Refuting fundamentalists

[Zazzy]

Having a biological two parent family is optimal, certainly.

Agreed.

I know a wonderful family. Here's the situation:

The parents are a lesbian couple.
The natural mother of the two children is one of the women.
The natural father of the children is the other woman's brother.

Both parents are biologically related: one is the natural mother, the other is the natural aunt. Both parents are well-paid professionals, the kids are great (both are scary smart), the friends and family are omnipresent.

Anyway, a biological two parent family. The kids are 10 and 12 now and doing great.

*Edit- just to clarify, the sperm was donated by the one woman's brother to the other woman. I personally inseminated the last one, which was fun, but weird. I got the honors because the wife was sick that day. It was beautiful, and can tell this gorgeous girl that I was there when she was conceived!

[Lion IRC]

Repeat the experiment 100 million times and get back to me with the results.

Opposite-gender mate selection and heterosexual (gender-balanced) parenting of human offspring has been "doing great" for 50,000 years.

[Polaris]

What benefit is there in trying to refute Fundies?

When they say something outlandish, I just politely move in the opposite direction and don't talk to them for the rest of the day. You'll find you'll be much better off doing the same.

[Esquilax]

Repeat the experiment 100 million times and get back to me with the results.

Such studies already exist.

Opposite-gender mate selection and heterosexual (gender-balanced) parenting of human offspring has been "doing great" for 50,000 years.

Well, at least I get to play the fallacy spotting game: appeal to tradition.

Do you have anything... you know, not based on fallacious reasoning?

[pineapplebunnybounce]

Repeat the experiment 100 million times and get back to me with the results.

Opposite-gender mate selection and heterosexual (gender-balanced) parenting of human offspring has been "doing great" for 50,000 years.

Did you not read what I said about experiments at this scale? It's not reasonably doable (especially when gay marriage is such a new thing, which means no official records, which means active recruiting). Which part of that is so hard to understand?

You can't even substantiate your claim that if you compare 100mil homo couples and hetero couples the result will be in your favour. Go ahead and try and present your result. Since you're already so sure that it worked well historically, it shouldn't be too hard for you to find data.

[Lion IRC]

People respond to criticism of the lack of gender balance and "role models" in same-sex adoptive parenting by saying...
oh well we have uncle Bill or cousin Mike involved in their upbringing so they have male role models.

But that merely reinforces the point that such a role model IS valuable if you hope to raise a child who will ''do well" when it comes to Darwinian sexual selection.

[Esquilax]

I simply state that being a good or bad parents isn't really relevant.
With homosexuals, it really isn't, for whether they are good or bad, they will never constitute the type of family that society prefers.

And you could make the same kind of argument about racial segregation years back. "What society prefers," isn't always what's right.

So I'd say that we ought to leave parenting to the people that constitute the desired candidates for parenthood, meaning, married heterosexual couples, who were blessed by nature with the ability to procreate, and have naturally been given the task of parenthood.

And the notion that social change for the better only occurs when we don't kowtow to what always has been and instead move toward what's actually right and equal, in accordance with factual accuracy means nothing to you, huh?

Well, no tradition is without basis.

Except that the basis only need be perception, and not reality: witchburning was a tradition because there was the perception that magic was real, when the reality was different. That's why the appeal to tradition is such an egocentric clusterfuck: you're completely disregarding the possibility that people could ever be wrong about anything, and ever need to change.

And as such, the tradition of parenthood and family has a basis. It simply comes down on your ability to accept it.

Does it? Got any more than a flat assertion?

It is due to the fact that you don't accept, nor respect these traditions that a significant portion of society opposes you, and the people you support.

Said the slaver to the abolitionist. Said the racist to the equal rights protestor. Said the misogynist to the suffragette. And so on, and so forth.

[kılıç_mehmet]

Agreed.

Strongly disagree. I've seen many "biological families" fall apart to not fall for this illusion of the perfect family. Such things are rare if they exist at all. Biological or not parents are susceptible to the same mistakes.

@ mehmet, the mere fact that you think people go through the trouble of having a family just to mock your "model" really reveals how mature you are. Are you saying that the only reason heteros deserve to marry and have a family is because they have a basis in tradition? Wow. Uhm, everyone has a right to have a family as long as everything's consensual, I especially like how you tried to make equality sound like a dirty word and a crazy concept.

Well, I do believe that this is not a battle of rights, but of concepts. Its was never about rights, but only social acceptance. The current form of family denies gays social acceptance by merely existing. So either you must find a way to destroy its credibility in the eyes of the people, or abolish it completely.

By consensual, you really don't ask for the child's consent when you create it by natural ways, and you sure don't ask for the child's consent when you give it away from an orphanage. You simply look at the family itself. And until now, only married heterosexual couples were allowed to adopt children. The gay rights movement needed to grant gays the right to marriage in order to grant them the rights to adopt children, as a non-married couple will not be able to adopt a child. So I still stand by my point that this is not a matter of rights. And yes indeed, equality as I had said before, is only amongst equals. The basis of tradition is not one that is so easily discarded. By trying to do this, you will obviously generate a lot heat, and replying to it with claims of moral superiority only makes you look ridiculous.
Besides, I still don't think that you actually give a damn about children.
I'd say that even a less well functioning nuclear family would breed less confusion and less social stigma for a child than a homosexual family would.

To think that we can protect our children from the realities of life is simply unrealistic. Children will always encounter some form of hardships concerning something or another, whether it be their weight, the acne on their faces, the glasses they wear, the clothes they wear, etc.

If we lived in a perfect world, children would not get picked on for anything because there would be no ignorance that would breed the type of bigotry to get them picked on by others.

Well, children will face hardships true, but hardships based on those who are their parents are usually the ones that hit them the hardest. I could stand up for anything that people say to me. May it be my looks, may it be my accent, may it be my glasses, though I don't wear any, or may it be my social standing within the school that is the combination of any, but I claim that if anyone would dare to insult my mother, I'd probably act violent. And usually people do not have a lot reasons to insult someone's mother, especially if she is known to be a either a housewife, or an honest working woman. But if my mother were to be a whore, or anyone of a similar occupation, even though she's my mother, I'd have to deal with the stigma of what the occupation brings with itself. As we don't live in a perfect world, I too would be a part of it, as a child of someone I wil never even meet, I'm a child of an hour's worth of money.

Similarly, the child that is being raised by homosexuals will face these, and in addition, will face problems concerning the reality. While the kids at school have a mother and father, he/she has two mothers or two fathers. Explaining this to a child is particularly hard, and even harder to explain to him/her how children come to be, and how does it come that one of his/her parents is not of the opposite sex. Confusion. Nothing more. This is why I consider same-sex parenthood to be undesirable and harmful to children.
Even worse are those who use surrogacy to have children, something that is ethically very debatable, concerning the use of women as incubating agents, but is again promoted by the same people.

So I'd again say, this debate is one that disregards children, so that gays can feel more normal about themselves, and society accepts them on the same level as heterosexuals.

And this kind of thinking is only the mere perpetuation of the problems that need to be eradicated.

Well, these problems as you call them, are not due to us, they are due to the pushing of homosexual agenda into the normally well functioning social institutions.

I know a wonderful family. Here's the situation:

The aunt is still not the mother though, so it defeats the purpose.

[Esquilax]

People respond to criticism of the lack of gender balance and "role models" in same-sex adoptive parenting by saying...
oh well we have uncle Bill or cousin Mike involved in their upbringing so they have male role models.

But that merely reinforces the point that such a role model IS valuable if you hope to raise a child who will ''do well" when it comes to Darwinian sexual selection.

And how does the argumentation of single individual cases at all prove a wider, factual point? Do tell.

[Esquilax]

Similarly, the child that is being raised by homosexuals will face these, and in addition, will face problems concerning the reality. While the kids at school have a mother and father, he/she has two mothers or two fathers. Explaining this to a child is particularly hard, and even harder to explain to him/her how children come to be, and how does it come that one of his/her parents is not of the opposite sex. Confusion. Nothing more. This is why I consider same-sex parenthood to be undesirable and harmful to children.

Good god, have you even met a child before? "Billy has two daddies" is not this intensely complex logical puzzle for them, dude. It's actually a pretty simple concept; my sister is a teacher, and she's never had a child come through that was at all scarred by this "confusion," beyond that trouble which is made by other kids raised by parents to be bigots. And I don't think the bullying instilled by homophobes is really the problem of same sex parents.

This is the problem with this tradition argument: you've got the same people that get to stack the decks against homosexuals saying that their way clearly doesn't work or it'd be more prevalent, and pretending like they have no bias, nor a hand in why this is so.