i hope this won’t be a long drawn out post but episode 4 shows a mormon women who stays 30 days with a gay couple raising 4 boys.
there is a woman on the show who has come out against g/l/b/t raising children because her father was gay. i was waiting on the edge of my chair to hear what she had to say. she said that her dad brought his partner to her house. it sounded ok so far so i wasn’t sure what she would say next.
she then said her dad and his partner would talk about ‘bathouse’ sex at the table amongst other things. that was my first clue. whether parents are heterosexual or homosexual, they shouldn’t be describing sexual acts to children. good parents are good parents and bad parents are bad parents. good or bad parenting isn’t the exclusive domain or either sexuality.
that woman was just a very small piece of the show and she is an example of someone who had a traumatic experience in childhood which led her to form opinions which seem logical and astute to her, they are based on a false idea of “normality”. as i said, any household which functions the way that she described hers would by dysfunctional. i have some experience in that area and it takes time and understanding to learn what is the “normal” or “expected” path for a child’s idea of sexuality to develop.
anyway…i’m off on another tangent. back to the main part of the show…
this main woman said over and over that she had a set of beliefs that she lived by. they were from god and part of her religion and she would not compromise them. i would not expect her to compromise her beliefs nor would i want her to expect me to compromise mine. she was not nice about it on the show. she would get shrill when in a confrontation and then accuse the other person of “attacking” her view points. i think she came off looking really bad. she was rude to the host family, rude to their friends and very closed minded and rigid.
i understand it is against her belief system to allow g/l/b/t to foster or adopt children or hell even get married in the first place! these two seemingly kind men simply stated that they don’t want to try and change her mind but to simply ask if she would not trample on their rights. of course that was too much for her. she then accused them of trampling on her beliefs. (i’m using my own words to describe the conversations.)
the difference between her pathway and the fathers’ is that what she believes should happen would result in these two men losing whatever benefits they might have with their partnership. they would lose the 4 wonderful boys that they love and care for who otherwise may have spent their lives in foster care or an orphanage. they have much to lose if she gets in the way.
what will she lose if they win? maybe what she believes is her moral high ground. will she lose her husband and/or children if these gentlemen are given the right to marry and adopt children? no. it wouldn’t affect her daily life other than maybe to require her to pray harder.
this is often the way of the conservative, evangelical right wing. they are more than willing to impose their belief system on entire groups of people for situations that wouldn’t affect them anyway. for all their belief in god, they are very not god like.
