Feel-Good Thread Right Here
@Broken_Arrow
And imo, marriage =\= family. Marriage is a means to unite two people who desire to spend their lives together and share their wealth, experiences and, well, everything.
You do not need to be married to start a family. I can attest to that by experience (parents unmarried and never were), and as could studies showing out-of-wedlock babies have grown extravagantly in the last few decades.
Marriage also does not mean love. A lot of marriages are loveless, and it's unfortunate.
Now, adopting children... That's a whole other topic than homosexual marriage. Now we have to take into account how a child develops having been raised by homosexual parents. Since homosexual relations is just recently a "public" appearance (most people a decade or so would've hid rather than expose their sexual preferences! Not to mention in the 1950s and before, it was a huge offense! Again, see
Milk.), there isn't enough information on how children are affected by it.
If it turns out the effects are negative, then I would be against it, because the rights of the child surpass those of the want-to-be parents. Overall, we have to protect the child's best interests because in that kind of situation, the children cannot escape and are forced to live in such an environment until they are at least eighteen. Negative effects for me would entail social complexes such as unable to differentiate between genders or unable to communicate needs or wants properly. Again, nothing has been really done in studies, so I'm just naming could-be's and not stuff that's actually proven.
However, if children are
not negatively affected by having homosexual parents - and it is proven through studies, nyaa - then let it be so. I don't see any issues with it unless it's going to hurt the child in question.
At this point, I can't see it hurting children except by not having one figure or another in their lives. I have seen studies that show that children benefit more from having a mother and father of the respective genders because mothers are better at some things and fathers at others; however, if the child has homosexual parents who
act as we stereotype fathers and mothers to act, then again, I don't see how it could have any sort of negative effect... Other than, you know, prejudice at school. But kids will always find something to pick on another kid about: their name, their class, their hair. It really isn't anything new.
That's a whole different topic, though. Just felt that that should've been explained for Broken_Arrow.
/end-somewhat-off topic