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VIEWPOINT
Should we support adoptions by gay or lesbian partners?

Harold Jantz

Across Canada there is a growing momentum toward extending to same sex partners all of the recognition, benefits or status that presently belong to married heterosexual couples. Much of this has come in the wake of the 1999 Supreme Court decision in M.v.H. in which the Ontario government was told its Family Law Act violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As a result a range of laws that till now have applied to families led by heterosexual partners must be extended to gay couples as well.

The shifts on this issue have come so quickly that many Christians feel bewildered. If courts and legislatures feel that the changes need to be made, why should they argue against them?

So far the federal government – following the lead of the American government – has drawn a firm line only in the use of the term “marriage” which it says should belong only to persons of opposite sexes who join to form a union. In practical terms, however, it appears ready to extend almost any right enjoyed now by heterosexual partners to homosexual couples too.

Thus one legislature after the other is passing laws which in virtually every way treat same sex couples as though they were heterosexual, with all the rights that heterosexual couples may enjoy.

What should our position as a Christian community be to such extension of rights? I would suggest the following: given that we acknowledge that we live in a world in which many may make choices which we believe to be wrong in terms of the Bible’s teaching, if persons of the same sex wish to set up households they should be allowed to do so. It should be possible for us to support the right for such couples to make provisions for one another, and enjoy legal protection as registered domestic partners. By doing so we would be acknowledging what Jesus saw when he told his disciples that because “of the hardness of men’s hearts” Moses permitted divorce.

But there are some things I think we should not support. One is the use of the term “marriage.” Another is the right to adopt. We should not support the right of both partners to be known as the legal parents of a child within that relationship. Often it may be the biological offspring of one of the two. Involved are some fundamental issues that I believe argue against moving in this direction, even though at least one Canadian province – Nova Scotia – has already done so.

Why should we not support the right to adopt for same sex couples?

I believe we must be clear, at the outset, that when we speak to this issue we speak as Christians. Of course we recognize that homosexual practice is very troubling to society. It has caused great pain in families and churches, too, struggle over it intensely. Every church community carries within it impulses which move it in quite contrary directions – on the one hand it wants to love gay people, on the other it also wants to call them to repentance.

Historically, the Christian church has taught that homosexual practice must be rejected. While the person can be cared for and embraced, the practice cannot. A church that wants to live faithfully with the Bible must act this way. Jesus did too. We are sinners and so we need others to accept us and care about us without accepting the wrong we do. It is not inconsistent to act in this fashion.

The standard for sexual behaviour for Christians from the Bible is high. Essentially, it holds: (1) that the marriage of two people is intended for persons of the opposite sex; (2) that such marriage involves a commitment to faithfulness to one another for as long as both partners live; (3) that any sexual relationship outside of marriage is against the will of God, whether it involves pre-marital or extra-marital sex or homosexual sex. Indeed, any sexual behaviour which moves away from biblical teaching – including indulgence in pornography or same sex sexual practice – does so because it is essentially an affront to marriage itself.

The biblical standard, then, could be summed up as sexual faithfulness in marriage and chastity in singleness.

Additionally, without minimizing the pain and struggle that it might involve, the church has also taught there can be change for persons who want to leave a gay or lesbian life. That’s what the Apostle Paul seems to be saying when he reminded Corinthian Christians that some of them had been “homosexual offenders” but no longer, they had been “washed and sanctified” and become part of the community of faith.

That this is not an outdated view was confirmed again as recently as last May at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association by Dr. Robert Spitzer – the same Dr. Spitzer who led the movement in the early ’70s to get the APA to stop defining homosexuality as a “psychiatric disorder.” In a recent study he concluded that “some people can and do change” not only their behaviour but their sexual orientation too. In a column he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, he said that he had started out believing it might be possible to change behaviour but not orientation, but after in-depth interviews with 200 subjects he had come to the opposite conclusion. He had found “many [who had] made substantial changes in sexual arousal and fantasy – and not merely behaviour.”

That’s a somewhat roundabout way of getting to heart of the immediate issue – should the government make adoption of children by same sex couples a part of the law?

It should not and here are some reasons.

It should not because a gay or lesbian partnership is not and cannot be a marriage. It simply can never be. The idea of marriage has been rooted since the beginning of time in persons of the opposite sex coming together to form a union of opposites to make a whole. It is only a union of two “others” that can bring forth new life. Some gay or lesbian partnerships may try to imitate the real thing by adopting masculine or feminine traits, but they will never be what they are imitating. A Catholic writer, Piero Schlesinger of the Catholic University of Milan, has written that to extend the concept of marriage to such a relationship is “to run the risk of totally distorting” marriage. It would lose its defining characteristic and “we would all become automatically poorer.”

Furthermore, a gay or lesbian partnership by definition excludes one sex and thereby limits the child’s access to a parental figure of the opposite sex. That represents a fundamental loss to the child. While many children must today grow up without the presence of two parents of opposite sexes, in most cases this is not because the parent remaining with them chose that situation. The opportunity always remains for a second parent to enter the equation. That is not the case within a gay or lesbian partnership. There are many studies which have underscored the advantages to children of growing up in settings in which both father and mother are present and the loss where that is not so. The best interests of the child are not served by by excluding a parent of the opposite sex.

A few months ago the CBC’s This Morning program carried a feature on children raised in lesbian environments. One woman’s account struck a particularly poignant note. She described a childhood growing up without a father. For years she hadn’t felt any lack. Life seemed perfectly normal. But then she began to wonder what sort of person her father might be. What would it be like to relate to him? She used an expression that seemed to me to be especially moving – she spoke about a kind of “cosmic longing” for her father. It was clear that there was a deep yearning within her for the presence not only of her kind but of the other too. She was describing a need which went to the very core of her existence.

The reality is that even though a child in a lesbian relationship may not know its father, it has one somewhere – unless, indeed, that father is dead. The door should be kept as open as possible to reconnect with that father someday. Making both partners of a lesbian relationship legal parents to the children measurably closes the door to reconnection and has less to do with the well-being and interests of the child than the interests of the partners. Human rights commissions seem strangely oblivious to this need in their haste to extend rights to gay and lesbian couples.

A further issue. All attempts to cast the blame elsewhere notwithstanding, gay and lesbian relationships are notoriously unstable. The incidence of breakup in them far exceeds the incidence within heterosexual marriages. In part it’s because there is no real moral stigma associated to such breakups, nothing like the stigma connected to heterosexual marriage breakups. Not only is that so, there is also a far higher level of unfaithfulness to a partner while in the relationship. Even so-called faithfully committed homosexual partners will argue for other relationships. For example, at a conference in Berkeley, California a few years ago, even though the group made claims to be Christian, it still had participants arguing that the attempt to impose monogamy upon homosexual partners was really just an attempt to impose an archaic Christian marriage ethic on gay people.

We don’t naturally connect children with homosexual relationships for good reason. A homosexual partnership is a fundamentally inward-looking relationship. In contrast, a heterosexual union is by definition outward looking. While not all heterosexual unions will bring children into the world, that is what they were designed to do. Parents who bring children into the world must look outward and forward. They carry the burden of preparing the next generation for their role in the world. They must always take into account the kind of world into which their offspring need to fit.

No lesbian partnership will ever give children what a healthy heterosexual marriage will give. The tragedy today is that our culture is placing more and more obstacles in the way of heterosexual unions, so that they too often fall far short of giving their offspring what they need to grow into healthy and secure adults. Yet there has not been and never will be a substitute found for families in which two parents of the opposite sex bring up children in a secure and loving environment. We should not do anything that would devalue that entity.

However strange it might sound in our rights-dominated world, we will not improve the situation of such families by elevating the status of gay and lesbian relationships even more. Where we have opportunity, we ought to raise our voices against it.

A brief biographical note. Former MB Herald editor Harold Jantz serves as chair of the board of New Direction for Life Ministries of Winnipeg, a ministry that works with people who want to come out of gay or lesbian lifestyle. New Direction also operates the House of Hesed, the only private facility in the city which provides a compassionate setting for men and women who’ve contracted HIV-AIDS. It has gained the confidence of a wide range of caregivers in the gay and in the medical communities of Winnipeg. After many years with the Herald, Jantz founded and edited ChristianWeek, a national evangelical newspaper.

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Last modified October 5, 2001.

© 2001 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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