Driving home yesterday morning from my early AM encounter with the endodontist, I caught the last ten minutes of a segment on Talk of the Nation. I like TOTN. I’ve learned a lot from the show. But host Neal Conan generally pilots his ship pretty straight down the middle of the channel…avoiding the higher seas and icebergs to the far right and far left. But Neal was out of the office yesterday; the guest host tackled the topic of the recent legislative pushes in several states to ban adoptions by gays and lesbians, and the S.S. TOTN strayed into some slightly choppy waters. And darned if I didn’t find myself hollering (incoherently, through my half-dead lips) at one of the guests—Charmaine Yoest of the "Family Research Council." Such a calm, soft-spoken, rational-sounding raging bigot…
Dr. Yoest’s mission was to point listeners in the direction of a study which concluded that children "do better" in homes with a Mom and a Dad. When other guests referred to thirty years of research that did not back her point, Dr. Yoest politely interrupted, called their research "flawed," or accused them of misquoting it. In the end, backed into a corner by the other guests, and challenged by excellent points made by several callers to the show, she exhorted listeners to check out the research, but, more importantly, "use your common sense."
Common sense? Wouldn’t common sense dictate that a system overloaded with children in desperate need of loving homes should welcome any and all responsible families willing to provide those homes? Wouldn’t common sense tell you that any child would "do better" in a stable adoptive home than being bounced from foster family to foster family? Hasn’t common sense been telling us for ages that homosexuality is not a learned behavior, and that gay couples do not adopt in order to raise up armies of little gay children? (And, come to think of it, what if they did?)
No, Dr. Yoest’s calm, reasonable exhortation was right-wing speak for, "Tap into your personal prejudices. If you feel threatened by homosexuality, we’ll just call that common sense." Common sense, religious right style.
Yep…just made me want to reach right through the radio and slap her upside the head.
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4 comments:
It plum pisses me off when resonable, safe, sane people are kept from being able to raise children and "crazy" people are allowed to keep them in cages.
Breaks my heart, the one with the BIG child-shaped whole in it.
The one that really, really wants kids.
The one the leans a little right.
I am not oppsed to anyone at all though adopting children and support all loving homes, regardless of the dynamics, in providing a family.
We choose who we love when we grow up but kids need families RIGHT NOW.
I have a bit of an opinion about this one.
I should get my own blog.
To paraphrase that candidate in Texas (my mind is a blank), gay people should have the right to be just as miserable as the rest of us parents. (Just kidding, Sarah and Joe! You're the lights of my life.)
I read something cheering in the newspaper. There's a Protect Marriage Arizona initiative with a goal of amending our state constitution to ban same-sex marriage. They had raised $120,000 in 2005 to put it on the ballot next November. "Meanwhile, the Together Arizona campaign, the group opposing the Protect Marriage initiative, had raised one-third more, nearly $170,000 by the end of the year." Sometimes I get so discouraged and start feeling that the average American really is a rabidly conservative fundamentalist hatemonger. That last quote made my day. I was glad to read that your hatemonger got backed into a corner.
Debbi
Well, my common sense tells me that all kids need someone to love them, and if they get two people to raise and love them, I don't for a NY minute believe it matters if it's a man and a woman, or two women, or two men, and color doesn't enter into it, nor religion, nor anything else...all of my common sense tells me that kids just need to be loved, and it makes my blood boil when I hear some of these self-righteous bigots pretending to be "the voice of reason". People like Dr. Yoest scare the hell out of me.
Good post.
Judi
Give her one for me!
V
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