gay parents, parents like the others? reads intervention Stéphane Lavignotte, pastor of The Green House (People's Evangelical Mission) in Audience Christianity organized by the newspaper La Vie September 25 derniersur the theme "The homosexual parents, parents like the others?" A family like she does to another? anthropology is that a source of endless fun. For example, among the Han in Yunnan, China, children are educated by their mother and uncle, and may not know even the name of their father. Samo in Burkina Faso, the first child to be born of a union before receiving premarital legitimate father as the husband of his mother. In many peasant societies, in Africa, Asia, Oceania, adoption is not a quick fix nor a problem of infertility is a common practice is the voluntary transfer between close relatives. There is also a very large number of examples after every war, children only raised by women.
This diversity in space shows that anthropology is also in time. Just look at the Bible. There are single parents raising their children, a polygamous man, Isaac, the two women use their maids as surrogate mothers and donor eggs to increase the children in a competition quite amazing, as three families Ruth, Naomi and Boaz, etc.. And we can not say any more than Jesus' family is very traditional. You know the story.
theologian Virginia Ramey Mollenkott was recorded in the Bible forty different family configurations only one of which corresponded to the heterosexual nuclear family standard, proposed by St. Paul as model family ... He did not give a concrete example, but it must exist!
In France today, families are also very diversified. Blended families now account for one in ten families and single parent families more than two in ten, three out of ten families called classical model. Likewise, LGBT families are not homogeneous. The figures are very different on the number of children living in these families: between 24 000 and 250 000 children receiving a variety of methods of counting. There are cases where a person has children in heterosexual families then in a second life, she starts a family with someone of the same sex, and children, as in any blended family, come to live in the new home. There are cases where a male couple and a couple of women agree together to raise a child born to one of two women and one of two men, so-called co-parenting. There are births with PMA, births linked to a donor sperm. There are adoptions, which are not allowed for gay couples but for singles, which then can be put in a relationship with someone of the same sex. Etc..
So the concept of family "like the others" is flawed: no family resembles another. This does not mean that we could invent families as we invent a recipe. All these differences are constructions in time in history, built on models, a social imaginary, a symbolic order, themselves always changing.
Second question on the concept of family as the others: growing up with parents like the others, is it a guarantee of anything? To put it mildly, this is not primarily in blended families, single parent or same-sex parents found most of domestic violence, incest, etc.. We all owe our parents the neuroses that we will ourselves to our children, even by having, for the most part, grew up in traditional families, heterosexual.
I wonder if to question parent families and families in general, the concept of "families like the others" or "parents like the others" is the right concept. I would prefer a hijacked concept of psychologist Winnicott. He spoke of mothers 'good enough', I will therefore family good enough. The idea of good enough mother is the idea that the mother should not be too much. If the parents fill all the needs before they arise, they are perfect, it does not leave the child the opportunity to experience desire. The child must learn to be oneself, alone or in the presence of the other.
The Parent Families Are they good enough? Unlike what is often said, hundreds of studies have been devoted since the early 1970s in the United States, Canada, Holland, Belgium, France, LGBT families, their parents and their children . There is a panel of forty, forty-five studies that specialists are particularly worthy. Well read them is deeply monotonous! A study will show, of course, that children of same-sex families are a little more shy but they have more capacity for adaptability. Another says that if during adolescence, the sense of being different children could embarrass them, in adulthood, they are rather proud. A study comparing children of heterosexual families and children of gay families: the children of straight people are more often wet the bed than the others! All these studies lead in fact to the same conclusion: children gay families will do neither better nor worse than those of heterosexual families.
gay families are good enough because their children are doing as well or as badly as others. Yet they are not perfect in the eyes of some psychoanalysts and anthropologists since both parents are of the same sex and will fail not the famous difference between the sexes. But why it would work anyway? Because only if not perfect - no family is perfect and should not be according Winicott - they provide the necessary, sufficient. What is it? This is what sociologists who study meet the family. The stability of the parental couple: stability over time between the child and all parents who make up his world. The emotional capacity of parents: parents are capable of attention and affection. A gay couple is he capable of that less than a straight couple? A straight couple Is automatically capable of that because straight?
However, there is a dimension where gay families are not like the others: their legal framework is insufficient today. If parental stability is an important element for the child, the marriage would better support the stability of the fragile couples PACS. At the time of the debate on the PACS, for example, Olivier Abel, a professor at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at Paris, defended the marriage rather than the PACS, saying that it was too fragile and need something that supports Conjugality better in this period where families need this support in order to keep. If the stability of relations in the time and attention are important, the fact that the step-parent, gay parent families or stepfamilies, companion or partner of the biological parent, the co-parent or parent has a lack of social rights weakens and duties of the frame. Step-parents can not take decision in case of medical emergency and in general. In case of separation, the child will not guarantee to continue to see the man or woman who raised him for many years. Also in case of separation, there is no obligation for co-parent, financially or education, to continue to support the child and the other parent, and nothing more to the point of view of inheritance.
general, and this also applies to stepparents in heterosexual stepfamilies, the fact that the parent did not share the same duties and there is not even secure links between him and the child is not in the sense of enduring quality framework for children. This could also secure legal fact reinforce the side of the liturgical accompaniment : it could accompany, supervise, support these families by taking such a celebration of blessing for gay couples on the occasion of PACS, the arrival of a child, all the important events in the life of the family. We will soon have the debate on the marriage of same-sex couples, although it will position themselves churches. This securing legal, social and liturgical would go in the direction of an overall strengthening of structural elements which are for families and for society more broadly, and elements that are now being undermined by insecurity liberal capitalism and the standardization market.
There is a principle that runs through the entire Bible: the principle of alliance . An alliance of God with his creation, an alliance conflict with humanity that God breaks and renews an alliance that ends up in all the covenants and spend humans need to promote humanity and society.
Second principle: the otherness , the difference between the sexes - I'd rather talk about "neighborhood of the sexes", a term used by the psychoanalyst Sabina Prokhor - is a prominent expression, but not alone.
Third principle: the pursuit of justice . In the extreme diversity of families in the Old Testament, the demand for justice on behalf of children and women is very strong, and God is often the one who responds by thwarting the will of the dominant male. In the New Testament of Jesus yal'insistance the fact that his family is not his biological family but those who practice the word of global justice.
The alliance is always the risk of the merger. Conversely, justice and otherness are still living at risk of expulsion. The search for a and others, building a balance between these dimensions, is finally finding what Paul Ricoeur calls the right distance with the other, the interval between humans that makes both the plurality and the link to society .
Otherness, covenant, justice are gifts from God, so in that sense, to respond to the theme of this meeting, yes, we need God. These gifts make us consider the other as a neighbor and love him as ourselves. It is this reference that should guide us beyond all the a-priori, of all modes of ideological world and all the conformists.
