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04/19/2007
Video: Grown adults ignore reality of life
Stuart Shepard, managing editor of Focus on the Family's CitizenLink news site, has interviewed a whole slew of the "pro-family" activists who work with FOF to keep this nation, among other things, unfriendly to gay folks. Here now are a few of those video pieces, along with a few of our own thoughts:
David Fowler of the Family Action Council of Tennessee:
Okay, so the pull quote from this one comes around the 1:05 mark, when Fowler says:
"At the core of who we are is the belief that the traditional family, a mom and a dad who are married raising their children, is good for society, it's good for EVERYONE. It's good for those who are not married. It is good for the social structure that the health of future generations passes through the portal of family today, and so to the extent we have a culture that values those families and what they do and what they add to the common good is a healthy society, and that's what we want to promote."
We reply:
Well, you know who it's not good for, Mr. Fowler? Those who realize that gay and lesbian people are not antipathetic or counter-productive to family life, but rather a part of the spectrum of familial normalcy! Under this sound bite-ready rhetoric is the heterosexist idea that gay couples are without worth or value, the idea that tradition and values are not found in gay-headed homes, and the concept that morality is only bestowed upon those male/female couples who say "I do" at the hetero-only altar. To those of us who are in gay couples and who would challenge anyone to a game of "Compare the Family Ethics" any day of the week, this short-sighted portrait of acceptable family life is nothing short of offensive!
The only reason why gay people are not considered part of the "traditional family" is because the "moral" among us have been keeping LGBT acceptance at bay for eons. However, if we could at the flick of a wrist eliminate all bias from the world and create an environment where gay folks were free to grow, date, love, and partner instead of fret, date the wrong gender, love in secret, and partner in a legally unrecognized fashion, we could do more for the "social structure" than Mr. Fowler's discriminatory pushes could ever hope to accomplish!
Victoria Cobb - The Family Foundation of Virginia:
(1:24) "Most Virginians would now know us as the leader of the marriage amendment that just happened in our state, where we were able to organize a lot of organizations to come together to fight for a simple concept -- that a child needs both a mom and a dad, and needs that opportunity, and we were excited to have a victory on that front."
Response:
Well, you're right about one thing, Ms. Cobb: Yours is surely a "simple" concept. However, unfortunately for the long-term goals of your organization, life and reality are not as simple as you'd like them to be. For some people, the idea of "mom and dad" is just not the truth to which they are geared. The over-simplication of what constitutes a family is the key number one problem of the "pro-family" movement, and one that we can't believe that the American public continues to buy. It is this biased "moral" outlook that gets gay members of families shunned by their kin, keeps committed gay couples legally separated, prevents a non-biological parent unable to obtain legal connection to a child that they love and raise, etc.
While at this point, most Virginians may know you kids at the leaders of the marriage amendment, Ms. Cobb, it's almost a certainty that as time passes and folks wise up to the reality of gay people, history will, at least on this particular issue, know the Family Foundation of Virginia as a backwards-thinking group that unfairly forced gays to pause their lives to detail why, exactly, their tax-paying existences are worth just as much value as anyone else's!
Julaine Appling - Family Research Institute of Wisconsin:
(1:48) "...children are told that whatever they want to be, as it relates to their sexual orientation, for instance, they can be -- that there's no right or wrong"
And again:
Uhm, no -- children are told that the can be whatever they want to be, as it relates to careers, politics, religion, etc. However, as it relates to sexual orientation, children are told -- or at least should be -- that they can be WHAT THEY TRULY ARE! The true problem is that you who have hijacked morality have narrowly defined "gay" as wrong and "bias" as right!
This writer knows that it feels like to be a gay kid, told that the truth that he fully realizes is unfit for society. If folks like Ms. Appling knew how much that hurts, perhaps she would be less quick to consider herself so righteous!
There are obviously quite a few other points of these videos that deserve response, so feel free to add your own in the comments section.
PikaFilms [YouTube]
Your thoughts
"a child needs both a mom and a dad"
A child needs a warm and loving environment to be raised in; nothing more, nothing less. Throughout the whole of recorded history children have done without one parent or another, whether through illness, maternal death during childbirth, or fathers being killed in war. The nuclear family of Fifties' cliche is a very recent invention. Historically kids were often raised by groups of women while the men were away for long periods hunting or fighting other men.
Ever notice how often people who fixate on the cultural obsessions of the Middle East circa 30BC manage to ignore all the history before or since?
Posted by: John C | Apr 19, 2007 2:08:58 PM
Check out the 1:05 mark (from the end-- when the youtube counter reads 1:05) on the Cobb video...
I love how she can, in a single little 3-minute video clip, both talk about fighting against gay rights AND get her Christian persecution complex on about the free expression of (Evangelical/ conservative/ Christian) faith in public schools!
Posted by: angie | Apr 19, 2007 9:43:24 PM
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