Posted by dahsdebater on 6/30/2013 3:42:00 PM (view original):
What do you think are the odds it's worse to grow up in a gay family than a (more likely several) foster family/ies? There is a decent body of statistics that suggests that children raised by same-sex parents are slightly MORE likely to graduate from college and LESS likely to go to jail than children raised by opposite-sex parents or children raised by single parents. I do believe those statistics are skewed. The portion of society most likely to go to jail and least likely to graduate from college - people from inner cities - vote Democrat when they bother to vote, but it's one of the most homophobic environments in the country, and very few inner city same-sex couples exist. So that's gonna tend to depress crime rates and improve college stats. But I'm willing to bet that the harms of being raised by a same-sex couple are small relative to the harms of growing up in the foster system, yes. Absolutely.
I'll give you this . . . the foster system in this country is ****** up. Many people are into the foster parent thing less for the betterment of the kids, and more to collect the state issued benefits for themselves. Basically, it's a variation of the "welfare queen".
The adoption system in this country is also ****** up in that there is so much red tape that qualified potential adoptive parents are often passed over, which is why you see so many adoptive parents going oversees (Russia, China) to adopt rather than adopting here at home. Basically, because they are given little choice but to do so.
Fix the adoption problem in the U.S., and you'll have less children needing to go into foster care.
Fix the foster system to weed out the "foster queens", and those kids who do go into the foster system will have better experiences.
Neither of these things have to do per se with SS vs. OS couples, but since you seem to want to bring the conversation to adoption vs. foster care, I thought I'd bring it up.