Invisible children

I was told that strong reporting goes to the source: Be a pavement-pounder, not a thumb-sucker.

But when I learned that a local faith-based agency was recently denied by the city their right to place children in foster homes because they weren’t recruiting same-sex households, I found myself in a quandary. No one I contacted at the Christian group consented to be interviewed. The words of the prophet had come to pass: “Therefore he who is prudent will keep silent in such a time, for it is an evil time” (Amos 5:13).

Instead they sent me their carefully crafted legal statement. At the same time this defenestration was occurring, the DHS launched a major effort via public service announcements and phone banks in an attempt to scare up 300 foster homes.

Depending on your point of view you will either say, “Bravo! The City Council is so committed to its diversity principles that it will not bend, even at the cost of forfeiting desperately needed homes the Christian agency can secure!” Or, “Tragic! The City Council is so committed to its diversity principles that it will not bend, even at the cost of forfeiting desperately needed homes the Christian agency can secure!”

Since no one in Philadelphia wanted to talk to me, I went to YouTube.

‘As a society, we shouldn’t normalize a family structure that requires children to lose one or both parents.’ —Katy Faust

There I found no shortage of people willing to speak—kids raised in single-sex homes who had now reached adulthood. An interesting common denominator is that they all were careful to praise their moms as good women; no bad-mouthing here. The other thread is that all thought they had suffered profound loss by not having had a father in the home. An Australian named Millie Fontana, self-called “donor kid,” says:

“How can you take a mother or a father from a child and expect it to have no consequence whatsoever? … To withhold that without it being absolutely necessary just seems ridiculous to me. … You should never willfully want to do that to a child. … It’s only when you hit adulthood that it catches up to you and you go, ‘Holy cr-p, I missed out.’”

Dr. Robert Oscar Lopez, raised by two lesbians, speaks of “the violation of children’s rights on a massive scale, and it now is being entangled, as we see, with gestational surrogacy, with international adoption schemes that really amount to baby farming, in places like Africa and Southeast Asia and India and Eastern Europe. And it’s also sperm banking.”

Katy Faust, echoing this theme of sacrificing a child’s welfare to adult desires, wrote a piece for The Federalist titled, “Don’t Ignore the Child’s Perspective on Gay Couples Commissioning Babies,” and subtitled, “What is it like for a child to grow up not just without knowledge of her mother, but with the knowledge that she was bought and paid for?” In the YouTube interview she says:

“I recognize that while my mother was a fantastic mother, … she can’t be a father. Her partner, an incredible woman, … cannot be a father either. Children have a right to be in relationship with their mother and father whenever possible. And as a society, we shouldn’t normalize a family structure that requires children to lose one or both parents.”

Faust became a Christian in high school: “What I was delighted to find when I read Scripture is that God has an incredible heart for … the plight of children. And that lines up very much with where we need to go in this discussion, which is focusing on the rights of children primarily, as opposed to emphasizing the desires of adults, which tend to take center stage when we’re talking about this issue.”

The gay lobby cries that children are just fine with two moms or two dads. Faust replies: “The reality is that anybody who’s talked to a child that’s lost a parent through divorce, abandonment, third party reproduction, or death knows kids absolutely care. Family structure matters to children.”

Conversations between the city and the Christian agency continue. But chickens are already coming home to roost in this grand social experiment of raising children with half a complement of parents. If you can’t find someone in town who will talk to you about it, just wait a few years and they will be everywhere.