Not Every Child Does Better with a Mother and a Father!
This is possibly one of the sickest stories I have written about Since I started my blog almost 5 months ago. I came upon the story from a blog post about the daughter and her rehabilitation, and surprisingly hadn’t heard of the initial crime at all. The link below is about the court verdict, with just enough information about the gruesome crime.
Anyone who has been following my blog will know that Marriage Equality has been a real focus for me. I didn’t mean for it to happen that way, but it has. I think the reason is that the issue (one I didn’t have that strong an opinion about initially) has at it’s intersection, the true ultimate question of Religion.
A number f years ago, my artwork often dealt with the issues of AIDS, Stigma and Society, and the collision of sex, love, blood, fear, life and death. There too, within that pandemic, I saw the ultimate question of Religion, and it led me to look at graduate study in Religious Studies. I became extremely interested in the way Religion is used as a weapon, the tool by which one group attempts to overpower and dominate another group. To me this is a bastardization of what Religion is all about, yet it is how it is so frequently used.
In the movement to oppress GLBT people and keep them as second class citizens, religion and the Bible are frequently trotted out as the amunition. I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count the number of blog posts and articles I have seen that say that children are better off with a father and a mother- as if it were a given- a 100% always true TRUTH. The reality is different however. There are women and men who rise to the occasion and are great parents, and there are some who fall short, and in the case of the linked story, hideously short of what a child needs from a family. The dividing line isn’t the genders of the parents however.
This story doesn’t prove anything either way about straight or gay parents, or the children raised by them. But it does remind us that the sexual orientation of the 2 parents is not the thing that makes a family work or fail. Fortunately, this story is not the norm, although it isn’t hard to find stories, perhaps not quite as dramatic of straight families where many children have been harmed. But it is also easy to multitudes of stories of gay and lesbian parents loving and raising wonderful children. As we move forward, I hope the day comes when we judge a family by the love within it instead of the sex of the parents.
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