“There is noth­ing in my mind that sug­gests that homo­sex­ual par­ents would not be in the best inter­ests of the child. Aside from issues that derive from social stig­mas, a child with same-sex par­ents should have as qual­ity an upbring­ing as any other.”

I dis­agree, The bible is clear that the dif­fer­ences between male and female are more than merely phys­i­cal dif­fer­ences, but extend to the way the two relate to each other.

Col­losians 3:18–19 “Wives, sub­mit to your hus­bands, as is fit­ting in the Lord. Hus­bands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.”

God made mankind male and female to reflect his image and although we are fallen and this immage is marred, I think that we should try and pre­serve and encour­age this order in soci­ety, even to the point of dis­crim­i­nat­ing against other forms of fam­ily structure.

“…now onto the bit I think Nathan really wants me to address, evil homo­sex­u­als deserve the right to have children…”

I’ve always thought it’s a lit­tle imma­ture to put words into people’s mouths that they never said. I don’t recall Nathan or any­body else call­ing homo­sex­u­als ‘evil’.

In response to the arti­cle itself, these are just my ran­dom thoughts…

I think it’s fair enough for soci­ety to sub­sidise chil­dren, to a cer­tain extent. I know it’s cliche, but chil­dren are our future. I guess it depends to what extent you’re think­ing. Our tax money goes towards build­ing schools; that’s a sub­sidy of hav­ing children.

You also said “Pro­vided par­ents pro­vide ade­quately for their chil­dren, that’s where the judge­ment should end”. Some peo­ple would argue a homo­sex­ual cou­ple is not pro­vid­ing ade­quately for chil­dren and that chil­dren should have, when pos­si­ble, both a mother and father. Sev­eral stud­ies have sup­ported this notion. Of course many peo­ple argue that a homo­sex­ual cou­ple would be more ben­e­fi­cial for a child than an alco­holic mother or abu­sive father, but nobody is advo­cat­ing that soci­ety goes out of its way to allow alco­holics and abusers to have chil­dren. In fact, as it is, kids will often get taken off par­ents like that. So should they be allowed to go to homo­sex­u­als? I’d sug­gest that while that option might be bet­ter than the orig­i­nal, a het­ero­sex­ual cou­ple would be the ‘best’ option.

A few things:

1. I like some basic reg­u­la­tion when it comes to par­ent­ing. It helps pre­vent chil­dren being neglected, and helps par­ents know what is the ‘right’ thing to do with their kids. Com­pul­sory school­ing and seat belts are good exam­ples. But it can be a fine line between set­ting guide­lines and mak­ing rules.
2. It’s a tough call to say whether par­ents are pro­vid­ing ade­quately for their chil­dren. Would I be pro­vid­ing ade­quately for my son if I never read books to him? What if I give him plenty to eat, but none of what he eats is fruit?
3. From where I sit, hav­ing chil­dren is a priv­i­lege, not a right. We have been try­ing for two years to have our sec­ond baby. I don’t believe I’m any ‘less deserv­ing’ than any­one else to have two kids. Should it be eas­ier for a “non-traditional” cou­ple to have kids than it is for my hus­band and I, or other “tra­di­tional” cou­ples in our sit­u­a­tion? (I don’t know a whole lot about pro­pos­als in regards to sur­ro­gacy, or the Medicare ben­e­fits or laws in regard to IVF, so I can’t com­ment more than throw a ques­tion out.)
4. I think it is my right to be able to stay home full time with my son. Well, maybe it’s my son’s right to have me stay home with him. I expect that soci­ety will sup­port that (Leah’s school exam­ple was a good one) — but I cer­tainly don’t expect that gov­ern­ment should sup­port me mon­e­tar­ily, or to sup­port some­one mon­e­tar­ily in their choice to not care full time for their kids, which I’m guess­ing is what you were allud­ing to.

They can play the part — but they can’t phys­i­cally be par­ents. One of them can. I’d say a sig­nif­i­cant part of the act of par­ent­ing stems from genetic ties.

Not so, I don’t think. Adop­tive par­ents? Step par­ents? There are also plenty of genetic par­ents who don’t care (absent dads/mums).

Also, think­ing aloud, is it not a good thing to enter into par­ent­hood with intent? So you could assume that if you are going to go through a huge and com­plex process to have a child (IVF, same-sex, sur­ro­gate) then you must really really want a child and gen­er­ally are going to pay a lot of atten­tion to par­ent­ing and try­ing to do it well?

You could say a lot of peo­ple who can ‘nat­u­rally’ don’t have the right intent. Some peo­ple think babies are cute acces­sories (not for long I’m sure). A few friends of mine had chil­dren just so they could jus­tify not work­ing. But who am I to decide what other peo­ple should do?

No, not a par­ent. But these issues affect whether we will be or should expect to be.

Also, I feel that hav­ing chil­dren is a priv­i­lege. Many can’t and I have seen how heart­break­ing it is for them. So who are we to argue with that desire for chil­dren, who­ever has it?

How much of this can we really leg­is­late for with­out becom­ing a nation that makes peo­ple pass a test or some­thing to have kids? How do we make the judge­ment as to who can and can’t? Who is the arbi­tra­tor of worthiness?

I don’t expect (when/if my time comes) the gov­ern­ment to throw cash at me but I do think there are things that can be leg­is­lated [sic?] for that help peo­ple out (such as the cur­rent rul­ing that your job must be held for you, or allow­ing income split­ting between a cou­ple). Espe­cially given cur­rent liv­ing costs (ie. as the reserve bank com­mented recently, the huge dif­fi­culty faced by under 35s to pur­chase a house) ver­sus the body’s fer­til­ity lev­els (both male and female are gen­er­ally more fer­tile under 35).

When it takes 2 aver­age incomes to buy an aver­age house in our cap­i­tal cities the fer­til­ity rate is going to suf­fer, and we really don’t want to end up in the posi­tion Japan is in cur­rently where the ratio of retirees to work­ers is hope­lessly skewed.

I don’t see a con­nec­tion from ‘what is’ to ‘what ought’ with­out ref­er­ence to a moral authority.

““I think all poten­tial par­ents should have an equal right to access that privledge. ”

Homo­sex­ual cou­ples, with­out exter­nal assis­tance, are not “poten­tial par­ents”… cer­tainly not bio­log­i­cally speaking.”

I don’t agree with Nathans logic, but so what if they can or if they desire it, what is the con­nec­tion to it being their right?

Benny:
Re Japan — boost­ing the birthrate has to be part of the solu­tion. Not all of it cer­tainly, but part of it.

Re job hold­ing. No, not to bait you but if you’ll indulge me:
One of the main rea­sons I will stay at my cur­rent work­place is the high level of sup­port and flex­i­bil­ity of con­di­tions sur­round­ing mater­nity leave and chil­dren. The costs of rehir­ing posi­tions, train­ing staff are sub­stan­tial, not to men­tion other costs such as the loss of expe­ri­ence when staff leave to have chil­dren and don’t come back. Because my job is there for me I will also not be a bur­den on the tax­a­tion sys­tem by need­ing unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits or par­ent­ing allowances, and I will be more likely to be pay­ing tax (given I won’t be hav­ing dif­fi­culty find­ing a job after chil­dren — and moth­ers attempt­ing to return to the work­place is the huge hid­den face of unem­ploy­ment numbers).

How is this a bad thing?

What do you think I’m say­ing that you don’t agree with? Gay peo­ple can’t have chil­dren with­out the help of a per­son of the oppo­site gender.

That’s fact. That’s not logic.

“How much of this can we really leg­is­late for with­out becom­ing a nation that makes peo­ple pass a test or some­thing to have kids?”

Why is that out­come seen as a bad thing. I don’t know how you can enforce it — but you have to do a test to be able to drive a car.

2. I am not sure why whether there is job hold­ing impacts tax payed and unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits. Tax dur­ing the leave will be paid depend­ing on any leave ben­e­fits obtained, and them­selves may be busi­ness paid (which i heav­ily oppose) or gov­ern­ment funded (which i much less oppose). so, the impacts of the job hold­ing will only be rel­e­vant on return­ing to the work force. lost tax­a­tion would occur if you couldn’t imme­di­ately re-enter the work­force. So, while you would be pay­ing less tax, who­ever now fills the posi­tion would be. So there should be no net tax­a­tion losses. A sim­i­lar argue­ment applies for unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits. If there is no net change to teh labour force, there is no change to unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits. If you aren’t receiv­ing unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits, the per­son who is dis­placed will be.

5. we have a pretty com­pet­i­tive labour mar­ket. if a busi­ness doesn’t find value in pro­vid­ing job hold­ing, it is likely because you are read­ily replaced. Thus, the mar­ket sounds pretty fluid. In which case, there shouldn’t be a great deal of trou­ble gain­ing employ­ment when you re-enter the labour mar­ket. The only rea­son you would find it dif­fi­cult to obtain a par­tic­u­lar posi­tion would be if there were bet­ter alter­na­tive employ­ees. In which case, that per­son should get the posi­tion ahead of you. Oth­er­wise we are pro­mot­ing a pol­icy that gives pref­er­en­tial treat­ment to moth­ers above more qual­i­fied can­di­dates. This would also impact busi­ness productivity.

smi­ley, your word limit for com­ments angers me.

“Anec­do­tally there are lots of adopted chil­dren who seek out their bio­log­i­cal par­ents because there’s some­thing about the genetic mix that counts in turn­ing us into the peo­ple we are. ”

Is this really such a big issue that its worth stop­ping a cou­ple hav­ing access to hav­ing a fam­ily? Your argue­ment that we should be try­ing to only hav­ing fam­i­lies with strong genetic ties seems some­what insignif­i­cant in the grand scheme here.

I thought the church was meant to be all for adop­tion as such (espe­cially as opposed to abbor­tion). Doesn’t this logic fly against that?

I don’t have a word limit for comments.

I agree that it shouldn’t be eas­ier to have a child then drive a car — but how earth do you cre­ate some sort of test to be a parent?

Give all young boys reversable vasec­tomies which they have to pass a test to remove??? Forced abortions?

There are plenty of peo­ple that I don’t think should breed. But I don’t have the right to tell them not to.

“Why should gay peo­ple be given the priv­i­lege of child rear­ing when chil­dren are a biprod­uct of het­ero­sex­ual relationships?”

Because they want kids.

Sec­ond that.

And yep, the com­ment­ing thing has got­ten very confusing.

I mean that if some­one has a job to go back to then she will not need to be on ben­e­fits once she is ready to rejoin the workforce.

I don’t see how that has answered the ques­tion you quoted.

Yes. We pay for IVF and the sup­port of pre­ma­ture babies. That seems largely irrel­e­vant to my point.

We pay for plenty of things with our taxes that I receive no ben­e­fit from — that doesn’t give me an enti­tle­ment to them.

Pub­lic fund­ing does not auto­mat­i­cally enti­tle the whole pub­lic to a ben­e­fit — it can pro­vide a ben­e­fit to soci­ety broadly. This is, I believe, is why churches are tax exempt… why uni­ver­sity edu­ca­tion is sub­sidised and why invest­ment into the arts is tax deductible even though nobody watches Aus­tralian movies and less peo­ple work on mak­ing them.

Just want­ing a grant to make an Aus­tralian Movie doesn’t enti­tle you to one — you have to have the capac­ity to make a film.

»“When it takes 2 aver­age incomes to buy an aver­age house in our cap­i­tal cities the fer­til­ity rate is going to suffer”

It would be inter­est­ing to inves­ti­gate how it came about that it takes two incomes — could it per­haps be that after the fem­i­nist push of the creed that women can have both a fam­ily and a career (some­thing that sadly many women are find­ing out too late is not nec­es­sar­ily true!) that banks and real estate costs rose to match the higher income of the new dual-income families?

»“How do we make the judge­ment as to who can and can’t? Who is the arbi­tra­tor of worthiness? ”

I don’t think it’s about ‘wor­thi­ness’, I think it’s ‘appro­pri­ate­ness’ and I think stud­ies have shown that the appro­pri­ate envi­ron­ment for chil­dren is a home with a mum and a dad, and so that should guide our leg­is­la­tion on who ‘deserves’ to be given adop­tion and fer­til­ity treatment.

No one has yet shown why ‘because I want one’ instantly gives one the right to do some­thing.
Some­times that desire to have a child for one’s own grat­i­fi­ca­tion can lead to unreal expec­ta­tions on the child, which is not healthy. So the desire argu­ment can go either way and can­not be the basis for such a deci­sion. It must what is in the best inter­ests of chil­dren — and as has been men­tioned sev­eral times, but I think largely ignored, hav­ing a mum and a dad is the best envi­ron­ment for chil­dren, and so that is a very good rea­son to leg­is­late that adop­tion and IVF only be avail­able to such a unit (which would rule out homo­sex­ual cou­ples but also sin­gle peo­ple). Per­haps one might have a let to stand on if there were no more male-female cou­ples wish­ing or avail­able to adopt, but I do not think that is the case at all.

1. I would sus­pect that the house price rise has more to do with cap­i­tal­ist creeds (encour­ag­ing prop­erty invest­ment through neg­a­tive gear­ing etc) rather than feminism.

But then, I’m an evil feminist.

Also, I don’t feel that I should have to choose between a career and a fam­ily any more than my hus­band should.

2. The appro­pri­ate­ness idea then could be fol­lowed through to an idea that chil­dren should be removed from their sin­gle parents.

I’m not say­ing there should be incen­tives as much as say­ing that there are far too many dis­in­cen­tives. And I feel that the finan­cial sac­ri­fice is all too often on the female and not the male, not only at the time but also in terms of super­an­nu­a­tion etc.

I don’t see the con­nec­tion between that fact that gay cou­ples can’t nat­u­rally have chil­dren, and the rea­son that homo­sex­ual cou­ples should not have the same rights to adopt chil­dren or have IVF. By that logic het­ero­sex­ual cou­ples who are infer­tile are not poten­tial par­ents and you would deny them access to IVF or adop­tion.
I see your point that that is a prob­lem in Benny’s argu­ment, but it is irrel­e­vant. Just because they can’t it is irra­tional to say that it is morally wrong to do so, unless you are assum­ing that is the way God made it. Ethics on the basis of nat­u­ral­ism are irra­tional, just because some­thing is, there is no log­i­cal con­nec­tion to what should be or should not be.

“things are the way they are because God made them that way.” That’s not really nat­u­ral­ism as in the phi­los­o­phy of nat­u­ral­ism. It’s still Chris­t­ian ethics, but only what can be shown from a study of nature with Chris­t­ian presuppositions.

I was refer­ring to nat­u­ral­ism as in the athe­is­tic asser­tion that the nat­ural world is all that exists, the ulti­mate real­ity. I meant that ethics is irra­tional because they assume mean­ing when the log­i­cal con­clu­sion of nat­u­ral­ism is Nihilism. Like Dave said in ‘Why I’m not an athe­sist # 2’

“But if the phys­i­cal evo­lu­tion­ary causes are the only expla­na­tion for life you have, how can you assert the real­ity of mean­ing of any kind? Itʼs not enough to say that you do assert the exis­tence of mean­ing and love and beauty! When I hear athe­ists do that, I just think they are talk­ing as a semi-Christianised athe­ist, still spend­ing some cul­tural credit hang­ing around from Chris­tian­ity! Itʼs not enough to say evo­lu­tion­ary nat­u­ral­ism doesnʼt lead to mean­ing­less for you — you have to show why it shouldnʼt?”

“But if the phys­i­cal evo­lu­tion­ary causes are the only expla­na­tion for life you have, how can you assert the real­ity of mean­ing of any kind? Itʼs not enough to say that you do assert the exis­tence of mean­ing and love and beauty! When I hear athe­ists do that, I just think they are talk­ing as a semi-Christianised athe­ist, still spend­ing some cul­tural credit hang­ing around from Chris­tian­ity! Itʼs not enough to say evo­lu­tion­ary nat­u­ral­ism doesnʼt lead to mean­ing­less for you — you have to show why it shouldnʼt?”

Are you quot­ing some­one, or are you say­ing this?

Infer­til­ity isn’t the only rea­son for IVF — it is used also as a method of genetic screen­ing, only implant­ing embryos that don’t have genetic or chro­mo­so­mal defects.
I don’t see pre­ma­ture babies on life sup­port a whole lot dif­fer­ent to life sup­port or life sav­ing pro­ce­dures for an adult.

Which is why poltics is hard.

In a mul­ti­cul­tural, mul­ti­faith soci­ety the law can’t act using Chris­t­ian pre­sup­po­si­tional ethics.

We can’t, as Chris­tians, impose our ethics whole­sale on peo­ple who don’t have the same frame­work. Put the boot on the other foot — how should this issue be leg­is­lated from the per­spec­tive of an atheist?

Is a mul­ti­cul­tural soci­ety a good idea?

I don’t think that’s the ques­tion we’re deal­ing with. Mul­ti­cul­tural soci­eties have been the real­ity since the Roman Empire.

There is no Bib­li­cal man­date for a theoc­racy. The clos­est we have is Israel — and look how that turned out.

Our Bib­li­cal polit­i­cal imper­a­tive is to trust God to use those in polit­i­cal power as agents of jus­tice (Romans 13 (off the top of my head), and to pray for them.

There’s a Bib­li­cal basis for using the tools of gov­ern­ment as a means for car­ing for the poor, but I can’t see any man­date for pur­su­ing a theoc­racy or for even encour­ag­ing rulers to gov­ern accord­ing to Bib­li­cal principles.

Rome was prob­a­bly the most anti-God gov­ern­ment of all time (given that rulers were wor­shiped as Gods) you would think that if this was God’s inten­tion for us as Chris­tians the Bible would say more about oppos­ing or influ­enc­ing the Gov­ern­ment than it does.