Little understanding on adoption

The Daily Herald reveals a profound lack of understanding when it argues that homosexual couples should be allowed to adopt children because in the Daily Herald’s view “Loving families and good parenting skills are not limited to straight couples or single people.”

If those are the only criteria necessary for parental fitness, then the Daily Herald must support adoption by polyamorists or incestuous couples, for surely there are polyamorists and brother-sister couples who are capable of “loving and parenting” children.

Historically, however, criteria for adoptive fitness have included not merely the capacity of those adopting to love and parent children. Criteria for adoptive fitness included an evaluation of the moral nature of the relationship between adopting parents. Types of relationships considered inherently morally flawed would be excluded from adoptive consideration.

Of course, in a wiser, less relativistic culture, this criterion did not need to be explicitly articulated. It would go without saying that society would not place children in environments defined by inherently morally flawed relationships — like polygamous, incestuous or homosexual relationships — regardless of the ability of the partners to love, parent and provide for children.

Despite specious arguments to the contrary, subjective homosexual attraction and volitional homosexual acts do not constitute a condition analogous to race, and disapproval of homosexuality is not analogous to racism. Making judgments about the morality of homosexuality is no more unethically discriminatory than is making judgments about the morality of polyamory or adult consensual incest.

Religious-and non-religious-adoption agencies do have the right and should have the freedom to make distinctions about what types of relationships constitute moral relationships. The government is overstepping its bounds when it attempts to impose the subjective moral assumptions of homosexual activists and their ideological allies on all child welfare organizations.

Laurie Higgins

Illinois Family Institute

Carol Stream