Thousands rally in Rome against unmarried couples law

[Dee]

Thousands rally in Rome against unmarried couples law (http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/070512/world/international_italy_family_dc)

ROME (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of Italians rallied at a Rome church square on Saturday to protest against a proposed law that would give greater rights to unmarried couples, including gays and lesbians.

The draft legislation, which requires parliamentary approval, has divided Italy's ruling coalition, angered the powerful Roman Catholic church and stirred passionate debate.

Waving banners and dancing to tambourines and trumpets, more than 500,000 people poured into the square outside Rome's St. John in Lateran cathedral to support traditional family values based on marriage between a man and a woman.

A large cardboard wedding cake with a bride and groom on top stood next to the stage, while nuns, parents and children chanted "Long live the family."

A host of conservative politicians including former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and some members of current premier Romano Prodi's government showed up, after days of speculation and debate over who would and should attend.

"The family is in danger because the more freedom and options you allow in creating other unions outside the natural family made of a husband and a wife with children, the more society itself dissolves," said one participant, William Bergamini.

The rally's organizers -- a consortium of largely Catholic groups -- handed out millions of flyers and plastered lampposts and walls with posters in a publicity blitz before the event that ensured a strong turnout...

The bill was immediately attacked by the Church, which sees it as an assault on family values by the Left and a 'Trojan Horse' that could ultimately usher in civil marriage ceremonies for gays and lesbians.

Members of Prodi's own government like Justice Minister Clemente Mastella also came out swinging against the bill, and the "Family Day" rally has became the latest issue to expose divisions within the Catholics-to-Communists coalition.

Mastella and Education Minister Giuseppe Fiorini ignored a fellow minister's plea to avoid the rally as a matter of correctness, while European Affairs Minister Emma Bonino turned up at the "Secular Courage" counter-rally.

Prodi, a practicing Catholic, was in Stuttgart on Saturday and urged Italians to avoid fighting like the "Guelphs and Ghibellines" -- rival Italian factions that fought in the 12th and 13th centuries.

"We must not manipulate religion," Prodi told Italian radio. "In all modern countries, secularists and Catholics live together."



Wow! A society based on a "natural" family structure must be rather weak if other types of families can so easily endanger it. This argument is complete nonsense with no foothold in reality whatsoever.

To paraphrase a line from my song Homo’s Lament (http://www.soundclick.com/bands/songInfo.cfm?bandID=648359&songID=4929372), can they not figure out what they don't know?

[Darlene]

can they not figure out what they don't know?

The problem Daniel, Is they don't know and they don't want to know. And that my friend is sad.
Peace,
Darlene

[DaveM]

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance--that principle is contept prior to investigation"--Herbert Spencer.

[hoops]

i don;t know if this is true of most catholics, i don;t even know if it is true of many cahtolics, i just know what i have seen of the catholics i come into contact with and see on tv...take the book, the davince code...the catholics i have come into contact with it have never read more than the liner notes yet they see it as evil, this has been so with many things such as gay marriage, aids, population control. they just don't want to know the whole truth but only the truth that suits them, again i say, this is only the catholics i have come in contact with. i myself am a catholic lesbian. i know that is an oxymoron, but that is who i am, and i have read the books
peace
hoops

[Dee]

Canadian study: Gay parents at least as good

published Tuesday, May 8, 2007

A Canadian study has found that same-sex parents are just as good, if not better, than opposite-sex parents.

The study, released by the Canadian Justice Department, was commissioned in 2003 by its then-Liberal government. The study primarily focused on lesbian couples.

The study, authored by Professor Paul Hastings at Concordia University, asserts that children raised by lesbian parents are equally as socially competent as children raised by heterosexual parents.

"A few studies suggest that children with two lesbian mothers may have marginally better social competence than children in traditional nuclear families, even fewer studies show the opposite, and most studies fail to find any differences," says the 74-page study.

Hastings, who only just gained permission to release the study, suggested that publication was restricted by the Conservative government that regained power in 2006, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

In December, the Conservatives tried to challenge the constitutional definition of marriage, but the efforts were defeated in the House of Commons.

Same-sex marriage has been legal in Canada since 2005.

The current government has insisted that the research represents findings of the author and "not those of the department." (Hassan Mirza, Gay.com U.K.)

(source (http://www.gay.com/news/article.html?date=2007/05/08/1&navpath=/channels/news/))

Adoptive parents, including gays, rate high

published Monday, February 12, 2007

Adoptive parents invest more time and financial resources in their children than biological parents, according to a new national study challenging arguments that have been used to oppose same-sex marriage and gay adoption.

The study, published in the new issue of the American Sociological Review, found that couples who adopt spend more money on their children and invest more time on such activities as reading to them, eating together and talking with them about their problems.

"One of the reasons adoptive parents invest more is that they really want children, and they go to extraordinary means to have them," Indiana University sociologist Brian Powell, one of the study's three co-authors, said in a telephone interview Monday.

"Adoptive parents face a culture where, to many other people, adoption is not real parenthood," Powell said. "What they're trying to do is compensate. . . . They recognize the barriers they face, and it sets the stage for them to be better parents."

Powell and his colleagues examined data from 13,000 households with first-graders in the family. The data was part of a detailed survey called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and other agencies.

The researchers said 161 families in the survey were headed by two adoptive parents, and they rated better overall than families with biological parents on an array of criteria -- including helping with homework, parental involvement in school, exposure to cultural activities and family attendance at religious services. The only category in which adoptive parents fared worse was the frequency of talking with parents of other children.

The researchers noted that adoptive couples, in general, were older and wealthier than biological parents, but said the adoptive parents still had an advantage -- albeit smaller -- when the data was reanalyzed to account for income inequality.

In particular, the researchers said, adoptive parents had a pronounced edge over single-parent and stepparent families.

The researchers said their findings call into question the long-standing argument that children are best off with their biological parents. Such arguments were included in state Supreme Court rulings last year in New York and Washington that upheld laws against same-sex marriage.

The researchers said gay and lesbian parents may react to discrimination by taking extra, compensatory steps to promote their children's welfare.

"Ironically, the same social context that creates struggles for these alternative families may also set the stage for them to excel in some measures of parenting," the study concluded.

(more (http://www.gay.com/news/article.html?2007/02/12/4))

[DaveM]

What on earth could sexual preference have to do with one's parenting skills? Parenting does not involve having your children in bed with you during intimate moments regardless of who you love (if it does, you DO have a problem). Raising a child requires love, tolerance, and an astonishing amount of patience....where will you find more of all than among those who have had to struggle with society just to live their own lives?

Given current statistics on child abuse, divorce, neglect, etc. etc. ad nauseum, I'd like to know what makes a heterosexual couple automatically qualified to be competent parents.

By the way, Dee--you often wish for parenting licenses. Our own Margaret Sanger (hated by the more rabid pro-lifers because she believed in eugenics at a time during which it was not only fashionable, but a matter of law in many states) advocated just that and was actually part of a group which tried to introduce legislation requiring a license to procreate into Congress. The world had to learn the hard way what a belief in eugenics can lead to--nonetheless, she may well have had a fine idea as far as parenting licenses are concerned.

[Dee]

What on earth could sexual preference have to do with one's parenting skills?

Absolutely nothing, but of course you have to have at least two functioning brain cells to realise that.

I am not in favour of eugenics at all, Dave. I have worked with and have friends who are disabled or differently abled. I don't believe it is ethically right to discard "flawed" human beings. Imagining a world of sterilizations or forced abortions is bit macabre to me.

What I’d like is for people who have or are going to have children to prove their ability to raise them in healthy ways either before or after procreating. Of course there is no realistic way to achieve any of this in a civilized society.

Years ago, I used to be against abortion but now I would rather they occur safely and legally if wanted than to see how children are neglected or abused, which I do see far too often alas.

[DaveM]

Eugenics is truly scary. And equally scary is the fact that many of its principles were matters of United States law for many years. It was the justification for bans on interracial marriages and compulsive sterilization of the mentally ill. Long after the Nazis provided an example of what a belief in eugenics will lead to if pursued to an extreme end, America still had such policies in place. The last law banning interracial marriage was removed from the books sometime during the 1970s, and laws authorizing sterilization of state hospital patients remain on the books in several states.

My mother can recall working in obstetric nursing during the early 60s. To one side of the hospital nursery was another room, where childen born with Down Syndrome or other conditions were, at the discretion of the doctor, placed and left to die (the parents were told the child had "failed to thrive"). How late the practice continued I do not know.

The problem in any attempt to "improve the breed" is that those who wish to do so tend to have very odd ideas of what "improvement" would be, and very extreme ideas as to how their beliefs would be imposed on the population. I, personally, would beg anyone carrying the Huntington's gene or similar to avoid having children. But once the question of force enters the picture, the only possible result is unimaginable horror.

One of the greatest omissions from histories of 20th Century America has been any detailed discussion of the popularity of eugenic ideas and the hideous results when they were placed into practice. It is a story I hope will be properly told someday--we could all benefit from the warning.

[Darlene]

I would love to read about the eugenic ideas and the hideous results. No natural selection, just the best from the best. It would definitely be a horror story.
Peace, Darlene