Says a "former PTA president" ("a faithful Christian and a fiscal conservative"): "It's time to open our eyes and our hearts"

Why are so many of the people who mouth off about "family values" the last people any sane person should want to listen to? As "faithful Christian" and "fiscal conservative" Candy Olson demonstrates, making basic sense on the issue really isn't a liberal-vs.-conservative matter.

"I don't know how we could consider ourselves Christians if we deny children a loving home because of a parent's sexual orientation. I don't know how we could talk about being fiscally responsible if we prefer to have taxpayers pay to care for these children rather than allow them to be adopted into a loving home, when foster care is far more costly. I don't know how we could say we want less government if we send government snooping into people's private lives."

-- Candy Olson, in "A Christian Applauds the End
of Florida's Anti-Gay Adoption Law," on HuffPost Religion

by Ken

The other day some news outlet was reporting breathlessly on Texas Gov. Rick Perry's view on something-or-other. I think it was Israel, or something to do with foreign affairs, about which he clearly knows even less than the absolutely nothing he knows about the things the governor of a state might be expected to know about. It doesn't really matter what exactly the subject was, because on any subject of importance to actual human beings, his ignorance is total, and his interest probably even lower. And without thinking, my first response was: Why on earth would anyone possibly care what Rick Perry thinks about [fill in the blank]. It makes as much sense as going to the zoo and asking, say, a panda for his/her thoughts on the mess in the Middle East.

What now passes for the national discourse is now so wholly dominated by lies, delusions, and malignant fantasies -- driven apparently by an insatiable appetite on the part of the public for even more lies, delusions, and malignant fantasies -- that an expression of good basic sense on a real-world issue comes to sound like a millennial revelation. Which is why I can't resist passing on this HuffPost Religion post by "former PTA president" Candy Olson.

As we all know all too well, for decades now we've been under siege from the crappiest of the Crap Christians regarding "family values" and more specifically the need for a "defense of marriage." And what I've always found so screamingly hateful about this is that the family-values and defense-of-marriage hawkers seems so consistently such deeply damaged human beings, psychologically and emotionally -- alarmingly often to the point of sociopathy. They are about the least qualified people one can imagine to be talking to anyone about values of any kind, unless it's the "value" of megalomania, authoritarianism, brutelike social orthodoxy, and stifling social repression.

And so while the immediate subject that Candy Olson is addressing, on the anniversary of a Florida appeals court's overturning of the ban on adoptions by same-sex couples, is the welcome dent that has made in Florida children's need for stable homes, which goodness knows is a matter of great importance, still, the case she argues has much wider applicability. (I'm not even going to go into the circumstance that the response of the governor at the time, Republican Charlie Crist, was to announce an immediate end to enforcement of the overturned ban, whereas one would dread to imagine the response of his also-Republican successor, an unabashed and unapologetic sociopath and criminal from the party's "There's No Such Thing as Too Much Greed and Selfishness" Right.)

"For the past 12 months," Olson writes, the end of the same-sex adoption ban "has meant that more children have gone to live with caring people or have had their family formally recognized and legally protected.

To me, a faithful Christian and a fiscal conservative, it made no sense whatsoever to deny any of these children a loving family because some people might not be comfortable with what the family looks like. Nor does it make sense to me to spend tax dollars on temporary homes when there are caring adults who want to adopt and some of them happen to be gay.

"Research," she says, "confirms that gay people can be good parents" (links onsite). And, she says, "I already know this."

I raised two children with a gay man. He fathered them, loved them and helped them learn right from wrong and 2+2. And then he came out. It didn't change his love for them, or theirs for him.

Our children both graduated from good colleges in four years -- not every child does that. Both have held good jobs -- not every young person does that. They are building lives of fulfillment and giving back. They are compassionate, joyful, loving human beings, in part because of their father's influence. He loved them, set limits, laughed and cried with them, just as I did. He took them -- and made them go -- to church and soccer practice and dance class and did the things that help children grow up into whole human beings.

I don't know how we could consider ourselves Christians if we deny children a loving home because of a parent's sexual orientation. I don't know how we could talk about being fiscally responsible if we prefer to have taxpayers pay to care for these children rather than allow them to be adopted into a loving home, when foster care is far more costly. I don't know how we could say we want less government if we send government snooping into people's private lives.

I hope for a world where people like my former husband could be themselves and where good parenting is the only standard in deciding who can adopt.

Or, as one of my children put it, "if gay people could marry each other and have families, they wouldn't feel pressured into a conventional marriage because they want children. How the heck is more love a bad thing?"

It's time to open our eyes and our hearts.

I love this, and especially I love that idea that the children's father "helped them learn right from wrong and 2+2." At the moment, if we go by, say, Fox Noise, one could be forgiven for concluding that there's no one who has even the dimmest clue about right from wrong or what 2+2 equals. And I have to assume that anyone who would even care about Rick Perry's opinion has any interest in the answers.


MEANWHILE, IT LOOKS LIKE ARCHKOOK MAGGIE
GALLAGHER WASN'T KOOKY ENOUGH FOR NOM


And the National Organization for Marriage confirms that Crazy Maggie has been succeeded as chairman by John Eastman, a raging nutjob the NOM press release describes as "a distinguished Constitutional law scholar" (he's a onetime clerk of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas). What I'm hearing is that, in contrast to Dame Maggie's quieter, respectable-looking ideological insanity, is a louder-mouthed, more bullying extreme right-wing loon.

Although I didn't mention Maggie in what I wrote above, I assumed that alert readers would take it for granted that she was one of the foremost people I was thinking of in terms of insanely inappropriate people to be peddling family and especially martial values As a colleague points out, perhaps because she wasn't as visibly loony as most of the ultra-right-wing icons, she was alarmingly effective in her Stalinist social crusade. It appears, though, that she wasn't visibly or aggressively enough whacked-out for the deep-pocketed right-wing funders who underwrite NOM.

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