Top Mormon Leader: Children Of Same-Sex Couples Are ‘Victimized’
by David Badash on October 7, 2012
in News,Politics,Religion
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One of the top leaders within the Mormon Church, Dallin Harris Oaks, said Saturday that children who are raised by same-sex couples are “victimized.” Oaks, the fifth most senior apostle in the LDS Church, was speaking at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ General Conference, and also spoke at length against single-parenting.
“He urged parents and caregivers to respond to children who struggle, including with same-sex attraction, with ‘loving understanding, not bullying or ostracism’,” the Salt Lake Tribune reports:
He also cautioned that it should be assumed that kids raised by same-sex couples or unwed mothers will be at a disadvantage.
“Children are also victimized by marriages that do not occur,” Oaks said.
Discussing children who are LGBTQ, Oaks suggested they suffer from “psychological abuse.”
“When we consider the dangers from which children should be protected, we should also include psychological abuse,” Oaks said, rightly attacking those who bully, and then added:
“Young people struggling with any exceptional condition, including same-gender attraction, are particularly vulnerable and need loving understanding and not bullying or ostracism.”
“We should assume the same disadvantages for children raised by couples of the same gender,” as for children raised by unmarried opposite-sex couples, and single parents.” Oaks then quoted an unnamed New York Times writer who claimed that “same-sex marriage is a social experiment.”
A quick search finds that writer to be the Times‘ own conservative op-ed columnist, Ross Douthat, who wrote in June of the flawed Regnerus anti-gay parenting “study” that New Civil Rights Movement writer Scott Rose has thoroughly discredited:
Same-sex marriage is a social experiment, and like most experiments it will take time to understand its consequences. We don’t know how relationship norms and expectations will evolve in the gay community – where the ongoing Dan Savage-style debates about monogamy and fidelity will lead, for instance, or how closely same-sex marriage will be associated with childrearing. We don’t know how plausible Saletan’s vision of wedlock and parenting running on parallel tracks for gays and straights really is.
The Mormon Church, via its wholly-owned Salt Lake City-based newspaper business, the Deseret News, was the first to announce and publicly applaud the flawed Regnerus “study,” and NOM co-founder Robert P. George is on the editorial advisory board of the Deseret News. The New Civil Rights Movement was the first to make this connection and one of the first to report on the “study.”
“One of the most serious abuses of children is to deny them birth,” Oaks claimed, decrying abortion, then praised “a mother in the Philippines [who] said, ‘sometimes we do not have enough money for food, but that is alright, because it gives me the opportunity to teach my children about faith. We gather and pray for relief and the children see the Lord bless us’.”
Oaks, an attorney, served as president of Brigham Young University from 1971–1980, and for decades was considered “a top prospect for appointment to the United States Supreme Court.”
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was a primary supporter of California’s Prop 8, which banned same-sex marriage, and provided extraordinary funding and non-financial, asset support. It is widely believed that the Mormon Church is the main funder of NOM, the National Organization For Marriage.
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