Romance and having children

I didn't disapprove right away of the opinion expressed by Pete Wilson that a gay man and a lesbian woman having a child "is a travesty." But I hadn't really thought the issue through completely...

I read through the comments on the SFGate blog website and was mostly impressed by everyone else's reasoning on the matter. What I got from everyone else's thoughts was that a stable family is important and romantic involvement is not as important.

I think there is some value to the example of romantic love that parents provides to children for later in life when they go on to have their own romantic relationships. And yet, romantically attached parents doesn't feel like an absolutely essential ingredient, and there are plenty of more conventional parenting situations where this romantic element is severely degraded anyway. (Besides I'm not sure why it is, but isn't there always an eeewwww factor when thinking about your parents having sex?)

There is another point made by some on the SF blog that many marriages end in divorce, of which many are quite rankorous and full of conflict. This platonic arrangement, which Wilson calls, "a travesty", is one where such a negative outcome is extremely unlikely -- there would be no "let's stick out this [awful marriage] out for the kids"...

I guess I would summarize the reasoning as follows: if Wilson truly has an issue with children born without romantically attached parents, then he should have complained loudly about these parents: single moms and single dads through divorce, surrogacy, sperm donation and adoption, about brokeback couples with children, about widows and widowers with children, and about couples with arranged marriages with only platonic relations (having affairs on the side). If he were really concerned about the example of romantically involved parents, maybe he should have complained that heterosexuals shouldn't be having kids until they have been married for 5 or 10 years -- when they are sure their romantic involvement will last past their children's teens -- and when they are 80% sure their relationship won't end in divorce. Why doesn't he think divorce is an experiment gone too far? And why doesn't he ask all those who fit in the categories for non-romantically involved parents to give up their children for adoption immediately for the sake of the kids if it's such a travesty?

(And how about those raising pets? Shouldn't we worry about those pets getting warped, too? :) )

All joking aside, I think the reason why there is such an uproar about this is the fact that Pete Wilson only choose to make his opinion known about the non-romantic gay and lesbian couple and not about these other cases which don't meet his strict criteria. It seems to come from a specific hatred for gays and lesbians which he has chosen to show openly and publically.