I was sitting here thinking about how gay men couples could get babies if they could not adopt from an adoption agency. They could have a woman friend carry a baby for them, but I feel like this could create ethical issues. What if her insurance pays for her medical bill during the pregnancy, but it's not even her baby. Is that wrong? Then I realized that maybe they could still get a child (for lack of a better word) but legally they still wouldn't both be able to have the same rights for insurance and everything else because the courts wouldn't recognize both of the men as parents. So the problems that you have to get around just keep coming up. It seems like a lot of emotional situations to go through, some dealing with ethics, just to have a child. I never thought about it before, but even if you don't go through adoption agencies it is still going to be difficult for gay couples to provide for their children, because of legal issues.
Legal issues seem to be the only problem. If someone is willing to give their child to a gay couple to take care of, then the law should not interfere with what the biological parents of a child want. Maybe when a child is given up for adoption, put into a will for care, etc., the parents could specify if they think it would be alright for their child to be in that environment.

Marriage the first step?

With the way most states are interpreting their laws, it is harder for homosexuals to adopt. The law in most places allows married people to adopt. There is a lot of debate if couples aren't married who can adopt the kids. They interpret that law so that step parents can adopt, but not gay and lesbian couples.
I wonder if it would just be easier if the first fight that was fought was for homosexual marriage and then, we could go from there to fight for homosexuals rights to adopt children.
It frustrates me to realize that maybe this is the first step in the fight because it just means that everything is going to take longer to achieve.
This might be the way it has to go because of the law, even though I feel like there is a very strong fight that I feel can be put up for the well-being of the children. It is a long battle, but it almost seems to be getting nowhere.
So many places allow homosexuals to be foster parents, yet they are not able to be a couple and adopt. This makes no sense at all, but it means that some people do believe that homosexuals are capable of taking care of children.
So I wonder if homosexual marriage being recognized is the first step, or if there is some other way to fight this battle?

Questioning My Side

I keep reading articles about same-sex adoption and it's starting to make me wonder a little bit. I know that I believe in it because I believe that it is what is fair for the parents who are adopting. I am, however, starting to wonder more about the children in these cases. I feel like the children who two moms or two dads could get teased more than other children. I also feel like being teased as a child is natural. I happens to almost every child there is, I was teased as a child. I wonder though if it will bother those children more, because it will hit so much closer to home. It looks like I'll need to look into how the children in orphanages and foster homes are treated, like if children pick on them more. If that is true it doesn't matter either way.
In some ways, I feel like the more advancements we make to give homosexuals more equal rights the better off we will all be. If they could get married and adopt and live normal lives it would be wonderful, and the children living in their lives would have no problems once society finally accepted all of it. There are so many people in the world who are homophobic it is ridiculous, and that does not help the children coming growing up now from not accepting homosexuality. It is okay to be how you want to be and live how you want to live. But will the children in same-sex adoptions find out the hard way?
I do not think this is enough uncertainty for me to oppose same-sex adoption, but it does however make me want to look at some things more closely.

New Outlook

I was wondering what I was going to write about this week and I turned the television on to some old Law & Order episode and I figured it out. There was an episode on called "Married with Children," it originally came out in 2004 I believe looking at IMDb and stuff.
The episode was about a woman being found dead, and later they found out that she was a lesbian. She had adopted a daughter in Florida and lived there with another women for a few years. The problem is that by law they were not able to marry or both be legal adoptive parents. When the parents split, the other mother had no legal standing on being able to see this child that she had been raising.
This actually opened up a new outlook for me. I have always looked at this in the aspect of why can't the gay and lesbian couples who want to adopt from the beginning just get the child. I realized that in some situations only one person might adopt and they might both have the children. I have also considered the child only having one legal parent in situations where the parents were still together or situations only child based, like hospitalization. I don't think I have considered the gay adoption problem from the aspect of, what if the parents split up?
It might now even make me more upset about a situation I was already upset about. I want to try and look for some more research or studies in the area of gay couples splitting up after adopting.
If both parents of a child aren't legal, the legal parent could take the child and run away like in this episode of Law & Order. Children could lose their parents and parents could lose their children. People are going to get around it and have children together they need rights as children together.
Dick Wolf is the writer of Law & Order. He brings together some very interesting legal, moral and ethical views on gay adoption in this episode he wrote. I don't know where he actually stands on the issue, but he brought it to America's attention in a story, which is a great form of argument. I feel like it could do a lot for the cause in this type of situation. Not that I'm saying everything in the episode I do or do not agree with because it does have many intricate parts and views and everything. It would be a good episode to use to explore some more of the problems with this issue.

At My House

Reading about gay adoptions there seems to be a fear that children raised by gay parents will be have confusion with gender rolls as they are growing up. In some ways I would contemplate that being a valid argument, but I just realized it isn't valid at all.
I own a house and my friend and her daughter live with me. My friend and I are both heterosexuals, but of course I offer her help taking care of her daughter. Her daughter loves living here. She loves different people making her dinner or helping with her homework everyday. She knows that her mother and I both work, go grocery shopping and pay the bills. We don't share a bank account or anything, but I'm pretty sure we share responsibilities pretty similarly to a married heterosexual couple.
Her daughter thinks nothing of it. Of course sometimes she goes to stay at her dad's house or her grandmother's house, but during the week she is always here. At the end of the night everyone goes to their separate bedrooms and goes to sleep. So what would the difference be if we were gay? I feel like besides maybe a little more romantic love in the house, the only real difference would, two women going to the same bedroom instead of separate ones.
I'm not sure at this point that her daughter will live to lead a perfectly normal life, but right now she's like any normal 8 year old. I've not had a child living with me in my adult life up until this point. I just don't quite see that if everyone in the house loves and respects the child there could be a problem if they were gay or straight. I totally wish I could remember more about that My Two Dads show that was on in the late 80's or early 90's. I remembered loving that show.
That was not quite normal but obviuosly people liked the show cuz it was on air. Maybe those two men were closet homosexuals. Or even Full House, I don't know what Joey and Jesse did in the middle of the night.
I just can't see the problem with what your sexual orientation has to do with raising a child on a daily basis.

My Reality is Their Fairytale

I went to work the other day and one of my coworkers was so excited to tell me that he got engaged earlier in the week. I almost froze with not knowing what to say. I felt bad for him. He is gay and lives in the a country where he's going to have to move to get married or just remain engaged until civil unions are legalized everywhere in the U.S. I didn't really know what to say to him, all of my girlfriends who have gotten engaged were ready to plan a wedding and already talking about the kids that they wanted to have. My poor coworker doesn't have it that easy. Most states will not recognize his marriage if he indeed does get married and it won't be recognized on a federal level even if some do. It is heartbreaking to know that something he wants to bad is not even recognized across the country. I've known of some gays and lesbians to have had wedding ceremonies for their own significance, but maybe that isn't enough. What happens next? What happens when they want to start and family and they aren't married? That makes is hard to adopt. Adoption agencies are hard on couples who aren't married and want to adopt. What are they going to say about two men who do not even know when their marriage will be legally recognized? I just think it's horrible that what they want for a life is almost like a fairytale because it's just not possible for them now. In their hearts they know what they want and yet so many people in the world thing its wrong, for what I would say there are no good reasons.

Where do I start?

Homosexuals can't get married and have it recognized nationally, they can't file taxes together, hey have a hard adopting and they are the target of many hate crimes.
I can't quite decide why the issues that homosexuals face in their lives sticks out so prominently to me when myself nor anyone that I am close to has gone through any of it. I fell like most many of the reasons people face social discrimination is not a result of a choice that they made. Maybe I am bothered in the instance of homosexuals rights because people are still having the debate of whether or not homosexuality is a choice.
I'm very interested in arguing about same-sex marriages or homosexual adoptions, so I am trying to determine why it is that I feel so strongly for them. It is one of the few things that I'll get upset about when I discuss it with people.
So I was looking for an article to write about to start somewhere in the homosexual rights area and I wondered if I'm already to biased to write about it because I am stubborn on my beliefs. I am debating if it would be more beneficial to me to learn where I stand on some other issue.
Therefore, before actually searching for articles I feel like I need to take a step back and determine what exactly I would like to accomplish during this semester when writing my papers. Should I become more educated on a topic I know something about? Or should I take this as an opportunity to learn something totally new about something I might not have even realized was a social injustice?