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Comment by mtinkerhess | Hacker News Reader

Parents are parents. Straight parents are parents. Gay parents are parents. There's no fundamental difference.

One of the implications of this "question" relies on the common belief that gay men are pedophiles and/or will teach gay sex to the children. In some people's heads, it's a matter of wicked, unclean gays corrupting the innocent children.

If nobody had such beliefs, then it is virtually impossible to understand why we would suppose that gay people are unfit as parents.

No, there are arguments (I'm not saying good ones) for why gay parents are different. Traditionally fathers and mothers have had different roles, this is cultural, so what happens if a gay couple adopt and don't adapt to cover the traditional role of the other gender. To use an out-dated (very) and somewhat sexist example, how will the son of lesbians learn to hunt animals, how will the daughter of gay men learn to make clothes?

While I don't agree with these arguments (for the record, I'm gay), it would be possible to make them without being homophobic. Would they be made in nobody had the beliefs you describe? Perhaps not, but they could be.

Trqditional roles are really quite a weak notion. There is huge variance among parenting styles across the population.

Just no being a drug-addicted and not having a debilitating mental disorder is enough to be an above-average parent.

I think you may be wrong. To be parents as a gay couple (particularly if male) there often has to be considerably more effort to get there. This would generally mean that the parents really strongly wanted to be parents. This fact alone surely makes for a better environment for kids than one where the child could be an accident.

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