Further Thoughts on McCain and Adoption

Here are a few pieces related (directly or indirectly) to John McCain’s foot-in-mouth comment on adoption by same-sex couples:

Terrance’s post, about finalizing the adoption of his son just days after McCain’s remarks, is especially moving.

Keli Goff at HuffPo notes that the uproar about the adoption comment highlights a basic problem for McCain: “How to win an election decided by voters in the middle, while continuing to pander to voters on the right. . . . Younger voters in particular, who have been raised in a world of Will & Grace and Ellen have become increasingly intolerant of intolerance.”

At the same time, she doesn’t go far enough, in my opinion, when she continues to assert, “I do believe that in an ideal world, a young black boy will be raised in a household in which he has the opportunity to see firsthand an image of a strong, responsible, black man; an image to serve as a roadmap for the type of man he will aspire to be someday.” Yes, I believe that children do gain something, ineffable as it may be, from positive role models of adults “like them” in gender or race, but those adults don’t necessarily have to be their parents. Most lesbian couples I know go to great lengths to make sure they surround their children with male role models, whether relatives or friends, and transracial adoptive couples do the same with regard to race.

Not that raising a child different from oneself in gender or race is always easy. Shannon of Peter’s Cross Station offers one of the most thoughtful lists I’ve seen of “Books Every White Adoptive Parent of a Black Child Must Read at Some Point.” It goes beyond just books on transracial adoption and includes works on the black experience in America, like Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. She recommends, too, that “You should take a class in African American Studies 101 at the nearest post-secondary institution offering such a thing.”

Robert A. Bernstein of the Washington Blade asks if in fact same-sex couples make better parents than opposite-sex ones. My opinion is that it’s a waste of time to determine things like this. It’s like competitive yoga—there are some things that just shouldn’t be made into contests. Having said that, I do think there are some general differences between same- and opposite-sex parents, and Bernstein isn’t entirely off base in pointing them out.