Glenn Stanton is a Research Fellow at Focus on the Family, that loving place once run by Dr. James “Daddy” Dobson (Dobson retired as their radio voice just yesterday), and was brought in by the Philadelphia Inquirer today, the first of November, to debate the gay marriage issue. (Gay marriage was supported in the Inquirer by David Boies, who argued using constitutional principles.) Stanton’s argument rests on the stance that children are owed an upbringing by their “natural” parents, one man and one woman. Stanton not only comes out against gay marriage and adoption, but in favor of children being raised by their birth parents. In making such a statement, here on the first day of National Adoption Awareness Month, Glenn Stanton offends heterosexual, homosexual and single adoptive parents, he offends all the children who love their adoptive parents, and he offends me.

I am particularly offended by the following line Mr. Stanton uses as “proof” that “natural” parents are the only kind worthy of parenting. The line can be found in Stanton’s diatribe against gay marriage in the Philadelphia Inquirer (that Stanton wanders from his subject to talk about adoption is the shame of the Inquirer, who know no editorial duidelines when it comes to right wing frothers, if also the lack of discipline of Stanton as a thinker):

I often tell my 15-year-old daughter as I drop her at school that she looks lovely today. She beams. Would these words have the same power if spoken by a mother’s lesbian partner? Any daughter knows the power of a father’s affirmation and the pain of its absence.

No, this is neither evidence about parenting nor about gay and lesbian parents. This is simply an example of Glenn Stanton crowing about his own fatherhood, using his 15 year old daughter to say a little something about his manhood. But this is also a narrow-minded statement from Stanton, one where he can’t imagine a child and how that child bonds with an adoptive parent, regardless of the gender. I’ve seen daughters preen for fathers who happen to be gay, I’ve seen daughters swim laps, straining to the utmost, for mothers who are lesbian. And if you saw my Jack this weekend, struggling to learn to walk, beaming when he got it and looking to me, his adoptive father, for emotional support when he struggled, there’s simply not a chance you could conclude anything about “natural” parents. No, I don’t have to dredge up the latest tragedy of a child destroyed by his or her birth parents to prove Glenn Stanton utterly wrong, nor does anyone. One just needs experience to know that adoptive parents, whether gay, lesbian or heterosexual, are fine parents kids to whom children fervently and lovingly cling.

Glenn Stanton closes his column by noting that no adoptive parent has the constitutional right to deny a child his or her “natural parent.” This is a paltry attempt to argue constitutional issues in a diatribe devoted to emotion, and not just in comparison to a real constitutional scholar such as David Boies. But Stanton’s attempt at constitutional discussion is on a topic that has no place in our constitution and is actually a straw man argument. Nobody is trying to deny any child his or her birth parent. No, there is no conspiracy going on here, Glenn Stanton. Adoption in this country only happens in cases where birth parents work towards an adoption plan that solves their needs and the needs of the child. What a stupid straw man this is. Stanton earlier had used the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child to underpin this stupid argument, though his gloss of the UN Declaration hides the fact that his is a warped interpretation. Oh yes, the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child does say that it is optimum that birth parents raise children, but the bottom line in those rights is about food, shelter, and loving caretakers. Stanton does what the UN does not, throwing out the good of adoption while presenting the ideal of birth parenting as the only acceptable option.

Perhaps what is most ludicrous about Glenn Stanton’s article is that he is a representative of Focus on the Family, extremist right wing organization that it is, and his diatribe against all things adoption is against one of the principles Focus uses as a plank in the abortion wars. They claim, at least, to favor adoption as a way to reduce the incidence of abortion. Search for the word “Adoption” on the Focus on Family webs site and you get hundred of hits. Without going into the notion of how this simply won’t work, it’s important to note that Focus on the Family strongly supports that which Glenn Stanton rails against, adoption. In his argument, adoptive children are disabled because they don’t have “natural parents,” after all.

As my final word on this subject, it is one more instance where the Philadelphia Inquirer fails its readers. Instead of putting up a scholar who argues against gay marriage on constitutional grounds, it chose instead to publish a man who argues from the particular, sprinkles in straw men and stupid rhetorical questions, and actually disparages the tens of thousands of adoptive parents in this country. Glenn Stanton proves himself to be just another garden variety right wing whackjob.