ZA OHRANITEV NOVEGA ZAKONA O ZAKONSKI ZVEZI IN DRUŽINSKIH RAZMERJIH

I’m a gay Boston University faculty member; my husband and I have been together for more than 30 years and are raising a child we had by gestational surrogacy (look it up). I know many other BU faculty/staff who are same-sex parents, and many many more in the Boston area. If you look in the right places, it’s not so rare as people seem to think.

I have to say I’ve been alarmed and distressed that a university-affiliated news site is attracting so many comments from people whose hostile or pitying views are, frankly, the only real source of threat to my child. My kid, so far, lives in a world where having same-sex parents is not very remarkable, nor is having parents with different skin colors, or only one parent, or step-parents, or grandparents raising you instead of parents, or parents who speak a different language. His peers and elementary-school teachers and actually every single person he has come in contact with in his life understand, as he does, that families come in all different kinds, and that what makes a family is love. He is loved; his world offers him everything he needs. Not having a mom is far less interesting to him than not having a dog, or not having his uncle or aunt live nearer than they do. Isn’t that what we all want children to feel? He’s a normal, happy kid and his life is a very good life.

This is a real person, folks: he is here in the world. Will one of you be the first person to tell my son that contrary to everything he has always thought, he should not exist; that his life is missing something essential and he should therefore feel miserable; that there is something unnatural or unstable about what he thought was the most natural and secure thing in the world, namely his home and family? I’m sure someone, somewhere will say these things to him (and my job is to raise him to be strong enough to shrug it off); I just didn’t think it would be anyone connected with BU. So it turns out there is a real danger to children here, and it’s you.

Until you know a real person who is in a same-sex-parent family, please just hold off on being so convinced you know what’s right. I’m sure it does seem to many people that women are essentially different from men, and that the man/woman complentarity IS what it means to be a couple and to be parents. If you’ve never known a couple whose complementarity is different — who complete each other in ways that don’t map onto ideas of traditional sex roles, and who fulfill all the roles a child needs in ways that just happen not to align with the familiar categories of “one dad-like person, one mom-like person” — then you can’t imagine that this could work. It’s understandable. But in fact it does work, folks, and what’s asked of you is to keep an open enough mind that you might actually have a chance of meeting such people. Once you see it, then you will be able to imagine it, and you’ll also see how much damage it has done to air your “moral convictions” in the absence of any knowledge of the human beings who are injured by them.

vir: bu.edu