nice as the one I'm familiar with.

I also have a cousin-in-law who is a lesbian. She has two kids now. (one girl about my sons age and a brand new baby). I am NOT saying that I approve of the choices she has made, but I will say with great confidence that those kids are FAR better off in a home with two mommies than being in a foster home. And if someone tried to take her kids away from her, they would have to go through me to get them.

I'm certain Palzon could give you much more information about the average foster care since he deals with that end of the law.

Bettina wrote:Again... no offense.

Of COURSE not! You've shared your point of view, I'm sharing mine. And the main reason I'm sharing it is that I think you are a pretty good person at heart. Way too good to be locked into any hope of being "Normal". Normal people are boring. Let the kids tease, you will be known by the quality of your enemies.

Duper wrote:Any historian worth his salt will tell you that any great civilization that died, did so from the inside first. They tossed aside anything moral and called it foolish.

Great civilizations rotted from the inside because the individuals within it lost their grasp on morality. No amount of government regulation can make the people virtuous or unvirtuous.

Duper wrote:Church and morality was commonly exercised together when debting law and maters of state. It is a dangerous thing to separate ourselves from government. If there truely is a rift, then it needs to be bridges and mended.

I believe that it is a good thing to have people with Christian ethics involved in the government. BUT, that is Christian individuals, not church organizations. Whenever the church and state combine, the church loses. The church can only be free to preach what it should preach when it is NOT involved in an adulterous relationship with the government.

The Church is God's bride, God's instrument for reaching the world. The apostles didn't need the support of the state to spread the Gospel. We certainly don't.

Look at any country where the church and the state actually work together. They are the places where religion is the weakest, or most corrupt. The idea of religious liberty, that each individual should be free to decide how to worship God, is the idea that made this country great. The idea that allowed religion to FLOURISH.

Kilarin wrote: I believe that it is a good thing to have people with Christian ethics involved in the government. BUT, that is Christian individuals, not church organizations. Whenever the church and state combine, the church loses. The church can only be free to preach what it should preach when it is NOT involved in an adulterous relationship with the government.

Exactly. We were not set up as a Theocracy. The founding fathers understood the dangers of both sides of the argument. They had an excellent example in Europe.

Lothar wrote:That's all there is to it. Not having one of those things means you're missing something important. No matter how good your situation is apart from that, you're missing one or the other of those things, which does mean there's a cap on how good things can get for you. I don't know if it's 8/10 or 9.99/10 but it's definitely not a perfect 10.

Now wouldn't the "10" represent the ideal mom-and-pop childhood situation and the "8" represent the ideal otherwise situation? To arrive at your conclusion that the ideal childhood situation consists in two heterosexual parents, how are you not, in effect, comparing different ideal parenting situations, which is what you seemed against doing a few posts ago?

Lothar wrote: I'm assuming the child's characteristics are a given -- the child simply is the gender, race, weight, etc. that they are. Then I'm looking at what sort of environment they would be best raised in.

Can you really describe one ideal parenting situation for every single variation of child? Suppose that one of the child's "given characteristics" was that he or she was gay or lesbian. Now, this is just one conceivable variation. Are you sure that a traditional mom and pop childhood situation fits the bill for being best for this one or any other variation? Can you justify that?

DCrazy wrote:The truth is that we have no definitive idea about what comprises the best childhood

Lothar wrote:I think we do know some things that comprise the best childhood situation. We don't know all of them, but we know some, based on our experience of the way certain factors positively or negatively affect children.

At best, we know that some parenting situations tend to be better than others. However, to demonstrate that having two heterosexual parents is the ideal childhood situation, you also have to anticipate any other possible childhood situation, including ones not yet conceived, and then justify how having two heterosexual parents will be better than those too. I don't see how you can do this without appealing to some sort of teleology. It's like talking about an ideal engine. One might say that the ideal engine is one that converts 100% of inputted heat into work, with no energy lost to heat, etc. But you would never point to a part of an engine and say, "This part is ideal, and we can incorporate it into our definition of an ideal engine." That would be shortsighted and wouldn't anticipate future engine designs. It would be better to leave the definition as is--that an ideal engine is one that converts 100% of inputted heat into work.

There is a very important life long lesson that a typical two parent-one man-one woman-parental unit provides that other combinations or solo parents don't quite provide. That is countless examples of how a heterosexual man woman relationship is developed and maintained and the effects it will have on the family unit and how that kind of family lives and interacts with its enviroment, society etc. etc.

Since the odds are VERY HIGH that any child born will end up in that kind of relationship as an adult and start a family of that type, then depriving a child of that nearly life long lesson of growing up in that kind of family the child is at a disadvantage right from the start! And I seriously doubt there is any way to supplement that life long experience.