Three judges in Britain have ruled against the appeal of a mother whose children were adopted by a homosexual couple.
The state took the children because the woman and her mate, the children’s father, are alcoholics.
Officials in Camden, a borough in London, had said homosexuals could adopt the children. The three-judge panel, two of them leftist women, said the borough council did the right thing because the woman would not, most likely, stop drinking.
What Happened
After Camden Council removed the children from the mother, who was “highly educated” though an alcoholic, she and the father of the children protested because the Council picked a homosexual couple for the adoption.
According to the Camden New Journal, “[t]he eminent judge, Dame Janet Smith, told the court on Tuesday that the mother and the boys’ father had been “distressed” to learn of the sexual orientation of the prospective adopters.”
But the judge said of the gay couple: “The evidence was all one way. This couple are suitable adoptive parents and there is no specific reason to think that the placement might fail.”
The gay couple had, she added, been through a rigorous selection process and Camden was convinced they will “provide a secure and loving home” for the children.
The newspaper reported that the mother did not protest the children being adopted, that she “did not appeal against that and only launched her battle to revoke the order in April this year after finding out that her children’s prospective adopters were gay.”
So although she was not in control of her drinking, she was in control of her moral faculties; she did not want homosexuals raising her children. But the leftist court plowed ahead, the newspaper reported: “The judge … said the case revealed ‘a sad human story’ of parents who met at a detox clinic but who had never managed to conquer their mutual dependence on alcohol and lost their children as a result.”
Although the mother was “very successful” in early life, she and her partner fought drunkenly in front of their children. The court was told she constantly denied her alcohol dependence and accused police of harassment and fabricating evidence against her.
Dame Janet said it was clear she was “out of touch with reality and capable of telling a pack of lies”.
The newspaper reported that “[m]atters reached a head when [the mother] was seen staggering drunkenly in the street and her children found wandering unchecked.”
The court dismissed the woman’s plea that she had licked alcohol, dumped the father and was living on the straight and narrow, albeit one day at time with regular attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. It was “too good to be true,” the judge opined, that the woman had suddenly changed.
The mother is appealing the court’s decision, and the council will not finalize the homosexual adoption until the country’s highest court rules.
For its part, the borough council is happy to send the children to homosexuals: ““We are satisfied that the court has made the right decision,” Councillor Angela Mason said, the newspaper reported, adding:
Camden is a borough with a diverse population and we are pleased that our adoption placements reflect that. We pride ourselves on being a borough which values diversity and always tries to find the very best solutions for children in our care. The gay couple who have been approved to take over care from the mother went through a rigorous selection process and we are convinced they will provide a secure and loving home for the children.
Depriving Children Of Normal Parents
Not everyone agrees with such a sanguine view of the situation, LifeSiteNews.com reported, linking back to an article from the former interim head of Human Life International.
Homosexuals, Monsignor Ignacio Barreiro-Carámbula wrote, do not have a right to adopt children. “A child is a free gift from God; thus, we do not have a right to this gift,” he wrote.
It is up to the Lord to grant a child to couple, or for reasons that He only knows, deny this gift. This is why a couple that does not receive the gift of children through natural means cannot use artificial means that are against the unitive nature of marriage to obtain a child. Reproductive technologies which seek to ‘take’ a child apart from sexual intercourse do not treat the child as what he truly is. Moreover, recognition of children as gifts underscores the most proper context for receiving that gift.
In the same way that a couple does not have a right to receive children naturally, a couple that is unable to have children does not have a right to receive children through adoption. Thus, to speak of the “right” of all couples to be treated equal with regards to adoption is misguided, because we cannot protect a right that does not exist. A couple that desires to adopt children has to fulfill the objective conditions established by natural law and revelation. They must demonstrate a capacity to provide a stable home for children through diverse objective conditions. A couple that does not fulfill these conditions, and thus is not able to adopt, should not be considered as having suffered unjust discrimination. Per the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the best interests of the child, as the weaker and more vulnerable party, are to be the paramount consideration in every case.
The monsignor went back to the teaching of the Catholic Church, which addresses the matter in its statement on legalizing “homosexual unions,” meaning treating them as marriage: “There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family. Marriage is holy, while homosexual acts go against the natural moral law. Homosexual acts ‘close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.’ ”
The statement carefully examines the four arguments — from the orders of law, reason, sociology and biology and anthropology — against legally recognizing homosexual unions. The argument against homosexual adoption comes from the biological subsection of the teaching:
As experience has shown, the absence of sexual complementarity in these unions creates obstacles in the normal development of children who would be placed in the care of such persons. They would be deprived of the experience of either fatherhood or motherhood. Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development.
Recent Study
As for how children fare under the care of homosexuals, a recently released study showed that rearing a child in a homosexual home harms him. The children of homosexuals are more likely to become homosexuals, more likely to suffer sexual abuse and more likely to be promiscuous.
As the Family Research Council noted in its analysis of the study, “At one time, defenders of homosexual parents not only argued that their children do fine on psychological and developmental measures, but they also said that children of homosexuals ‘are no more likely to be gay’ than children of heterosexuals. That claim will be impossible to maintain in light of this study.”
It found that children of homosexual fathers are nearly 3 times as likely, and children of lesbian mothers are nearly 4 times as likely, to identify as something other than entirely heterosexual. Children of lesbian mothers are 75% more likely, and children of homosexual fathers are 3 times more likely, to be currently in a same-sex romantic relationship.
As well, “males and females who were raised by both lesbian mothers and homosexual fathers have more opposite-sex (heterosexual) partners than children of married biological parents (daughters of homosexual fathers had twice as many).”
But the differences in homosexual conduct are even greater. The daughters of lesbians have 4 times as many female (that is, same-sex) sexual partners than the daughters of married biological parents, and the daughters of homosexual fathers have 6 times as many. Meanwhile, the sons of both lesbian mothers and homosexual fathers have 7 times as many male (same-sex) sexual partners as sons of married biological parents.
Even more shockingly, the level of abuse is higher as well.
Children raised by a lesbian mother were 10 times more likely to have been “touched sexually by a parent or other adult caregiver” (23% reported this, vs. only 2% for children of married biological parents), while those raised by a homosexual father were 3 times more likely (reported by 6%).
