Dear Selma, Your two cents are worth much more than you think on this forum. The fact that you struggle with these decisions makes you more human than those pious souls who have all the answers in black or white. As we evolve, our opinions shift based on the knowledge we gain from experience and learning. Those who choose to refer to 2000 year old books for all their answers will either go to heaven or go extinct. (More on the death penalty later.)
I, too, used to think that a child needed the mother and father role models to develop into a healthy adult but after witnessing the interactions within TWO same sex families, I have changed that opinion. I was genuinely amazed at how the male same-sex couple I know, with an adopted daughter, each modelled a different gender consistently. One of them was a typical 'mother-hen' .... making sure the daughter was dressed correctly, picking her up from school, helping her with teenage problems etc. while the other partner was more the 'Dad role' stricter with the discipline and made most of the decisions for the family, although 'Mom' did the finances. Granted, this is a personal observation but it changed my preconceptions of the family dynamics within a same-sex family. The roles were not as defined in the lesbian couple who had a daughter from a previous marriage of one of the partners. Both were 'Moms' although just from their interaction there was a definite difference in their personalities, one being quite decisive when it came to financial decisions, the other deferring to her and even asking every time a financial question came up. Both these couples are clients of mine. Aside from their parenting skills, gay couples make the best pet owners! They can empathize with their pets and project their maternal/paternal instincts onto their 'surrogate children' to follow all recommendations to keep them healthy. I think that mankind is generally an empathic being which is the basis for universal morality and necessary for social living and survival. However, there are deranged individuals who are loners and can survive in isolation but that is the exception. Similarly, there are exceptions wherin the ability to empathize has never developed either due to a physical injury, a chemical imbalance or a socializing problem as the child grew into an adolescent and eventually an adult who had no way of feeling his/her victim's suffering (whether physical or emotional). This has been studied in children who have fun pulling wings off or burning insects, grow into younsters who poke pencils into caged rodents and eventually have no qualms about setting a kitten on fire. In cases where these deranged individuals are a consistent danger to society, they need to be restricted - life time prison terms with programs to make them earn their keep as there would be no hope of rehabilitation. In other cases of 'crimes of passion' it has been well documented that emotions can run so strong as to overcome those natural inhibitions to commit serious injury and even death in some cases. However, do they deserve the 'eye for an eye' barbaric system of justice? The deterrent value of capital punishment has been refuted in many studies. It costs society much more to execute a convicted criminal than to incarcerate him/her for the rest of their lives. And since, in many cases, it is a neurological abberation that creates these monsters, are we justified in killing them to make us feel safer? I think not! Anyway, that's my $0.02Cdn for now. Kevin Saldanha Mississauga, ON. ----------------- From: Carvalho [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 09:19:39 -0700 (PDT) To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], goanet@lists.goanet.org Subject: Re: [Goanet] Section 377/reply to Kevin This is one of those issues I struggle with like the death penalty. I can see both sides of the argument. Anyway, that's my two cents and it's probably worth even less :)) selma -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ . _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list Goanet@lists.goanet.org http://lists.goanet.org/listinfo.cgi/goanet-goanet.org