Thread: Discussion of Homosexuality Acceptance (Split)

Well, I don't have any statistics, and I don't know how they arrived at those results, all I can talk about is experience. For all we know those might have been feminist-sponsored studies. Being raised by essentially a man-hating feminist I know my life would be different if my father had stuck around to defend me from her ideology and to socialize me into proper male behavior. Of course I can't say, even if he did stick around, that it would have been a happy functional family - it probably wouldn't. But I would have been grateful for at least a few more years of coaching in how boys are supposed to act. I wouldn't have been so ostracized all through school, would have learned to stand up for myself. My mom taught my sister and me that if we're being picked on by someone the thing to do is to just walk away. That might work for a girl, but you know what it does for a boy? Years and years of teasing. Unfortunately you go through school with mostly the same group of people until you graduate high school, assuming you don't move. It took until well into adulthood for me to really understand that I was raised according to a bizarre ideology. God, if only somebody had taught me when I was young that bullies will mostly back down when stood up to, or that bruises and even broken bones heal but shame never does, and that even if you get your ass kicked, you'll be respected by everybody. Men teach these things, not women. And not feminized men, at least in many cases. And I put up with a lot of teasing also from male family members at holiday get-togethers for my long hair and the way my mom dressed me (it wasn't completely gender-free or anything, but close enough to get me mocked). And for my childhood and adolescence and a few years beyond I just believed my mom, that we were living the 'right' way. and that they were all just stupid old-fashioned barbarians. I even felt proud about it. But later in life I came to realize it was actually the source of a lot of my problems.

But of course you can't go back and change things. And while I would like to make a stand for a child's right to be raised in a more positive way, I realize like I said that even a nuclear family doesn't ensure that - no kids have rights. They can't choose who their family is, whether they get circumcised or not, what religion they'll be brought up in etc. They just have to try to survive childhood and hope to come out of it relatively (no pun intended) unscathed. And of course I guess a kid being raised by a same-sex couple is probably better than never getting adopted at all and becoming a ward of the state, in and out of foster homes.