Bisexual, Latino, Lesbian-raised Intellectual Defends Mark Regnerus

Robert Oscar Lopez , a bisexual, Latino, lesbian-raised intellectual goes after critics of Mark Regnerus’s gay parenting study:

The problem with Sherkat’s disqualification of Regnerus’s work is a manifold chicken-and-egg conundrum. Though Sherkat uses the term “LGBT” in the same interview with Bartlett, he privileges that L and G and discriminates severely against the B, bisexuals.

Where do children of LGBT parents come from? If the parents are 100-percent gay or lesbian, then the chances are that the children were conceived through surrogacy or insemination, or else adopted. Those cases are such a tiny percentage of LGBT parents, however, that it would be virtually impossible to find more than a half-dozen in a random sampling of tens of thousands of adults.

Basically, Lopez argues, the self-appointed arbiters of legitimate sexual identity are furious that Regnerus’ study captured experiences like his own:

Most LGBT parents are, like me, and technically like my mother, “bisexual”—the forgotten B. We conceived our children because we engaged in heterosexual intercourse. Social complications naturally arise if you conceive a child with the opposite sex but still have attractions to the same sex. Sherkat calls these complications disqualifiable, as they are corrupting the purity of a homosexual model of parenting.

I would posit that children raised by same-sex couples are naturally going to be more curious about and experimental with homosexuality without necessarily being pure of any attraction to the opposite sex. Hence they will more likely fall into the bisexual category, as did I—meaning that the children of LGBT parents, once they are young adults, are likely to be the first ones disqualified by the social scientists who now claim to advocate for their parents.

I have some reservations about Lopez’s suggestion elsewhere that difference itself is a bad thing (“growing up different from other people is difficult and the difficulties raise the risk that children will develop maladjustments or self-medicate with alcohol and other dangerous behaviors”), but that’s easy enough for me to say as someone who was raised in a thoroughly traditional home.

The real thing that enrages Regnerus’s critics, of course, is not the design of his study but his violation of sexual orthodoxy. Lopez is another dissenter from the dogma of sexual liberationism, and, as he explains, he came by his heresy the hard way:

In the Bronx gay world, I cleaned out enough apartments of men who’d died of AIDS to understand that resistance to sexual temptation is central to any kind of humane society. Sex can be hurtful not only because of infectious diseases but also because it leaves us vulnerable and more likely to cling to people who don’t love us, mourn those who leave us, and not know how to escape those who need us but whom we don’t love . . . . That’s why I am conservative.

More here . Lopez also has a  book  that looks well worth buying.