Dawn Stefanowicz explains her experience being raised by a gay parent

*** WARNING: This post is definitely for grown-ups only! ***

I was listening to a Dr. J podcast on “Why Marriage Matters”, and I heard about a woman named Dawn Stefanowicz, who was raised by her gay father in Toronto.

So, I looked around and found this interview with Dawn posted on MercatorNet. This is mature subject matter.

Intro:

Gay marriage and gay adoption are being fiercely debated in a number of countries. Usually these issues are framed as a human rights issue. But whose rights? Patrick Meagher, MercatorNet’s contributing editor in Canada, recently interviewed a woman who was raised by a homosexual father. She feels that her rights as a child were completely ignored.

Dawn Stefanowicz (www.DawnStefanowicz.com) grew up in Toronto. Now in her 40s, she has written a book, Out From Under: Getting Clear of the Wreckage of a Sexually Disordered Home, to be released later this year. Stefanowicz has now been married for 22 years, is raising a family, and also works as an accountant. She has also testified about same-sex marriage in Washington and Ottawa.

Sample:

MercatorNet: How did you feel about what was going on around you?

Stefanowicz: You become used to it and desensitised. I was told at eight years old not to talk about this but I knew that something was wrong. I was not thinking “this is right or wrong” but I was disturbed by what I was experiencing. I was unhappy, fearful, anxious and confused. I was not allowed to tell my father that his lifestyle upset me. You can be four-years-old and questioning, “Where is Daddy?” You sense women are not valued. You think Daddy doesn’t have time for you or Daddy is too busy to play a game with you. All this is hard because as a child this is the only experience you have.

MercatorNet: How did this affect your relationship with others?

Stefanowicz: I had a hard time concentrating in school on day-to-day subjects and with peers. I felt insecure. I was already stressed out by an early age. I’m now in my 40s. You’re looking at life-long issues. There is a lot of prolonged and unresolved grief in this kind of home environment and with what you witness in the subcultures.

It took me until I was into my 20s and 30s, after making major life choices, to begin to realise how being raised in this environment had affected me. Unfortunately, it was not until my father, his sexual partners and my mother had died, that I was free to speak publicly about my experiences.

And:

MercatorNet: Why do so few children speak out?

Stefanowicz: You’re terrified. Absolutely terrified. Children who open up these family secrets are dependent on parents for everything. You carry the burden that you have to keep secrets. You learn to put on an image publicly of the happy family that is not reality. With same-sex legislation, children are further silenced. They believe there is no safe adult they can go to.

Have you ever considered what effect it has on a child that they have to grow up without their mother or their father? Is that good for them? Is that something that we should be promoting so that there is more of it? It’s a sad thing to tell adults that they cannot do whatever they want, but it’s a sadder thing to harm children just so that adults can do whatever they want. We need to choose to be careful not to harm children by making poor decisions.

Related posts

• Mark Regnerus’s research vindicated by University of Texas at Austin
• Growing up with two lesbian mothers: a child’s perspective
• Mark Regnerus and the progressive war against science
• More social scientists stepping forward to defend Regnerus study
• Do children of gay parents perform as well as those of heterosexual parents?
• Are gay relationships typically stable and monogamous?
• The American Psychological Association (APA) on lesbian and gay parenting
• Do children raised by gays and lesbians do as well as those of married parents?
• New study finds that children do best in traditional mother-father families
• Obama openly supports gay marriage: 48 hours after top gay donors cut off funding
• Democrat introduces bill to defund adoption agencies that favor married couples
• A secular case against same-sex marriage

Filed under: Commentary, Activist, AIDS, Amendment, Battery, Child, Children, Commitment, Dawn Stefanowicz, Definition, Domestic, Duration, Equal, Equivalent, Female, Fidelity, Gay, GLBT, GLBTQ, Health, Healthy, HIV, Home, Household, Institution, Intact, Intimate, Last, LGBT, LGBTQ, Male, Marriage, Monogamous, Monogamy, Number, Out From Under, Parenting, Partner, Percent, Promiscuity, Raising, Rate, Relationship, Risk, Same-sex, Stability, Stable, STD, Suicide, Violence

Landslide in North Carolina: traditional definition of marriage wins 61-39

Eastern United States Map

The traditional definition of marriage was affirmed by North Carolina voters on Tuesday. The count was 61-39.

North Carolina approved a constitutional amendment Tuesday defining marriage solely as a union between a man and a woman, becoming the latest state to effectively slam the door shut on same-sex marriages.

With most of the precincts reporting Tuesday, unofficial returns showed the amendment passing with about 61 percent of the vote to 39 percent against. North Carolina is the 30th state to adopt such a ban on gay marriage.

Tami Fitzgerald, who heads the pro-amendment group Vote FOR Marriage NC, said she believes the initiative awoke a silent majority of more active voters in the future.

“I think it sends a message to the rest of the country that marriage is between one man and one woman,” Fitzgerald said at a celebration Tuesday night. “The whole point is simply that you don’t rewrite the nature of God’s design based on the demands of a group of adults.”

In the final days before the vote, members of President Barack Obama’s cabinet expressed support for gay marriage and former President Bill Clinton recorded phone messages urging voters to oppose the amendment.

The Obama administration opposes traditional marriage and instead favors gay marriage.

Notice that there is nothing in the amendment about banning anything:

Sec. 6. Marriage.
Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State. This section does not prohibit a private party from entering into contracts with another private party; nor does this section prohibit courts from adjudicating the rights of private parties pursuant to such contracts.

That’s something you hear in the leftist media, but this bill is no more a ban on gay marriage as it is a ban on polygamy. It simply affirms that the state will only recognize traditional marriages as valid. People can do whatever they want and live however they want. What they can’t do is force other people to call relationships that do not affirm the right of a child to have a mother and father “marriage”.

To understand why people oppose same-sex marriage, you can read my post from yesterday, in which I lay out 3 non-religious reasons to oppose gay marriage. In addition, my friend Melissa has another reason to support traditional marriage that Christians in particular will find compelling.

Filed under: News, Amendment, Amendment 1, Amendment One, Ban, Banned, Barack Obama, Constitutional Amendment, Fairness, Gay Marriage, Man, Marriage, North Carolina, Same-Sex Marriage, Vote, Woman

Jim Demint introduces bill to halt funding for European bailouts

Senator Jim Demint

The Wall Street Journal reports on the Republican effort to halt taxpayer-funded bailouts for socialist European nations.

Excerpt:

A group of Republican senators plan to renew their attempts at stopping the U.S. from funding International Monetary Fund loans to Greece and other countries after the Senate failed to vote on their proposal last week.

A spokesman for Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), who is leading the effort, said the GOP senators plan to soon introduce stand-alone legislation that would direct the U.S. Treasury to vote against any IMF assistance to European Union nations for the foreseeable future. If enacted into law, it could halt U.S. participation in any future IMF attempts to stabilize the sovereign debt crisis in Europe.

The proposal comes as finance ministers work towards a political agreement committing to provide financing to meet a growing gap in Greece’s funding needs beyond the current EUR110 billion, which in turn would allow the IMF to release a delayed tranche of cash in early July.

[...]Attempts by GOP lawmakers to block IMF loans failed to gain traction in Congress last year. And President Barack Obama has asserted in a signing statement after a House vote on an IMF provision that he doesn’t recognize Congress’ ability to tell the administration how to vote at the IMF.

Greece embraced socialism, and now they have to face the music.

Filed under: News, Amendment, Austerity Measures, Bailout, Barack Obama, Bill, Debt, Debt Crisis, Democrat, Europe, European Union, Greece, IMF, International Montary Fund, Ireland, Jim Demint, Obama, Portugal, Republican, World Bank

Senate Democrats block pro-small business amendment

From The Hill. (H/T ECM, Marathon Pundit)

Excerpt:

The Senate on Monday night defeated two amendments designed to ease the tax-filing requirements for small businesses.

Senators voted 61-35 — six votes short of the necessary 67 — to reject an amendment by Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) that would strip a provision from the new healthcare law that requires businesses to report supply purchases of $600 or more with a single vendor. Likewise, the chamber voted 44-53 to defeat Sen. Max Baucus’ (D-Mont.) amendment, which would accomplish the same provision but is unpaid-for. That amendment also required 67 votes.

At issue is a section of the new healthcare law that requires businesses, charities and state and local governments to file 1099 reports for all transactions above $600 per year. The votes also represented a noteworthy showdown between Johanns and Baucus, who presented a similar idea but did not fund it through offset spending cuts.

Johanns said his approach was wiser since it was funded through unspent federal monies, directing the federal Office of Management and Budget to cut $39 billion in funds that would have been generated by the 1099 mandate.

The reporting requirement was introduced by the Obama administration.

If you force businesses to waste their time on paperwork, they have less to make money, and that means less money for hiring people.

Filed under: News, Amendment, Business, Economic Growth, Economics, Economy, Employment, Jobs, Obamacare, Regulations, Reporting, Small Business, Unemployment

Study finds that gay parents are more likely to raise gay kids

A new peer-reviewed study about gay parents raising gay kids in AOL News.

Excerpt:

Walter Schumm knows what he’s about to do is unpopular: publish a study arguing that gay parents are more likely to raise gay children than straight parents. But the Kansas State University family studies professor has a detailed analysis that past almost aggressively ideological researchers never had.

[...]His study on sexual orientation, out next month, says that gay and lesbian parents are far more likely to have children who become gay. “I’m trying to prove that it’s not 100 percent genetic,” Schumm tells AOL News.

His study is a meta-analysis of existing work. First, Schumm extrapolated data from 10 books on gay parenting… [and] skewed his data so that only self-identified gay and lesbian children would be labeled as such.

This is important because sometimes Schumm would come across a passage of children of gay parents who said they were “adamant about not declaring their sexual orientation at all.” These people would be labeled straight, even though the passage’s implication was that they were gay.

Schumm concluded that children of lesbian parents identified themselves as gay 31 percent of the time; children of gay men had gay children 19 percent of the time, and children of a lesbian mother and gay father had at least one gay child 25 percent of the time.

Furthermore, when the study restricted the results so that they included only children in their 20s — presumably after they’d been able to work out any adolescent confusion or experimentation — 58 percent of the children of lesbians called themselves gay, and 33 percent of the children of gay men called themselves gay. (About 5 to 10 percent of the children of straight parents call themselves gay, Schumm says.)

Schumm next went macro, poring over an anthropological study of various cultures’ acceptance of homosexuality. He found that when communities welcome gays and lesbians, “89 percent feature higher rates of homosexual behavior.”

Finally, Schumm looked at the existing academic studies… In all there are 26 such studies. Schumm ran the numbers from them and concluded that, surprisingly, 20 percent of the kids of gay parents were gay themselves. When children only 17 or older were included in the analysis, 28 percent were gay.

Here’s the paper entitled “Children of homosexuals more apt to be homosexuals?“. It appeared in the Journal of Biosocial Science.

Abstract:

Ten narrative studies involving family histories of 262 children of gay fathers and lesbian mothers were evaluated statistically in response to Morrison’s (2007) concerns about Cameron’s (2006) research that had involved three narrative studies. Despite numerous attempts to bias the results in favour of the null hypothesis and allowing for up to 20 (of 63, 32%) coding errors, Cameron’s (2006) hypothesis that gay and lesbian parents would be more likely to have gay, lesbian, bisexual or unsure (of sexual orientation) sons and daughters was confirmed. Percentages of children of gay and lesbian parents who adopted non-heterosexual identities ranged between 16% and 57%, with odds ratios of 1.7 to 12.1, depending on the mix of child and parent genders. Daughters of lesbian mothers were most likely (33% to 57%; odds ratios from 4.5 to 12.1) to report non-heterosexual identities. Data from ethnographic sources and from previous studies on gay and lesbian parenting were re-examined and found to support the hypothesis that social and parental influences may influence the expression of non-heterosexual identities and/or behaviour. Thus, evidence is presented from three different sources, contrary to most previous scientific opinion, even most previous scientific consensus, that suggests intergenerational transfer of sexual orientation can occur at statistically significant and substantial rates, especially for female parents or female children. In some analyses for sons, intergenerational transfer was not significant. Further research is needed with respect to pathways by which intergenerational transfer of sexual orientation may occur. The results confirm an evolving tendency among scholars to cite the possibility of some degree of intergenerational crossover of sexual orientation.

Comments to this post will be strictly filtered in accordance with Obama’s law restricting speech on controversial topics.

Related posts

• Frank Turek lists ten alleged facts about same-sex marriage
• Which family configuration is best for raising children?
• Why do people oppose same-sex marriage?
• What causes homosexuality? Is there a gay gene?
• Obama praises non-traditional families on National Family Day

Filed under: News, Activist, AIDS, Amendment, Ban, Banning, Child, Children, Constitutional, Definition, Domestic, Duration, Equal, Equivalent, Female, Fidelity, Gay, Gay Adoption, GLBT, GLBTQ, Health, Healthy, HIV, Home, Homosexuality, Household, Institution, Intact, Intimate, Last, LGBT, LGBTQ, Male, Marriage, Monogamous, Monogamy, Nature, Number, Parenting, Partner, Percent, Promiscuity, Prop, Proposition, Raising, Rate, Relationship, Risk, Same-sex, Stability, Stable, Statistics, STD, Suicide, Violence