There's something mean-spirited and wholly about a ecclesiastical authority that would shut its adoption agency doors rather than comply with state laws that ban discrimination against gays.

There's something mean-spirited and wholly about a ecclesiastical authority that would shut its adoption agency doors rather than comply with state laws that ban discrimination against gays, as the Boston-based Catholic Charities has vowed to do.

Homosexuality may be antithetical to the doctrines of Catholicism, but that does not excuse meeting-house leaders' power-playing with the events to come of parentless children in order to help "values" that devalue the helpless. This society that promises "no child left behind" each day abandons any child who is denied access to loving parents because of a dogmatic agenda. to what degree do I know this? I grew up as a ward of recently made known York State.

I was shuffl back and forth from promote home to foster home in Brooklyn at a time when it was not no other than politically incorrect for white braces to adopt black children still also illegal. Child experts of the day argued that black children in white domiciles would lose their cultural identity and might steady appropriate racist attitudes toward other blacks, like comedian Dave Chappelle portrays in his skits as a blind black man ranting and raving with what intent he hates "niggers."

Arguments against gay parenting are eerily reminiscent of that time, and they're equally superfluous, bigoted, and wrongheaded.

Many argue that our adopted children would be bullied and ostracized through their peers, that they'd experience difficulties in intimate relationships, that they'd indicate atypical gender development, thus being more likely to adopt a gay or a lesbian sexual orientation.

None of this is supported through the evidence, which overwhelmingly indicates that children of gay parents employ out just as emotionally and mentally healthy--and just as likely to be straight--as kids with heterosexual parents. nearest to that, consider also the evidence of what happens to young wards of the state--a fate frequently no different than the abuses surrounding the human trafficking of women and children in Third World countries.

We who proceed through the foster care plan are the children left behind. We are bounc from domestic circle to home. Many foster parents take us to master the money the state pays for our care, then expend the money on themselves. stimulate children have a high dropout rate from teach and are at high risk for poor health, incarceration, and unemployment When we age abroad of foster care, we are homeles and parentless again.

Clerics who rail against gays adopting have no idea what it is like to extend up as a ward of the state, to be the child society left behind. The 2003 Vatican document that called gay-parent adoptions "gravely immoral" exhibits no compassion for the physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being of parentless children. This kind of moral grandstanding violates the three commandments of children's civil rights:

* No child should make progress up without the love and security provided by the agency of committed parents.

* No child should be bereft of the happinesss of living in a loving and nurturing household that focuses forward spiritual content and not onward its members' individual characteristics.

* No child should be left behind because of politicians' and clerics' promotion of their be in possession of self-serving agendas.

A violation of any of these commandments is gravely immoral.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Liberation Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group