Period.

You have a very strong ideology. It goes "a man and woman is the necessary combination to raise children and anything else starts with a loss." Guess what? That's an ideology.

Arguing the relative merits of family arrangements in the context of public policy on child rearing and marriage is a "red herring" in your view? That makes no sense.

It is a red herring because it pretends that male-female families constitute the ideal parental unit. There's no reason to believe this. It's an argument that springs from the idea that a mixture of male and female is necessary for a child to be raised properly. It's a rigged argument for which there is no support. Individuals don't fall into neat patters, nor do relationships. So sometimes a male-female couple can give the child what is needed, sometimes not.

Your notion that the "ideal" never exists, as defined as two parents of the opposite sex who are both loving and competent... do you see how absurd your assertion just was?

That's not how I defined the ideal. The point isn't that male-female couples can't be good parents. Obviously they can. But not because one of them is male and the other female. What is necessary is not one male/one female, but a couple that is capable of raising healthy kids. There's no evidence male-female couples are more likely to do this. There is just some vauge idea that each embodies a sexual role and that the transmition of both these roles is necessary to the children's proper development.

Yes that exists quite often enough to be considered an obtainable ideal. My mother despite being well educated and from an upper middle class family, bought into another poorly considered radical movement, the feminist movement against fathers in the 60’s, and has regretted it since. Neither of us would wish that on anyone or recommend it because it was often unnecessarily difficult and painful. Neither would any of the many children of single parents that I know.

This is truly absurd. Because the two of you didn’t like your situation, you’re saying it proves the male-female ideal exists and can be achieved? That’s a complete failure of logic. It’s autobiography masquerading as intellectual argument.

I'm not saying LGBT parents are awful or anything like that. In fact I'm quite positive many make excellent parents and there will be a slew of highly successful children in future to prove exactly that point and move the issue forward.

But for some perspective, the black community often praises heroic mothers who manage to raise children without fathers against adversity. But you don’t see any of them recommending it to the next generation do you?

Again, your own failure of logic is scewed, and seems to be based on the idea that not having a traditional parental unit indicates a loss, a loss one can survive but does not wish on others. Since many black women have to raise their children alone due to the repercussions of a prejudiced society, I would guess they don’t want their children to go through the same thing. But the gay family scenario is not one based on overcoming loss, but of simply wanting to live as a couple and raising a family. The comparison makes no sense.

And yet we’re supposed to believe in the case of LGBT families that two parents of the same sex, meaning the lack of a father or mother in exchange for two of the same, that’s nothing to be concerned about and that we can even be confident enough now to recommend it as fully equal to the established ideal?

I’m arguing against ideals period. I’m not replacing one with the other, I’m saying let people marry and have kids. Some cases will be successful, some won’t, but there’s no one pattern of success.

Sorry, but as much as I used to support gay marriage and as much as I want to say it’s as simple as everyone’s the same, I don’t see realistically how that assertion can be anything but highly speculative and potentially reckless and driven by ideology more than reason.

Well, you’re trapped in an ideology that won’t allow to see that. Doesn’t mean gay marriage/families don’t work. In fact, in contradiction of yourself, you already said they can.

Regardless, this issue is a big waste of time because it's not going anywhere. The only staunch proponents of it are the half of the LGBT community well-heeled enough to do it for self gratification, win or lose. In fact, they don’t even listen to the pro-civil union contingent of the LGBT community which is more in need of realistic reform now as they’re the one’s truly suffering from lack of medical benefits and who can’t afford legal counsel to accomplish the economic benefits. The cries of suffering on the behalf of the litigation side of the LGBT community ring hollow and are much more about a cultural war thanpractical issues.

There are so many examples of prejudice and stereotypical thinking here, I can’t waste my time with them all. The unsubstantiated evaluation of how many gays and lesbians are in favor of gay marriage, and the shallow psychology as to why some do, are pretty obvious examples. I think you prove you don’t mean what you say anyway, because you claim this is a pointless argument after having written a series of detailed (if ineffective) arguments.

First of all, me thinks "non-ideological" doesn't understand the meaning of the words in that handle. If you're expressing an opinion, you're basing it on your personal ideology. Second, the response to the comment about homophobic people being likely to be repressing gay tendencies can only fall under the Shakespearean quote, "Methinks he doth protest too much!"

Third, there is an unacknowledged undercurrent within this discussion thread regarding what proper men and proper women are like. Many posters, in their discussion of women and men in straight or gay relationships are desperately clinging to the stereotypical images of male and female when the fact is, there is as much behavioral variation within the male half of the human species as there is between the male and female stereoptyped roles and as much variation within the female half of the human species as there is between the male and female stereotyped roles.

This is part of the reason for the longstanding survival of the human species - that we have been infinitely varied and infintely adaptable over the eons (as has "marriage"). The fact is, we are in the midst of major adaptation again. The rules for human society are being rewritten as society itself evolves.

Like it or not, folks, what so many of us see as "normal," the nuclear "Ozzie and Harriet" suburban family created by the U.S. government in league with Redbook and Ladies Home Journal after WWII in the effort to get Rosie the Riveter to go home and keep house so her returning GI husband would have a job when he got home was a brief 30-year abberation in the history of marriage and family life.

Not only that, but these families were demonstrably destructive for the children who grew up in their isolation without the benefits of the extended family living in close proximity that had so often been the norm prior to the 50's. Hence the later designation of America as the "most addicted and addictive society on the face of the earth."

"Non-ideological" and his buddies can pine for the days of the Nelson family and even create their own Nelson family if they want, but it's likely their kids will turn out to be more like those of the psychadelic 60's than the young Republicans they expect to produce. The fact is kids need far more than two functional parents of whatever gender in order to grow up as healthy individuals. They need biological or adopted cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and great grandparents and teachers and librarians, etc. It really does take a village.