Brian Brown is enough to make me (almost) respect Maggie Gallagher. Brian has taken over some of Maggie responsibilities at the National Organization for Marriage, and he just posted this on NOM’s blog:
In Great Britain, thanks to a new ruling, the principle of nondiscrimination now trumps religious liberty and common sense. Catholic adoption agencies will be closed unless they agree to place children with gay couples on an “equal” basis. No preferences for the natural family are permissible any longer, even if it means fewer orphaned children find good homes. The sky is not falling, because the sky never does fall, but there is a large crack opening up in our civilization’s foundations.
I didn’t even bother to see whether Brian has the story right, because it’s ludicrous and nasty even if you take it at face value.
First, the ludicrous part. Brian thinks expanding the pool of potential adoptive parents will result in fewer orphans getting adopted. However, this reasoning — oh heck, I’m done. I can’t point out the illogic any better than that.
The nasty part was this:
No preferences for the natural family are permissible any longer…
Emphasis added. Now when Maggie says crap like that, she’s using making some offensive (and wrong) comparison between biological and adoptive parents. But Brian here isn’t making that particular distinction. He’s saying opposite-sex adoptive parents make families that are natural, while same-sex adoptive parents make families that are…not.
When Maggie ran NOM, she tried to maintain the fiction that the group had nothing against gays or our relationships. NOM’s primary concern was allegedly to create the best environment for children (even if she couldn’t back that up with facts). Animus against gays had nothing to do with it. Here’s Brian, though, not only telling gay couples that they’re, well, unnatural, but telling kids that their whole family is unnatural, too.
(Am I being unfair here? “Unnatural” is such a loaded term. This is usually the part of the interview where Brian sweats and cackles and stammers, “I didn’t mean, uh, unnatural, I just, uh, meant, not natural.”)
I’m ready to believe Maggie agrees with Brian on this. She’s savvy enough not to say it, though. Savvy enough to spin her message in positive terms. She talks about what NOM is for and tries to avoid saying what they’re against. But Brian’s clumsy. His real feelings are easier to see, and under his leadership NOM will find it tougher to duck charges of bigotry and hate bias and disdain.
Not that I would defend this asshole (not to malign a perfectly useful orifice by the comprison), but he may merely mean that only the hterosexually based family is natural, is is not saying anything about adoptive parents at all.
I have heard Brian say in interviews that same-sex marriages are “not real marriages”, so its not any leap at all for him to espouse the view that gay/lesbian families are “not real families”. No matter what rhetoric they use, at the base of it all is their fear/hatred of LGBTQ people.
That’s what I mean Ben. He’s not making a distinction between biological parents and adoptive parents. Rather, he’s saying families headed by opposite-sex adoptive parents are natural, while families headed by same-sex adoptive parents are unnatural. The ONLY difference is the sexual orientation. His anti-gay bigotry (which he would claim doesn’t exist) is showing.
The more they speak, the more they dig their graves. Please, step up to the microphone Brian.
NOM says things gently when everyone is listening because they know that saying “we’re against gay rights” is a losing strategy. But sometimes they show their true colours.
For example, she told Jeremy Hooper (goodasyou) that she wants to legally divorce his marriage:
http://www.goodasyou.org/good_as_you/2009/12/a-maggie-little-christmas.html
Are we sure he didn’t mean the preference for the biological family when he said natural family?
In effect, the legislation to which he refers no longer allows the biological family to offer an effective preference for the minor child to be placed in a home with a heterosexual couple. I think the context of his comment highlights the fact that the persons who created the child have less control over with whom the child is placed.
If that’s the case, let’s just highlight the fact that any sort of preference is not a right in adoption cases. If it was, it would be terminated before the child could be adopted anyways. At least in most US jurisdictions.
Am I alone in this interpretation?
What’s always bothered me when these guys immediately leap to the “religious freedoms” defense for adoption agencies, property rentals, or employment is that they seem to think that “religious freedoms” protect everything that a religious group or person does—even when the law in question is religion-neutral and the activity in question is wholly secular.
When your church is engaged in religious activities—services, prayers, ceremonies, and the like—those practices are of course protected by freedom of religion. But freedom of religion isn’t a blanket indulgence to ignore secular laws you disagree with, particularly when you are engaged in secular activites.
When your church holds a bake sale, you still have to follow food safety laws. When your church sends the kiddies on a field trip, your bus driver still has to obey traffic laws. Leviticus tells us “he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him,” but you can bet that you’re going to prison for murder if you act that one out—no matter how strongly you believe. No freedom of religion problem there; you are free to believe whatever you like, but your actions are still constrained by religion-neutral secular law.
Acting as a landlord, employer, or adoption agency is not a religious activity. It’s a secular activity, and thus wholly subject to secular law.
I like to take Brian’s posting for what it is, DESPERATION. Not to say that I disagree with you in any way, Rob, you are spot on. But a part of me is relishing in delight as NOM is freaking out and they are cranking their propaganda machine to volume setting “11.” The world around us is advancing in Human Rights and our noticeable lag is now becoming a badge of dishonor. I applaud GB for putting Human Rights first, and it’s happening fast and furious all over Europe, Canada, Mexico and soon the rest of the Americas.
As far as Brown’s demeanor, he’s always been a nasty prick. When the 3 protesters in Providence separated from the rest of the group and approached Brian at the podium, Brian said to the nearby NOMers, “don’t touch them, they have AIDS.” Seriously, I hope he is haunted the rest of the days of his life.
Bob– is that on tape somehere? That would be a youtube sensation
Let’s not forget that kids aren’t turned over to any gay person or couple who wants one. These gay folks have been screened just like heterosexual folks are, but irrational folks of Brian’s ilk never point that out.
Along the lines of Thomas’ comment, keep in mind that all adoptions, private ones and ones through foster care, in FL are affected by the ban on gay adoptions. Thus, a woman wanting to enter into a private adoption arrangement can not select a gay person/couple as the adoptive parents unless she opts to deliver out of state. However, she can choose an abortion. So, folks who support FL’s adoption ban would rather see the child aborted than placed with gay parents. Exactly where in the Bible do they find justification for that?
Laws such as FL’s adoption ban and comments like Brian’s do harm kids. Some think surrogacy is selfish but it’s this nonsense that caused me to opt for surrogacy instead of adoption. I knew that being a biological parent would make it more difficult for a conservative nut job judge to.challenge my parenting rights. With adoption I was concerned about losing the kid should my parenting rights be challenged.
Make no mistake. Once they’ve completed their quest against gay marriage, they will try to export Florida’s gay adoption ban via state legislatures and the ballot box. Makes me wonder what they’ll propose to do with the kids
already living with gay parents. It was only 15 years ago that Judge Tarbuck in Pensacola, FL gave a father custody because the mother was a lesbian. The problem? The father was a convicted murderer. He killed his first wife during their divorce proceedings. So being a lesbian makes you a worse parent than being a murderer?
@Thomas August 21st, 2010 at 5:17 pm
The legislation he refers to does not remove a biological families standing in an adoption, those issues are taken care of before the child is in the group that needs a parent.
The authorities have already screened and polled the known family members to see if they wanted to adopt the child or were eligible to adopt the child.
These are generally the kids that no one wants, that will live in orphanages and foster homes all their lives for want of an adoptive family.
NOM and their allies have consistently said that a kid is better off in an orphanage than with a loving gay family. Which of course is at odds with their stance that they don’t hate gays, they just want the best for children.
Also remember that the Catholic Orphanages & Charities (here and abroad) don’t just get money from the church, they get funding from the state. So Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Gays etc all end up paying those subsidies.
That funding is what is being addressed in this suit. They don’t want to loose the revenue from the state.
If they didn’t mind losing that funding, and the Church was really committed to the children, the Church would pay from its own deep pockets for the orphanage to be a private orphanage. There are thousands of them around the world and here in the U.S. Take note that Rome consistently refuses to do that.
This, like the D.C. Catholic Charities demands that it could discriminate against gays, just shines a big spotlight on the truth of their hypocrisy.
The D.C. Diocese stamped their foot and said they would fold up their Charity tents if they were not allowed to discriminate. They lost and decided to stop providing services to homeless and food banks and adoption services.
The D.C. services support system suffered a blip for about 2 seconds as other providers, religious and non-religious, jumped at the chance for the Federal Dollars previously sucked down by the Catholic Charities financial machine.
The same will happen here, the non-bigoted groups will get access to the funds the church had been sucking out of the pool and will be able to expand or at least maintain their service levels.
People that should not be allowed to adopt children are the Brian Browns of this world. People that teach children hatred and homophobia should NEVER be allowed to pass hatred onto little innocent children…
@Thomas
We know that Brian didn’t mean the “biological family” because his statement was in regards to adoption. I was watching a segment of Larry King Live, where Dennis Prager was saying to a gay marriage supporter, “If you have a heterosexual couple and a homosexual couple, which couple would you prefer to give the child to?” Completely disregarding any information about either couple, these ‘black and white’ statements are dangerous at worst and ignorant at best.
I think the business of “fewer orphaned children find good homes” means that this legislation will “force” Catholic agencies to close, so there will be less adoptions in general, even with more prospective parents.
If adoption agencies are going to be bigots, they should be closed, and their funding given to other, more open agencies, who probably couldn’t get the funding in the first place because the Catholics were standing there with their hands out. Besides, isn’t the Catholic church the richest one on the planet? Shouldn’t, perhaps, some of the money that goes to making gold plated toilet seats for the Pope be given to these agencies so that state funds can go to lesser funded ones?
Just a thought.
I think he means fewer orphaned children will find good, that is, heterosexual homes. Because as a result of the ruling, some will now be adopted into… how did that guy Louis put it again? “houses of homosexuality.”
[...] liars. But there’s another possibility. NOM’s president Brian Brown is, after all, a colossal screw-up. Perhaps he doesn’t know his Constitution very well. Perhaps he doesn’t [...]
[...] liars. But there’s another possibility. NOM’s president Brian Brown is, after all, a colossal screw-up. Perhaps he doesn’t know his Constitution very well. Perhaps he doesn’t [...]