IGF CultureWatch

The conventional view about John McCain is that, on many domestic issues, he tries to appeal both to religious conservatives and to independents. I think the truth is often less calculated than that: he has good instincts but simply hasn't given many cutting-edge domestic issues much deep thought. In recent comments about gay adoption, for example, he began badly but ended up in a pretty sensible position.

It started when the New York Times asked McCain whether he supported allowing gay couples to adopt children. "I think that we've proven that both parents are important in the success of a family," McCain responded, "so, no, I don't believe in gay adoption."

The interviewer, apparently dumbfounded, asked whether McCain would still feel that way even if it meant the child would be placed in an orphanage. McCain, suddenly sensing a culture-war minefield, avoided the question and simply said that he believed adoption should be encouraged.

Lots of gay activists jumped on this exchange as if proved that McCain hates gays or, at the very least, proved that he has capitulated to the religious right. It proves neither.

I don't think McCain has given even a moment of thought to adoption policy. The second half of the quote is a non sequitur. Adoption is necessarily a context in which "both parents" are unavailable, so it makes no sense to cite the superiority of biological parents as a reason to prohibit adoption by gays.

In the context of the culture wars, I think McCain hears a question like, "Do you favor letting gay couples adopt?" as, "Do you think gay parents are just as good for a child as a mother and father?" I don't think he hears it as, "Do you think that, once a child is up for adoption because his mother and father are out of the picture, gay people should be allowed to adopt that child?"

There is considerable debate about whether children do just as well with same-sex parents as with opposite-sex ones. Studies comparing children of gay and straight parents, while supportive of gay parenting, are not yet conclusive. Reasonable people who don't blindly hate gays can believe that opposite-sex couples would be better for children on average than same-sex couples.

Hardly anybody thinks, however, that this means gay persons must be prohibited from adopting children. Certainly gay people are competent to raise children, and public policy throughout the country reflects that fact. Only one state absolutely forbids adoptions by homosexuals, and even it allows gays to serve as long-term foster parents. McCain can't be opposed to adoptions by gay people under any circumstances, which was obvious when he side-stepped the interviewer's follow-up about Dickensian orphanages.

But McCain's answer in the Times created enough doubt, and generated enough criticism in the blogosphere (including by me), that his campaign was obliged to explain what he meant. After noting correctly that adoption is a state, not federal, issue and that McCain was not supporting any federal legislation on the subject, the campaign explained his position thus:

McCain expressed his personal preference for children to be raised by a mother and a father wherever possible. However, as an adoptive father himself, McCain believes children deserve loving and caring home environments, and he recognizes that there are many abandoned children who have yet to find homes. McCain believes that in those situations that caring parental figures are better for the child than the alternative.

(A week later, McCain was asked again about gay adoptions by ABC's George Stephanopoulos. He responded, again, by asserting that he supports "traditional families" but also supports adoption for kids with no alternatives. Despite repeated goading from Stephanopoulos, he did not repeat his statement to the Times that he "opposes gay adoptions.")

What to make of all this? By itself, the clarification was unobjectionable. Few doubt that children should be raised by their own mother and father "wherever possible." But where the biological parents aren't available or are incompetent, children should be raised by caring adoptive parents rather than shuttled from home to home in long-term foster care. For McCain, does "caring adoptive parents" include a same-sex couple?

While some gay writers and activists complained that McCain didn't go far enough in repudiating his earlier opposition to gay adoption, it's instructive to consider the reaction of anti-gay groups. The Family Research Council worried that McCain had "muddied the waters" of his earlier opposition. Focus on the Family fumed that he had "backed off." He was sharply criticized on the Christian Broadcasting Network.

And while McCain could have been clearer in his clarification, it does establish a couple of important things that all but the most zealous supporters of Barack Obama should appreciate. Whereas McCain had suggested to the New York Times that it's always best for children to be raised by mothers and fathers, he now acknowledges this often won't be possible since "there are many abandoned children who have yet to find homes."

Also, his seeming insistence on allowing adoptions only by opposite-sex couples has been replaced by supporting adoptions into "loving and caring home environments" where there are "caring parental figures."

I would have liked an explicit acknowledgment that gay parents can be caring parents and provide loving homes. (That would be a good future follow-up question.) But it won't be lost on religious conservatives that the McCain campaign used the kind of gender-neutral language about families that could be found on the website of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force.

Taking his statements together, I think McCain's view is roughly this: when it comes to adoption opposite-sex couples are preferable, but same-sex couples are acceptable. That's not a crazy or necessarily anti-gay view. In fact, if that's his view he is near the forefront of adoption policy, since such "second-parent" adoptions by unmarried gay couples are now permitted in only some jurisdictions in only about half the states.

On the whole, after some uncomfortable twisting and turning, McCain came up with a generally supportive position on gay adoption. It won't appease gay partisans in an election year but it is defensible.

As best I can from this distance, I try to follow the progress of gay rights movements abroad. And I feel great admiration and sympathy for the brave men and women who are trying to promote gay legal and social equality in many countries of Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and South America.

But most of them face a much harder time than we did in North America and Western Europe. They face very different social situations from the ones we did so I am not sure if the activist model they have adopted in part from us can work as well for them as it did for us.

An effective gay rights movement in America followed, it did not precede, the sexual revolution of the 1960s which liberated heterosexual sexuality. In addition, the late 1960s and 1970s were a time of growing economic prosperity and the growing autonomy for individuals that that prosperity facilitated. There was-if not exactly a growing secularization-at least a gradual decline in the Cold War-inspired Christian religiosity that gripped the country in the 1950s. And finally, prestigious reports-the Wolfenden Report (1957) in England, and the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code (draft c. 1954; final version, 1962))-both recommended decriminalizing homosexuality.

Most countries outside North America and Western Europe have few or none of these things to aid their efforts. After decades of official homophobia by atheist Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, once Communist oppression was removed, people returned to religion with the attendant hostility to homosexuality of both Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. How gays can find any institutional support, lessening of hostility, any wedge point at which they can begin to build power and influence is far from clear.

Contrast this with Spain, where the Franco regime's military authoritarianism tied itself to a conservative Catholicism. A growing economic and religious liberalization began in the last years of Franco's reign and now Spain is one of the most gay-friendly nations, even allowing gay marriage. You have to wonder if there is some general law that people react against whatever supported that oppression.

In China, there has been a gradual reduction of economic controls and, resulting from that, some social controls so long as there is no organized opposition to the government. The official psychiatric organization, influenced by international psychiatric groups, declared gays no longer sick. This has allowed gays to meet unobtrusively in public places with only sporadic harassment prompted by officials at the local level.

It will be interesting to see if, with China's growing capitalism and economic liberalization, a kind of gay liberation can occur without organization and leadership, or if, alternatively, a cautious, non-political gay movement can manage to work within the government strictures. We can view with concern the rise of Christianity and Falun Gong spiritual exercises in China since both are hostile to gays, but on the other hand perhaps their growth will pressure the government to further reduce social controls-which would also benefit gays.

Africa presents a dismal spectacle except for South Africa. There the country has recoiled from the conservative, segregationist regime with its Dutch Reformed religious support and embraced gay equality in its constitution-another example of the rebound thesis. This has been aided by prominent pro-gay spokespersons within the Anglican Church and the government itself.

But in most of the rest of Africa gays are officially harassed and threatened, their sexuality and organizations criminalized. Religious leaders of both an aggressive, ignorant Christianity and an equally aggressive, ignorant Islam compete for legitimacy and followers by loudly promoting their hostility to homosexuality.

South America presents a mixed picture. Chile remains sexually conservative, while Brazil's Sao Paulo has the largest Gay Pride parade in the world. With its pervasive Catholicism, South America should be socially conservative, but its Catholicism seems to have more to do with ritual and festivity and a worship of saints and the "Blessed Virgin" than with sexual morality. Growing evangelical Protestantism should be a concern except that so far its social agenda has focused on literacy and economic self-help. Neither seems to pose a threat to gays.

One major obstacle to gay progress seems to come from South America's obsessively macho concern with gender roles and the social construction of gays as feminine. There is harassment and even murder of gays by youth gangs in several countries. But the targets seem often to be transvestites, often transvestite prostitutes. It seems doubtful that most of these are genuinely transgendered males. Instead many seem to be gay men dressing to signal their sexual availability to other, ostensibly heterosexual males.

I offer these perceptions and analyses only tentatively and welcome better-informed thoughts by others.

First published at 365gay.com on July 21, 2008

Here's the latest for the "politicians trying to have it both ways" file: John McCain on gay adoption.

Asked about the subject by the New York Times, McCain made clear that he opposes it. Here's the relevant portion of the interview in full:

Q: "President Bush believes that gay couples should not be permitted to adopt children. Do you agree with that?"

McCain: "I think that we've proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no I don't believe in gay adoption."

Q: "Even if the alternative is the kid staying in an orphanage, or not having parents?"

McCain: "I encourage adoption and I encourage the opportunities for people to adopt children; I encourage the process being less complicated so they can adopt as quickly as possible. And Cindy and I are proud of being adoptive parents."

Q: "But your concern would be that the couple should be a traditional couple?"

McCain: "Yes."

A few days later, after considerable criticism, McCain's director of communications issued the following "clarification."

"McCain expressed his personal preference for children to be raised by a mother and a father wherever possible. However, as an adoptive father himself, McCain believes children deserve loving and caring home environments, and he recognizes that there are many abandoned children who have yet to find homes. McCain believes that in those situations that caring parental figures are better for the child than the alternative."

Let's start by making something clear: nobody gives a flying wallenda what McCain's (or any other candidate's) "personal preferences" are. My personal preference is that children be raised by parents who dress them in tasteful Ralph Lauren sweater sets, but I'm not about to translate that into public policy.

Second, the follow-up question in the initial interview could not have been clearer - "Even if the alternative is the kid staying in an orphanage?" - and, at best, McCain punted on that question. Given the thousands of children in need of good homes - often due to heterosexual irresponsibility - and the number of gay couples selflessly stepping up to the plate to provide for them, McCain's response was nothing short of shameful.

McCain's "clarification" just added insult to injury. Through an aide, he went out on a major limb and said - are you ready? - that having "caring parental figures" is better for children than abandonment. Now there's some bold leadership for you. (Notice that the campaign couldn't even bring itself to mention gay parents- just "caring parental figures.")

Everyone knows what's really going on here. McCain is trying to impress the religious right by being against gay stuff. But in the year 2008, insulting gay parents isn't cool in the eyes of moderate voters. So he flip-flopped - but in a vague enough way that he can pretend he didn't.

Let's suppose one believes, as McCain apparently does, that all else being equal it is better for children to be raised by both a mother and a father. I think this is a defensible position, although the best available research on gay parents suggests that their children turn out just as well as those of straight parents. But let's grant the premise for the sake of argument.

What follows with respect to gay adoption? In practice, virtually nothing. That's because even if - all else being equal, which it seldom is - straight couples make better parents, gay couples clearly make very good parents, and adoption is one arena where we cannot afford to make the best the enemy of the good.

Indeed, parenting in general is such an arena. Otherwise no one would be fit to have children.

In general, children do better with more-educated parents than with less educated ones, but we don't conclude that all prospective parents must have college degrees. In general, children do better with comfortable financial resources than with meager ones, but we don't insist that prospective parents must have higher-than-average incomes. In general, children do better with grandparents around, but we don't tell orphans that they themselves should never become parents. And so on.

Here's another thing that research and common sense tell us: in general, children who are planned do better than children who are "accidental." And unlike straight couples, gay couples never say "Oops, we're pregnant." So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that children of gay parents do as well as they do.

I'm not suggesting that children of gay parents don't face unique challenges. But the main one happens to be other people's ignorance. When such ignorance comes from an adoptive father, it's surprising. When it comes from a potential president, it's downright unacceptable.