"Gay Parenting:" Children Raised by Unchaste Adults Lead Difficult Lives

by Susan Fox

There were two innocent-looking ceramic turtles sitting on the coffee table.

The five-year-old girl studied them. Her cousins were friends with a number of artists in the 1960s. One of their friends had sculpted the turtles.

A little child is curious. So she picked up the turtles and turned them over. To her shock, underneath, they were human with male and female genitalia and breasts. They were almost pornographic in their detail.

This happened about 57 years ago. The image intrigued and bothered the little girl for a long time. 

When she was six, she went into the towel closet and dug underneath the towels. She  came upon a picture of her father (who had died) and her  mother. They had stuck their heads into a wooden cartoon frame for the photo. It depicted an attractive lady sitting in a bathtub and a man looking at her through a window. These images had her parents’ heads.

Perhaps the 1950s images were innocent and harmless, but the girl's mother had correctly understood that they were too adult for her child. That’s why she hid it in under the towels, thinking the daughter would never find it.

What was the little girl doing, digging under the towels in the closet? She was hiding her Barbie doll from herself. She had correctly discerned the almost anatomically correct doll was a near occasion of sin. How funny that both mother and daughter thought to hide lustful images in the same place!

These childhood peccadillos were nothing compared to those of Dawn Stefanowicz, who was raised by a father who self-identified as gay, her sickly mother, and her father’s various live-in boyfriends.  Stefanowicz, author of Out From Under and one of the writers for Jephthah’s Daughters: Innocent casualties in the war for family “equality,” was raised by a weak mother and an unchaste father.

Her personal visit to the towel closet included a trip to the nudist beach at Hamlin’s Point, Toronto Island, Canada. “We were the only kids there amongst all these gay males. But there would be a few females that were topless who were female models, but they were surrounded by14-16 gay males,” she said, also telling stories of vacations in Florida where she was left alone in the hotel pool while her father cruised the local “gay” hot spots.

Author Dawn Stefanowicz

 “My father would find out about another gay cruising area, and we’d actually switch hotels 50 miles down the road,” she said. Left alone with her two brothers while her father was cruising, Dawn said,   “I loved that pool looking up at the starry night sky. (But) I didn’t realize how lonely I felt inside, how rejected and abandoned.”  

Her comments in Jephthah’s Daughter’s appeared in the midst of a discussion with other adults who had been raised by same sex partners. The book covers over 70 cases of same sex parenting.

When she turned 12, Dawn had all kinds of boyfriends but in these relationships she was looking for the kind of male-affirmation that she should have gotten from her father. Self-identified “bi-sexual” Robert Oscar Lopez, raised by two same-sex attracted females, desperately wanted a father’s attention, so much so that at the age of 13 he began to prostitute himself to older men.

Lopez was fascinated by the fact that Dawn had a father, but felt fatherless.  “His attention was always centered on the males in his life,” she responded. “There were three key males (2 brothers, one father) in my life growing up, but there were also multiple partners that my father had, and his partners had, that they were involved with sexually. So in some ways it wasn’t like a couple, it almost seemed polygamous at times because my father and his partners could be involved with 12 other men at the gay bars downtown.” (Jephthah p. 54)

Dawn currently is a wife and mother, but she had to undergo counseling in order to learn what it means to be female.  Lopez – husband and father -- also felt confused about his sexual identity growing up with two “Moms.” He had a lisp, and only knew the mannerisms of women, so as a teenager he never fit in.

“What was it like when your father exposed you to gay culture?” Lopez asked Stefanowicz. “It’s something where as a little girl growing up I didn’t feel that my own femininity and womanhood was being affirmed, and valued, and loved. In fact, I felt it was better to be a gay male, or even a transgender male, than it was to be a little girl. I always felt that I wasn’t lovable because I did not see the men in my life loving women.” (Jephthah, p. 51) 

That is the crux of the problem. Besides creating a  highly sexualized environment, same sex parents are completely unable to model normal male/female roles and respect for the opposite sex. Everyone understands their identify as a child of a mother and a father, so if you treat one or the other as contemptible, the child loses his own self-respect.

About 30 percent of kids raised by same-sex parents self identify as bi-sexual or homosexual, while the number is only 2 percent in the general population. (Jephthah, p. 53) In fact, persons who self identity as homosexual are generally understood to be a small percentage of our population, but on June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same sex “marriage,” giving same sex couples de facto rights to raise children. Therefore, the number of people, who self-identify as homosexual, is bound to grow in the future as a percentage of our population.

Stefanowicz, having interviewed and emailed numerous other kids raised by unchaste adults, believes that all of them experience some gender confusion growing up. “Almost all of us have had some level of sexual confusion. Not that we came out and labeled ourselves. But we struggled. A number of us ... there was sexual abuse. It’s a very sexualized environment (growing up with same sex parents) – not just within the home, but within the subculture that I was exposed to.” (Jephthah p. 53)

Raised by a single parent, who clearly understood her sexual identity as a woman, and exposed to the Catholic culture which esteems chastity, I personally have never suffered any gender confusion or insecurity in my entire life, but individuals like Dawn and Robert had the normal problems of growing up compounded by a sexual identity crisis. They had to face the question: “Who am I sexually?”

A Canadian economist Douglas Allen used Canada’s 2006 census to discover that young adult children of same-sex couples are 35 percent less likely to graduate from high school than young adult children of traditionally married opposite-sex couples. Daughters of same-sex couples do considerably worse than sons. They were 85 percent less likely to graduate than their counterparts raised in a traditional household.  Canada Study: Kids in Gay Families Hampered in School  

 “What is known from decades of research on family structure, studying literally thousands of children, is that every departure from the traditional, stable mother-father family has severe detrimental effects upon children; and these effects persist not only into adulthood but also into the next generation,” Dr. Jeffrey Satinover was quoted in the book Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior is Changing Everything by Robert R. Reilly.  “In short, the central problem with mother-mother or father-father families is that they deliberately institute, and intend to keep in place indefinitely, a family structure known to be deficient in being obligatorily and permanently either fatherless or motherless.” 

The American College of Pediatricians in 2012 echoed Satinover’s findings: “Clearly apart from rare situations, depriving a child of one or both biological parents -- as same-sex parenting requires -- in every case is unhealthy.”

Some years ago, Robert Lopez had a column in his Children’s Rights blog, the English Manif, where he linked to two Disney movies that he felt clearly depicted the behavior of controlling same-sex parents. One was the suffocating “lesbian” mother in Tangled  (think Rapunzel – literally taken

Suffocating mother in Tangled 

from her rightful parents and raised alone by a witch in a tower) and the other is the foster father of the hunchback Quasimodo, Hunchback of Notre Dame. Quasimodo’s “foster father” attempts to keep him hidden and controlled by saying he would frighten people by his appearance.

When I watched those cartoons that Lopez identified as modeling gay parenthood, I realized that the characters were acting like they had stolen the children -- like they really had no right to the kids they were raising. That’s why I titled this piece: “Children Raised by Unchaste Adults” instead of “Children Raised by Unchaste Parents.” On a very deep level, even same sex couples understand they are not the rightful parents of the children they are raising. This makes sense since they had nothing to do with conceiving them. They used illicit means to get them: a sperm donor, an incubator or they got some idiot adoption agency to hand over a helpless child. The children in same-sex households have literally been stolen.

Understanding who is and who is not your father can bring great healing. My mother re-married when I was 18. She dated my stepfather two years before that. It probably sounds whiney -- in light of the horrors Lopez and Stefanowicz suffered -- to say my stepfather never fathered me, but my mother and I tried to shoehorn him into that relationship anyway. “Daddy” treated me like the dirt under the carpet. I no longer felt welcome in my own home despite the fact that my mother was my best friend. But by the grace of God I came to understand that my stepfather was NOT my father. He was actually my brother in Christ; I was healed of the pain caused by that relationship. God is my Father. He is the only Father, who ever welcomed me into His home. He promised to kill the fatted calf, put a ring on my finger and throw a party for my friends. Such an approach could help others saddled with "step-parents."

The American Psychological Association -- in contrast with   the viewpoint of Jephthah’s Daughters -- has a number of studies which finds same sex households are equally nurturing as traditional married households. The organization was taken over by the LGBT movement in the late ‘70s. Because the courts have largely adopted the APA propaganda, it is not unusual to find people who self-identify as homosexual naively believing that others within their same sexual lifestyle can be good parents.  But Professor Loren Marks of Louisiana State University debunked the APA myths when he pointed out that “not one of the 59 studies referenced in the 2005 APA Brief compares a large, random representative sample of lesbian or gay parents and their children, with a large random, representative sample of married parents and their children.”

Robert Lerner and Althea K Nagai in reviewing the same homosexual parenting studies for the Ethics and Public Policy Center reached the same conclusion: “The methods used in these studies are so flawed that these studies prove nothing. Therefore they should not be used in legal cases to make any argument about ‘homosexual vs. heterosexual’ parenting. Their claims have no basis.”

Professor Mark Regnerus, University of Texas, in his New Family Structures Study, managed to completely blow the APA studies out of the water for he used a large study sample that met the standards for research in social science. He found that children are more apt to succeed as adults “on multiple counts across a variety of domains” when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father, especially when the couple remains married to the present day. Unfortunately, this is becoming increasingly rare.

Children raised in same-sex households therefore are more likely to suffer outcomes similar to those from heterosexual stepfamilies and single parents. Specifically, they are more likely to be sexually abused, to be unemployed, less healthy, more depressed, more likely to have cheated on a spouse or partner, smoke more pot, have trouble with the law, have more male and female sex partners, and are more likely to reflect negatively on their childhood. (Regnerus)

Rivka Edelman also discusses some of the creepiness of her upbringing in a same-sex household in Jephthah’s Daughters. What most bothered her the most was her mother’s obsession with her own daughter’s sexuality.  

“A boy would be over and she’d be like, ‘you know, I think he wants to kiss you.’ And I’d be like, ‘Yeah, so what? He can go kiss a doorknob,’” she said, “I literally just completely closed down that way. I was just completely androgynous. I never flirted with a boy ever, in my life.”

Edelman really brings the point home that children of same sex relationships are trophies in a same-sex union. They have as their primary purpose making their parents look good and normal. For the kids, there is no freedom to regret the lack of a relationship with a father or a mother.

“Children learn to role play the part of living dolls,” said Edelman, “Our parents used us as little display objects. We existed only to make our parents look good, to feed the insatiable egos that were our parents. Does that sound like a happy childhood?”

“Looking back over the past 65 years of my life, I have come to understand that child abuse is not about parents who consciously want to do irreparable damage to their children,” said Lee Taylor, who was raised by a “gay” man. His comments appeared in Jephthah’s Daughters, p. 73.  “It’s not as if they plan ahead to turn their children’s world into a living hell. That comes quite naturally as they do their best to give what is truly theirs to give, all of the unconscious toxins which motivate their blinded lives.”

“There is not even the slightest doubt in my mind that my parents consciously wanted the very best in life for me and my brothers and sisters. There is also not the slightest doubt in my mind that they were among the most dangerous and destructive parents that any child could survive. Their lack of conscious awareness of their own psychic demons did nothing to assuage the pain and suffering of my physical, emotional, spiritual and sexual abuse. It would’ve been no less painful if they’d planned it,” Taylor concluded.

Pope Francis weighed in on the issue in a weekly papal audience: “Children also pay the price for immature unions and irresponsible separations: they are the first victims; they suffer the outcome of a culture of exaggerated individual rights, and then the children become prematurely precocious. They often absorb the violence they are not able to ‘ward off’ and before the very eyes of adults are forced to grow accustomed to degradation.” He has spoken out repeatedly against genderless “marriage” and the rights of children to have both a mother and a father wherever possible.

The American College of Pediatricians summarized the risks to children raised in same-sex households:

•  Violence between same-sex partners is two to three times more common than among married heterosexual couples.
• Same-sex partnerships are more prone to dissolution than heterosexual marriages with the average homosexual relationship lasting only two to three years.
• Homosexual partners are promiscuous with serial partners even in loosely termed “committed” relationships. 
• Individuals who practice the homosexual lifestyle are more likely to suffer from mental illness, substance abuse, suicide and have shorter lifespans.

In short the ACP believes that it is very hazardous for children to be raised by same-sex couples whether by adoption, foster care or artificial reproduction. (Making Gay Okay)

I met a self-identified homosexual man on Twitter, who  thought I was very naïve to raise questions about the success of “gay” parenting.  “We don’t have sex in front of our kids,” he said. But one divorced mother, whose husband dragged their kids into a homosexual household, said it was a shock to her son to see his father go into his bedroom with another man. This example alone is much more serious than a five-year-old turning over an obscene ceramic turtle lying on the coffee table.

But that’s not the worst that the children suffer when  they end up under the thumb of an unchaste parent in a divorce. “Their father moved into his new (male) partner’s condo, which is in a complex inhabited by 16 gay men. One of the men has a 19-year-old male prostitute who comes to service him. Another man, who functions as the father figure of this community, is in his late ‘60s and has a boyfriend in his ‘20s,” the man’s ex-wife reported. She says her kids are taken to transgender baseball games, gay rights fundraisers and LGBT film festivals, while on Halloween their father wears make-up and sex bondage straps. For her daughter it’s a very bad environment as the walls of the condo are adorned with large framed pictures of women in provocative poses. “Her father should be protecting her sexuality. Instead he is warping it,” the children’s mother said. It is no better for her son, who in interested in girls, but all the men around him seek sexual gratification with other men. (Jephthah, p. 92)

Hidden in the heart of this story is the issue of the dangers of pornography for little children.  Like the mother hiding the mature image in the towels, some same sex adults do try to hide their porn. But others just leave it carelessly lying around. Robert Lopez spent a lot of time reading his mother’s porn when he was growing up. Edelman and Stefanowicz discovered the same thing in their homes. Stefanowicz’s father moonlighted as an underground male model for underwear in a community magazine. Of course, for her that was a drop in the bucket given that her father and his male partner tried to solicit her 14-year-old boyfriend into a three-way relationship, and then dressed her up and used her as “gay bait” in public places.

Many researchers wondered why the outcomes for kids raised in same sex households were so much worse than for children raised in traditional homes. They theorized that it was the instability and volatility of the same sex relationships.  That undoubtedly had an effect.

Her mother and a succession of lovers raised Edelman. She remembers standing in the driveway when one of the more stable lovers was leaving her Mom: “She put plates on a table, with a glass, with food on the plate,” Edelman recalls. “She was leaving, and I was like in the driveway, saying, ‘Don’t go.’ And she said, ‘In a few years you’ll be able to get out of here.’ I was in sixth grade. It was a long few years.” Edelman  was grateful when someone called Child Protective Services, and she and her siblings were removed from their home.

But something that is not often alluded to by the researchers is the sexualized atmosphere children endure in “homosexual” homes.  No one seems to see that adult chastity is a necessary component of a healthy childhood.   

I began writing this post on the Feast of St. Maria Goretti, the 11-year-old Italian girl, who was stabbed 14 times by

St. Maria Goretti, murdered at age 11 by a man
obsessed with porn

Allesandro Serenelli. He had become obsessed with reading pornography, and Maria refused to have carnal relations with him. That ended in her murder July 6, 1902, the Feast of the Most Precious Blood. She forgave Allesandro before she died.

Serenelli testified in relation to her canonization that Maria’s concern during her stabbing was for his own salvation. “No, no it is a sin. God does not want this. If you do this, you will go to hell,” she repeated.

One hundred and thirteen years later, young children are exposed carelessly to pornography in the home, and at school their innocence is violated by “education” -- sex education. They are growing up in highly sexualized environments, exposed to lustful images and activities long before they are able to cope. Fr. John F. Harvey, O.S.F.S., who researched homosexuality and its causes, found early porn exposure in children as young as eight contributes to homosexual lifestyle choices later in life.

Ex-gay porn star Joseph Sciambra confirmed this in his book Swallowed by Satan. As a practicing homosexual, he thought he was “born” that way. But he came to understand that early porn viewing contributed to his choice to self-identify as a homosexual later in life.

This evil infiltrated our children’s lives in the 1950s. My uncle  had a Playboy calendar in his workspace in the garage. My innocent cousin was a little girl when she walked into the garage and looked at her father’s calendar. “Dad,” she said, “That lady doesn’t have any clothes on.” As an afterthought, she added, “Daddy, she ain’t got no pants either.”

In the 1990s, I had my son in a parent-run pre-school. In connection with this, my husband and I had to take a class once month in childcare. Well, one month – when my husband couldn’t attend -- the topic was self-abuse. The teacher was trying to tell us not to disturb our children if they began to play with themselves.

Everyone appeared to be accepting what she was saying so I raised my hand, and asked the elderly teacher, “If we don’t tell them to stop now, when do we tell them to stop?”  She said, “Why never! It’s an excellent practice for relieving stress even for married couples when one is away for a business trip.”

I looked at the shocked faces of the 40 couples in the room with me, and said, “Do you understand what she is recommending you do?” Then I turned to the woman and said, “Madam, I am not an animal.”

Now those kids are adults. They have been taught to indulge their sexual whims without restraint.  Sadly, the next generation faces further onslaughts of filth in their young lives because the U.S. Supreme Court has introduced them to same-sex households. The manure is hitting the fan. The consequences for the human race are catastrophic.  

“Our culture no longer corners us into virtue,” said author Robert R. Reilly (Making Gay Okay) “but impels us into vice. Almost every contemporary cultural signal militates against chastity, which is why the fabric of society is falling apart.”  

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