Tag Archives: Children

News

Woman raised by two lesbian parents speaks out: I missed my Dad

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Heather Barwick
Heather Barwick

This is from The Federalist. Just so you know, the author is a former same-sex marriage advocate.

She writes:

Gay community, I am your daughter. My mom raised me with her same-sex partner back in the ’80s and ’90s. She and my dad were married for a little while. She knew she was gay before they got married, but things were different back then. That’s how I got here. It was complicated as you can imagine. She left him when I was two or three because she wanted a chance to be happy with someone she really loved: a woman.

My dad wasn’t a great guy, and after she left him he didn’t bother coming around anymore.

Do you remember that book, “Heather Has Two Mommies”? That was my life. My mom, her partner, and I lived in a cozy little house in the ‘burbs of a very liberal and open-minded area. Her partner treated me as if I was her own daughter. Along with my mom’s partner, I also inherited her tight-knit community of gay and lesbian friends.

But now she opposes same-sex marriage because it became apparent to her through her own life experience and the experience of having children that children need a mother and father.

She writes:

Growing up, and even into my 20s, I supported and advocated for gay marriage. It’s only with some time and distance from my childhood that I’m able to reflect on my experiences and recognize the long-term consequences that same-sex parenting had on me. And it’s only now, as I watch my children loving and being loved by their father each day, that I can see the beauty and wisdom in traditional marriage and parenting.

Same-sex marriage and parenting withholds either a mother or father from a child while telling him or her that it doesn’t matter. That it’s all the same. But it’s not. A lot of us, a lot of your kids, are hurting. My father’s absence created a huge hole in me, and I ached every day for a dad. I loved my mom’s partner, but another mom could never have replaced the father I lost.

I grew up surrounded by women who said they didn’t need or want a man. Yet, as a little girl, I so desperately wanted a daddy. It is a strange and confusing thing to walk around with this deep-down unquenchable ache for a father, for a man, in a community that says that men are unnecessary. There were times I felt so angry with my dad for not being there for me, and then times I felt angry with myself for even wanting a father to begin with. There are parts of me that still grieve over that loss today.

I’m not saying that you can’t be good parents. You can. I had one of the best. I’m also not saying that being raised by straight parents means everything will turn out okay. We know there are so many different ways that the family unit can break down and cause kids to suffer: divorce, abandonment, infidelity, abuse, death, etc. But by and large, the best and most successful family structure is one in which kids are being raised by both their mother and father.

I recommend reading the whole thing.

Dawn Stefanowicz said similar things about her experience raised by her Dad and his gay partner in this interview posted on MercatorNet. This is mature subject matter.

It says:

MercatorNet: How did you feel about what was going on around you?

Stefanowicz: You become used to it and desensitised. I was told at eight years old not to talk about this but I knew that something was wrong. I was not thinking “this is right or wrong” but I was disturbed by what I was experiencing. I was unhappy, fearful, anxious and confused. I was not allowed to tell my father that his lifestyle upset me. You can be four-years-old and questioning, “Where is Daddy?” You sense women are not valued. You think Daddy doesn’t have time for you or Daddy is too busy to play a game with you. All this is hard because as a child this is the only experience you have.

MercatorNet: How did this affect your relationship with others?

Stefanowicz: I had a hard time concentrating in school on day-to-day subjects and with peers. I felt insecure. I was already stressed out by an early age. I’m now in my 40s. You’re looking at life-long issues. There is a lot of prolonged and unresolved grief in this kind of home environment and with what you witness in the subcultures.

It took me until I was into my 20s and 30s, after making major life choices, to begin to realise how being raised in this environment had affected me. Unfortunately, it was not until my father, his sexual partners and my mother had died, that I was free to speak publicly about my experiences.

And:

MercatorNet: Why do so few children speak out?

Stefanowicz: You’re terrified. Absolutely terrified. Children who open up these family secrets are dependent on parents for everything. You carry the burden that you have to keep secrets. You learn to put on an image publicly of the happy family that is not reality. With same-sex legislation, children are further silenced. They believe there is no safe adult they can go to.

As I’ve written here before there are several completely non-religious reasons to oppose same-sex marriage. But the one that is surely the easiest to understand is that children need a mother and a father, and when they don’t have both they miss having both. In general, children do better with their mom and dad close by as they they are growing up. That’s a very good reason to promote the traditional definition of marriage – one man, one woman, for life. Period. I don’t want to have any part in depriving children of the safety and security of their mothers and fathers. It’s a scary thing to grow up in the world and not have two people who are YOURS. Who are interested in your development, and whose bond to you is irrevocable and undeniable.

News

Famous gay fashion designers express opposition to gay marriage

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This is reported by Breitbart News.

Excerpt:

Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, founders of the eponymous fashion house, have come out strongly against gay marriage, the notion of gay families, and the use of surrogacy to procreate.
The billionaire pair, who used to be romantically linked, gave an interview with the Italian magazine Panorama, in which they said, “The only family is the traditional one. No chemical offspring and rented uterus. Life has a natural flow; there are things that cannot be changed.”

They also said, “Procreation must be an act of love.”

“I call children of chemistry, synthetic children. Uteri for rent, semen chosen from a catalogue,” Dolce stated.

Gabanna said, “The family is not a fad. In it there is a supernatural sense of belonging.”

The pair have long been outspoken about gay marriage. In 2013, when the LondonTelegraph asked them if they had ever considered getting married, they answered, “What? Never!” Dolce said, “I’m a practicing Catholic.”

Gabbana told the Daily Mail in 2006, “I am opposed to the idea of a child growing up with two gay parents.”

LGBTNews in Italy is already calling for a boycott of Dolce and Gabbana.

It is not unusual for gay men in Europe to oppose gay marriage. In fact, a group of gay men in France, calling themselves Les Hommen, have been an ongoing feature of traditional marriage protests in France. Les Hommen invaded the French Open, stripped to the waist, with pro-marriage slogans written on their chests. Gay Star News suggested it was “the most homoerotic anti-gay protest ever.”

First Things has a quick review of their success story:

Domenico and Stefano were for years perhaps the globe’s most prominent gay power couple. In the tightly knit, family-based, quasi-aristocratic world of Italian fashion, these two men came from nowhere to make a name for themselves that the whole world would recognize. In a 2005 New Yorker article, John Seabrook marveled at their success:

Unlike the Guccis, Pradas, Puccis, Zegnas, Ferragamos, and Fendis, Dolce and Gabbana do not come from families with long pedigrees in the production and sale of luxury goods. . . . They began as outsiders, with their noses pressed to the windows of the fashion world. Their business and their distinctive style are based not so much on family history and artisanal traditions as on their relationship with each other. And the only reason that Dolce and Gabbana are creative and business partners at all is that they were romantic partners first.

The two men have long approached political orthodoxies with the same brashness and iconoclasm that guide their fashion sensibility. In 2006, Gabbana told the Daily Mail, “I am opposed to the idea of a child growing up with two gay parents.” Such statements have yet to affect Dolce & Gabbana’s business, but as gay rights make gains there is likely to be less freedom to speak for those who oppose them—even if those speaking are gay men.

Already the new interview has prompted opposition, with the website LGBT News Italia calling for a boycott like the one launched against Barilla pasta after its chairman made similar comments. I tend to loathe the sub-democratic habit of expressing political preferences through consumer choices, but it would be hard to object to the victory won for elegance if conservatives were to start wearing D&G in solidarity with these two brilliant, independent-minded Italians.

I just want to say that I have absolutely no problem with these two guys. I think they should be allowed to believe what they want, act how they want, speak how they want and even have private commitment ceremonies if they want. All I want from them is that I be allowed to say the same things that they say in public, and not face the wrath of the secular leftist state and their powerful LGBT allies. I would like to also have the freedom to not celebrate or endorse anything that gay people do in word or deed.

I hope that a lot of gay people like these two guys will speak out for freedom like this, and in favor of natural marriage and family. I don’t expect any gay people to endorse my sexual orientation, which is premarital chastity and postmarital exclusive fidelity. But I do expect them to tolerate me, just like these two guys seem to be able to do. I could probably be friends with these two guys, except that I don’t care about fashion. But on gay marriage, these two guys really get it, and they get it better than most Christians and conservatives. Is it that hard to make a simple defense of natural marriage? I think not.

News

As senator, Hillary Clinton paid women 72 cents for every dollar she paid men

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Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood
Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood

I already knew that Hillary Clinton was pro-gay-marriage, and radically pro-abortion, but it turns out that she is a hypocrite on women’s issues, as well.

The Washington Times reports:

During her time as senator of New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton paid her female staffers 72 cents for every dollar she paid men, according to a new Washington Free Beacon report.

From 2002 to 2008, the median annual salary for Mrs. Clinton’s female staffers was $15,708.38 less than what was paid to men, the report said. Women earned a slightly higher median salary than men in 2005, coming in at $1.04. But in 2006, they earned 65 cents for each dollar men earned, and in 2008, they earned only 63 cents on the dollar, The Free Beacon reported.

[…]Mrs. Clinton has spoken against wage inequality in the past. In April, she ironically tweeted that “20 years ago, women made 72 cents on the dollar to men. Today it’s still just 77 cents. More work to do. #EqualPay #NoCeilings.”

Meanwhile, she is making “equal pay for women” her top priority.

CBS News reports:

Hillary Clinton lamented the number of women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math at a Silicon Valley women’s conference on Tuesday, and called for more action to close the wage gap.

[…]In advocating for closing the pay gap, Clinton also endorsed the impassioned plea for wage equality made by Patricia Arquette in her Oscars acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress.

“Up and down the ladder many women are paid less for the same work, which is why we all cheered at Patricia Arquette’s speech at the Oscars — because she’s right, it’s time to have wage equality once and for all,” Clinton said.

All right, let’s take a look at the facts on the so-called “pay gap” between men and women.

The facts

This article is from the very left-wing Slate, of all places.

Excerpt:

The official Bureau of Labor Department statistics show that the median earnings of full-time female workers is 77 percent of the median earnings of full-time male workers. But that is very different than “77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.” The latter gives the impression that a man and a woman standing next to each other doing the same job for the same number of hours get paid different salaries. That’s not at all the case. “Full time” officially means 35 hours, but men work more hours than women. That’s the first problem: We could be comparing men working 40 hours to women working 35.

How to get a more accurate measure? First, instead of comparing annual wages, start by comparing average weekly wages. This is considered a slightly more accurate measure because it eliminates variables like time off during the year or annual bonuses (and yes, men get higher bonuses, but let’s shelve that for a moment in our quest for a pure wage gap number). By this measure, women earn 81 percent of what men earn, although it varies widely by race. African-American women, for example, earn 94 percent of what African-American men earn in a typical week. Then, when you restrict the comparison to men and women working 40 hours a week, the gap narrows to 87 percent.

But we’re still not close to measuring women “doing the same work as men.” For that, we’d have to adjust for many other factors that go into determining salary. Economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn did that in a recent paper, “The Gender Pay Gap.”.”They first accounted for education and experience. That didn’t shift the gap very much, because women generally have at least as much and usually more education than men, and since the 1980s they have been gaining the experience. The fact that men are more likely to be in unions and have their salaries protected accounts for about 4 percent of the gap. The big differences are in occupation and industry. Women congregate in different professions than men do, and the largely male professions tend to be higher-paying. If you account for those differences, and then compare a woman and a man doing the same job, the pay gap narrows to 91 percent. So, you could accurately say in that Obama ad that, “women get paid 91 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.”

I believe that the remainder of the gap can be accounted for by looking at other voluntary factors that differentiate men and women.

The Heritage Foundation says that a recent study puts the number at 95 cents per dollar.

Excerpt:

Women are more likely than men to work in industries with more flexible schedules. Women are also more likely to spend time outside the labor force to care for children. These choices have benefits, but they also reduce pay—for both men and women. When economists control for such factors, they find the gender gap largely disappears.

A 2009 study commissioned by the Department of Labor found that after controlling for occupation, experience, and other choices, women earn 95 percent as much as men do. In 2005, June O’Neil, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that “There is no gender gap in wages among men and women with similar family roles.” Different choices—not discrimination—account for different employment and wage outcomes.

A popular article by Carrie Lukas in the Wall Street Journal agrees.

Excerpt:

The Department of Labor’s Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.

[…]Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women’s earnings are going up compared to men’s.

When women make different choices about education and labor that are more like what men choose, they earn just as much or more than men.