Fathers and mothers

I have a Super Bowl prediction: At half-time the Colts and their cheerleaders will switch roles. Peyton Manning will spend the second half prancing about the sideline half-naked, while the cheer squad blows a double-digit lead over the Bears.\nOK, it'll never happen. I concocted this ridiculous scenario to draw attention to an equally ridiculous but nonfiction blunder being enacted in Britain: the legalized adoption of orphans by homosexuals.\nLast week Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, the head of the Catholic Church in England, announced that Catholic adoption agencies on the island will shut down if new anti-discrimination laws force them to place orphans with sodomites.\nNow, it's worth noting that four of my five siblings are adopted; additionally, for about 15 years of my childhood my father and mother were foster parents and gave shelter to the orphans of Indiana. I've had a short lifetime of experience with orphans.\nFor an orphan, life in an orphanage is better than death. And miserable as it may be, growing up in the foster care system is better than the orphanage. Believe me, the foster care system isn't perfect, but it's far better than an orphanage for one reason: A handful of dedicated nuns can never be a father and a mother; certainly if anyone could come close to approximating the love and care of parents it would be godly Christian women who have sworn-off their own lives to do only that. But we designed the foster care system because nuns can't replace parents.\nThe NFL knows that men and women are different, and it is banking on its fans appreciating that. On Sunday those differences will be inescapably lucid for anyone watching -- even if they're emphasized in a distasteful way. \nIf men and women are different in such a triviality as the Super Bowl, how much more so in the very weighty task of raising children? Through the mechanism of certain biological necessities, God has given every child a father and a mother because that child needs a father and a mother.\nAn orphanage cannot be a father, and two men cannot be a mother. Homosexuals cannot be the parents every child was meant to have.\nI don't know what the impetus behind homosexual adoption is, but I'll posit a guess: It's thought that raising kids might somehow lend legitimacy to the sham of gay marriages. If this is the case, it's nothing more than an unscrupulous political move that takes advantage of the most-vulnerable among us. \nIf Britain -- or America, for that matter -- cannot find a father and mother for each of her orphans, it might be time to reopen the orphanages.\nCertainly, 20 nuns are not a father and mother. But for the good of the orphan, he's much better off in the hands of 20 Christian women dedicated to caring for orphans than in the hands of two men dedicated to having sex with each other.