Queerly reared

With the staggering surplus of loving homes available to foster children right now, we'd better start weeding some out, eh?\nAccording to Reuters News Service, the Texas House of Representatives passed a bill this week banning gays from becoming foster parents. Says State Representative Robert Talton (R): "There's a risk that more of the children will go into homosexuality because it's a cultivated and learned behavior."\nYeah, just like I learned to be attracted to men by watching my mom pluck my dad's back hair.\nTalton's statement was supported by Cathie Adams, the president of a conservative group called the Texas Eagle Forum. She claimed, without bothering to cite any sort of research, that gay foster parents are more likely to molest their foster kids.\nI beg to differ.\nDuring the research for 2001's "The Stop Child Molestation Book," Nora Harlow and Dr. Gene G. Abel interviewed 1,038 men who had molested boys. An overwhelming 70 percent of these men said they were "predominantly heterosexual" in their adult sex lives. Included in this figure are the 51 percent who were "exclusively heterosexual."\nCold hard facts aren't as readily available to dispute Talton's "learned behavior" statement, but there are quite a few findings out there that point to genetics. For example, the online psychology resource http://allpsych.com posted the results of a study of gay men with identical twin brothers. In Fifty-two percent of these pairs showed both twins to be gay, whereas only five percent of the adopted gay men studied had adopted brothers who were gay.\nBut even barring these statistics, simple common sense renders Talton's statement ludicrous. Most of the gays I know, including my own brother, come from a traditional family with married, heterosexual parents. And interviews with gays almost invariably result in the revelation that they've known of their same-sex preferences from early childhood, even as their straight parents were raising them as heterosexuals. Most of them tried for years to "force" themselves to be straight to no avail.\nIn other words, homosexuality is no more a learned behavior than is heterosexuality. If it were, then every 40-year-old man who grew up watching "Starsky and Hutch" would prefer "outties" to "innies."\nAnother reason for the ban, according to Adams, is that "a child is better served by having a male and female role model." Interesting, then, that there are so many single foster parents. And how about all the kids coming from abusive two-parent homes? Is it really less damaging to be regularly beaten than to be exposed to -- gasp -- same-sex relationships?\nThere are about 542,000 children in foster care in the United States. Those kids need capable caretakers, and they're not going to get them if potential caretakers are eliminated based on something as arbitrary as sexual orientation. And despite Adams' claim that "homosexuals cannot procreate, so they recruit," gays can easily employ the same methods that infertile heterosexual couples use to conceive. So wouldn't it be nice if, instead of resorting to artificial insemination to add to the bulging U.S. population, they took in existing children looking for families?\nIt's undeniable that child molestation is a serious problem, but banning gay foster parents is not the solution. Legislators who claim that they're working in children's best interests to exercise their own dogmatic prejudices are selfish and immature. With foster kids being put into juvenile detention centers because of a lack of adequate care options, it's ridiculous to deny thousands of caring, stable adults the chance to help a child in need. \nBesides, why target foster parents when those Wiggles are still on TV?