Tag Archives: GLBT

Dawn Stefanowicz explains her experience being raised by a gay parent

*** WARNING: This post is definitely for grown-ups only! ***

I was listening to the latest Dr. J podcast on “Why Marriage Matters”, and I heard about a woman named Dawn Stefanowicz, who was raised by her gay father in Toronto.

So, I looked around and found this interview with Dawn posted on MercatorNet. This is mature subject matter.

Intro:

Gay marriage and gay adoption are being fiercely debated in a number of countries. Usually these issues are framed as a human rights issue. But whose rights? Patrick Meagher, MercatorNet’s contributing editor in Canada, recently interviewed a woman who was raised by a homosexual father. She feels that her rights as a child were completely ignored.

Dawn Stefanowicz (www.DawnStefanowicz.com) grew up in Toronto. Now in her 40s, she has written a book, Out From Under: Getting Clear of the Wreckage of a Sexually Disordered Home, to be released later this year. Stefanowicz has now been married for 22 years, is raising a family, and also works as an accountant. She has also testified about same-sex marriage in Washington and Ottawa.

Sample:

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.

I noticed that Bill Muehlenberg has an even more controversial review of Dawn’s book about her childhood, too. When I was doing research on these issues, I read Dr. Jeffrey Satinover’s “Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth” and Dr. Joseph Nicolosi’s “A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality“. But I think I am going to buy Dawn’s book, too. It sounds like a tough read, but it may be necessary to understand what is really at stake, so my views can be formed by real data.

NOTE: Comments to this post will be strictly filtered in accordance with Obama’s hate crimes bill.

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Ontario Liberals abandon plan to sexualize children in schools

McGuinty wants children prepared for anal sex in school

First some background from LifeSiteNews.

Excerpt:

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced Wednesday that the Ontario government will be requiring Catholic schools to teach the new provincial, explicit sex ed curriculum that been slammed not only by Catholic leaders but the Progressive Conservative party and secular columnists.

“They’re part of the publicly funded school system here in Ontario and this is part of our curriculum,” said McGuinty, who says he is himself Catholic.  “If parents are uncomfortable with certain aspects of this new curriculum, they can and they are free to withdraw their children from the classroom.”

[…]The curriculum is designed to align with the Ministry’s equity and inclusive education strategy, which is seeking, among other things, to promote homosexualism and transgenderism in Ontario’s schools.

Sex ed is now set to begin as early as grade 1, where students will learn about their body parts, including genitalia.  In grade 3, they begin exploring “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”  In grade 6, students are taught that masturbation is “common” and “not harmful,” and by grade 7 they are to learn about oral and anal intercourse and how to use condoms.

Leona Dombrowsky, Ontario’s new Minister of Education, also insisted Wednesday that Catholic schools must teach the new program.  “This is the Ontario curriculum, and it’s the curriculum for all schools and all students,” said the former Catholic school board trustee.

So Catholic-educated politicians were behind this initiative.

I think that Christians need to do a better job of integrating rigorous Bible reading, theology and ESPECIALLY apologetics into our church life. There should be debates and lectures by practicing scientists, economists, social scientists, philosophers and historians. If we insist on 5-minute homilies and praise hymns, then our own children will grow up to be tools of the secular left. Church should be about truth, not feelings.

You can see how different groups of Christians vote in this graph. I think we have a serious problem in the church where Christians who are solid on socially conservative issues think that corporations are bad, taxes are good and that we need to have government control carbon emissions and health care. Fiscal liberalism means sexualization of children in the schools. Lots of naive Christians vote to “help” the poor via big government.

Thankfully, in Ontario there was a happy ending – for now.

From the National Post. (H/T 1RedThread)

Excerpt:

Just days after defending a new sex education program that would include mention of homosexuality in Grade 3 and anal intercourse in Grade 7, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has backed down in the face of a public backlash.

[…]He insisted the new curriculum applied to “all students in publicly funded schools, including Catholic schools.”

His education minister, Leona Dombrowsky, also said the Catholic Church supported the new curriculum.

But Catholic officials made it clear they were not prepared to implement any of the more controversial elements, including talk of homosexuality and masturbation in Grades 3 and 6 respectively.

[…]Mr. McGuinty was squarely behind the new curriculum when he was first asked about it Tuesday morning.

“They are going to get this information,” he said moments after a Christian family values group alerted the media to the changes. “If we can provide [it] in a format and in a venue over which we have some control or they can just get it entirely on their own and be informed by potentially uninformed sources, like their friends at school.

No mention of parents, who are too buy wasting their money on “beer and popcorn”, as Liberals have said in the past. No, it’s the government’s job to prepare children for sex early on so that feminists and gay rights activists can be appeased that the next generation will think that sex outside of marriage is normal. Because schools are about undermining the naive, outdated values of religious taxpaying parents.

How would the legalization of same-sex marriage affect your liberty?

Let me just quickly review how traditional marriage supporters are being treated in the prop 8 trial by Judge Walker. ECM sent me this article from National Review.

Excerpt:

Take, for example, Walker’s resort to procedural shenanigans and outright illegality in support of his fervent desire to broadcast the trial, in utter disregard of (if not affirmatively welcoming) the harassment and abuse that pro-Prop 8 witnesses would reasonably anticipate.

[…]Take the incredibly intrusive discovery, grossly underprotective of First Amendment associational rights, that Walker authorized into the internal communications of the Prop 8 sponsors…

[…]Take Walker’s insane and unworkable inquiry into the subjective motivations of the more than seven million Californians who voted in support of Prop 8.

But the thing I want to focus on is the way that same-sex marriage would reduce the liberties of people who believe in traditional marriage, because this is something that is never discussed.

Consider this article from Jewish scholar Dennis Prager about the effects on your liberties that would occur if same-sex marriage became the law of the land.

Excerpt:

Outside of the privacy of their homes, young girls will be discouraged from imagining one day marrying their prince charming — to do so would be declared “heterosexist,” morally equivalent to racist. Rather, they will be told to imagine a prince or a princess. Schoolbooks will not be allowed to describe marriage in male-female ways alone. Little girls will be asked by other girls and by teachers if they want one day to marry a man or a woman.

The sexual confusion that same-sex marriage will create among young people is not fully measurable. Suffice it to say that, contrary to the sexual know-nothings who believe that sexual orientation is fixed from birth and permanent, the fact is that sexual orientation is more of a continuum that ranges from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality. Much of humanity — especially females — can enjoy homosexual sex. It is up to society to channel polymorphous human sexuality into an exclusively heterosexual direction — until now, accomplished through marriage. But that of course is “heterosexism,” a bigoted preference for man-woman erotic love, and therefore to be extirpated from society.

Any advocacy of man-woman marriage alone will be regarded morally as hate speech, and shortly thereafter it will be deemed so in law.

Companies that advertise engagement rings will have to show a man putting a ring on a man’s finger — if they show only women fingers, they will be boycotted just as a company having racist ads would be now.

Films that only show man-woman married couples will be regarded as antisocial and as morally irresponsible as films that show people smoking have become.

Traditional Jews and Christians — i.e. those who believe in a divine scripture — will be marginalized. Already Catholic groups in Massachusetts have abandoned adoption work since they will only allow a child to be adopted by a married couple as the Bible defines it — a man and a woman.

Anyone who advocates marriage between a man and a woman will be morally regarded the same as racist. And soon it will be a hate crime.

You can already see it happening in many places. Just this week Dr. J blogged about how Princeton University promotes or sponsors LGBT speakers who advocate for open marriage, but they won”t promote or support a student group that favors abstinence.

Comments will be strictly moderated in keeping with Obama’s hate crimes law.

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