Mrs. Clinton endorses gay adoption, quietly
Struggling with Senator Barack Obama for black votes, Hillary Clinton acquitted herself well in Selma the other day. That Southern drawl she’s suddenly developed assures her a job with any future revival of “Hee Haw” if her presidential ambitions are quashed.
Not so widely covered by the mainstream media was a speech Senator Clinton delivered two days earlier. She spoke before 400 members of the Human Rights Campaign, which boasts it’s the nation’s largest gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization. Hillary was gushing with enthusiasm for the HRC: “I love the fact it’s my initials, have you ever noticed that?”
She’s proud to stand with the Human Rights Campaign, she told them. Apparently not, however, proud enough to publicize her address to the group. The Associated Press reported that when she was asked Monday why she didn’t advertise the speech, as is usually done, Mrs. Clinton responded, “You’ll have to ask my campaign.”
The liberal double standard is wondrous to behold. George W. Bush is directly responsible for the misdeeds of any soldier anywhere in the world. Yet when one of their own is challenged, liberals immediately shift into full Sergeant Schultz “I know nothing . . . nothing!” mode. This, despite the fact that Hillary’s campaign isn’t quite as large as the U.S. military. Although it may spend more. Private detectives can be so very expensive.
The Human Rights Campaign posted a video of Hillary’s talk on YouTube.com. She began by congratulating the organization for the fabulous job it did in giving the country Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid. They saved the Republic from a fate worse than death, two more years of GOP control of Congress.
She extended kudos for helping to defeat last year’s Federal Marriage Amendment, which would have (close your eyes here, children) defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
The proposal, said Hillary, was wedge politics at its worst. It runs against the entire forward movement of American history. Moreover, it was mean spirited.
Both HRC the person and HRC the organization routinely charge that something, or somebody, is mean spirited. In 2003, a Human Rights Campaign spokesperson termed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) “a mean spirited attack on gay families.” The bill denied Federal acknowledgment of same-sex marriages and permitted states to not recognize same-sex marriages licensed in other states.
In her speech, Mrs. Clinton didn’t mention DOMA, possibly because it was signed by Mr. Clinton when he was president. The senator has subsequently voiced her support for the law. Looking now to keep an important constituency happy, Hillary’s changing her story.
Former Clinton advisor Dick Morris has written that the Clintons’ interest in DOMA came after polling data suggested strong public approval. Her support, she claims, wasn’t based on that. Rather, it was a clever plan to derail a constitutional amendment that would have banned gay marriages. Sure, I believe that.
The senator detailed for the HRC crowd her opposition to her husband’s failed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, her backing of legislation prohibiting employment discrimination and her hatred of hate crimes.
Then she said something I haven’t heard her say on TV: “We’re going to make sure that nothing stands in the way of loving couples, gay or straight, who want to adopt children.”
Gay adoption is the new front. The battle against civil unions or gay marriages has pretty well been decided. It’s no longer a question of if; the remaining questions are when and how the laws will be structured.
Still, many Americans — a majority according to some polls — oppose gay adoption. For Mrs. Clinton to have so softly expressed her support for gay adoption suggests she knows her endorsement could prove risky, at least in a general election.
Courting gay activists is essential for any Democratic candidate and the senator ended her talk by speaking of those she believes need a voice:
“The boy who is afraid to walk down the hallway at school. The devoted partner barred from the hospital bedside of the woman she loves. And all those who still go about their daily lives in silence, unable to acknowledge who they are and who they love.
“For more than 25 years you at the Human Rights Campaign have been their voice and I am proud to stand by your side. I want you to know that just as you always have an open door to my Senate office, you will always have an open door to the White House.”
After seeing how she’s tried keeping her speech and its support for gay adoption under the radar, you have to wonder whether or not it’ll be the front door that’s always open.
This Michael Bates column appeared in the March 8, 2007 Reporter Newspapers.
Michael M. Bates has written a weekly column of opinion since 1985 for the (southwest suburban Chicago) Reporter Newspapers. Additionally, his articles have appeared in the Congressional Record, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Mensa Journal. He has been a guest on Milt Rosenberg's program on WGN Radio Chicago, the Bruce Elliott show on Baltimore's WBAL, the Jim Sumpter show on the USA Radio Network and The New Media Journal on Blog Talk Radio. As a lad, Mike distributed Goldwater campaign literature and since then has steadily moved further to the Right. He is the author of "Right Angles and Other Obstinate Truths." In 2007, he won an Illinois Press Association award for Original Column. | More from Mike Bates
Stumble It!
March 8th, 2007 at 8:54 am
Sexual deviants capturing kids is what the next big thrust of the movement is all about. Rome had catamites for sale and today’s progressives will continue the ancient tradition of queers accessing kids.
March 8th, 2007 at 10:28 am
While it is a sad typical political ploy (pandering to a subgroup) the topic of this story doesn’t address the real problem: This is a family matter. Why is the government involved at all? Adoption is another word for a piece of paper that says they won’t later attack and break up the family you choose to make. It is a protection racket, and not laissez-faire, as she pretends it is.
The obvious thing is that it won’t help lesbians at all, at least fertile ones. They can buy sperm on the market. So why is Ms. Klinton supporting this change, knowing it helps gay men? Here is the key: Because she knows it won’t help straight men to adopt, therefore it preserves the feminist privilege to get child support from unsuspecting males they can trick into believing the woman’s family goals were sincere.
This is where conservatives have a big opportunity. If adoption must be government-controlled, they could support adoption for individual men, who are often prohibited to do so, or effectively prohibited by automatic rejection. Then when a man wants to start a family, because it would then be sole custody, he does not have to worry about the woman abducting them with the aid of the courts. The family would then be preserved, as nature intended, because there is no monopolistic tool for the woman.
March 8th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Honestly, one would think gay marriage would be a bigger issue than gay adoption. It really is not that big of an issue considering that the majority of people opposed to gay adoption are not tripping over themselves to adopt unwanted children. Those kids still remain in foster care, bounced from home to home, with little to no hope for a stable family. The idea of opposing anything that would grant those children that is rather silly, again because the opposition is not adopting those children.
As for Clinton hiding the speech, I do find that curious. If she truly supports gay adoption, then it makes little sense for her to hide it. Of course, she could later claim that the reason for keeping it under the radar is because of the reaction her support would garner from the right. Let us not forget that Clinton is still trying to play the moderate. I do not think anyone particularly buys her act, but she is trying to appear that she is in the middle. I suppose that may explain her keeping the speech low-key, but not much.
March 8th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
Hillarious Hillary has not got it all her own way. There are a few women speaking out against same sex relationships and against same sex couples adopting children.
Jennifer Roback Morse, for example, gave a speech recently too. In it she made some very pertinent arguements and said:-
The family is the basic unit that propels society forward into the next generation. Neither the state nor the market can perform this function of generating and rearing children. A man and a woman, united in marriage, and their children, constitute the basic cell of the family. . .
Men and women are different in socially significant ways. These differences are intrinsically complementary, and have the potential to be sources of mutual benefit, despite the easily observed fact that gender differences can be a source of conflict and misunderstanding between men and women.
I argue that complementarity between men and women is an essential aspect of both marriage and parenting. Obviously, the reproductive process itself requires a parent of each gender. For their full development, children need parents of both genders. Mothers and fathers each make unique and distinct contributions to the child’s development. We know that mother absence in infancy places a child at risk for attachment disorder. We know that breast-feeding offers unique physiological and psychological protections to an infant. Likewise, fathers provide valuable inputs that women, even masculine women can not provide.
The absence of a child’s father in the household places boys at risk for delinquent and girls at risk for early sexual activity. Across a wide array of behaviors, we find that boys and girls respond differently to father absence than to mother absence, and indeed that boys and girls develop differently, and respond to their environments differently. Gender is a relevant category for parenting.
The alternative view is that gender is an irrelevant category and that men and women are interchangeable. There is no unique contribution of either gender to anything relevant to the family. The contributions to child-rearing that I am calling uniquely masculine can be rendered by a woman. The uniquely feminine contributions to the family can, in principle, be provided by a man. But this view that men and women are perfect substitutes for all practical purposes undercuts the very idea of sexual orientation.
A gay man’s insistence on a male sexual partner provides evidence that he does not regard men and women as perfect substitutes. A lesbian woman’s desire for a female partner illustrates that she herself does not regard even a “feminine†man to be just as good as a woman. If men and women were truly interchangeable, then the idea of “sexual orientation†would be incomprehensible. No one would insist on either an opposite sex partner or a same sex partner. No one could plausibly claim that they were being discriminated against by the requirement that marriage consist of a man and a woman. Evidently, the same sex experience can’t be replicated by having an opposite sex partner. I conclude that even people who experience same sex attraction believe that the differences between men and women are significant and meaningful. Gender is relevant, in at least some dimensions.
Advocates of same sex parenting claim the gender is irrelevant for the purposes of parenting. Everything a child gets from his mother can be equally obtained from a household with two fathers. Likewise, he or she can just as well receive everything a child gets from his father all across his developmental stages, from a household with two mothers. Yet at the same time that gender is supposed to be irrelevant to children, gender is considered crucial for adults. The same adults who insist on a partner of a specific gender claim that the children regard the gender of his parents as irrelevant.
Put another way, adults are entitled to have what they want. Children have to take what we give them.
Advocates of opposite sex parenting face no such conundrum. We accept that the differences between men and women are real, significant and complementary. Indeed, one of the great purposes of uniting men and women in marriage is to provide the children they may bear with the unique and mutually complementary gifts that each gender provides.
This, then is my first public reason for limiting adoption by same sex couples. The child has a right to have a relationship with both of his parents, united to each other in bonds of love. The situation of adoption itself presupposes that something has happened to disrupt that ordinary entitlement of the child. However, the child is still entitled to an adoptive situation that most closely mirrors a life-long relationship with both parents.
We want the child to have contributions of each gender to his well-being, and we want the child to be supported by a stable long-term relationship marriage relationship. We know that children do best with their biological parents, married to each other. This is superior to having divorced parents, step parents, cohabiting biological parents, single parents. Based on that evidence, combined with the inconclusive nature of the evidence on same sex parenting, we have no right to assume that children will do just fine with same sex couples.
http://jennifer-roback- morse.blogspot.com/
March 9th, 2007 at 10:12 am
At the moment there is no evidence that demonstrates any overt detrimental harm to a child being raised by two parents of the same gender.
A child also has a right to a loving, stable home. Again, most people advocating against gay adoption are not providing that for those children. So the argument against it really sounds like, “These kids need a mother and a father. Not me and my wife, of course. But someone who isn’t gay and is married should take those kids in. Just not me and my wife.”
That is not a compelling argument. It sounds more like an attempt to attack gays rather than any genuine concern for those children. After all, the easiest means of preventing gay adoption is by adopting the children yourself. Since there are more straight couples than gay couples, this should not be a problem. However, no one seems to want to do that. Instead, people fight against other people who wish to care for children no one else wants.