Well bach, I'll tell my children that they are the normal fruit of mum and dad's heterosexual intimacy. And they will reply yuck.

Johann Sebastian Bach married his second cousin, and they had 7 (fruit that is).

J.S. Bach then married a young soprano 17 years his junior and the normal fruit of their heterosexual intimacy produced 13, fruit.

Fruit, fruit, fruit

lol what is the point of that rant?

Hi bach - it was my first degree, about 30 years ago. The maths major was in statistics. My second degree was in anthropology, which became the career from which I've mostly retired. However, it's one reason I know that the claim that the nuclear family is "normal" or "natural" for humans is patently false. There are just so many other kinds of families and expressions of gender and sexuality across cultures and human history.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree, since I think your faith blinkers what you know of humanity. That's fine, but please don't expect those who don't share it to welcome attempts to force its values on to the rest of us.

C J,
You may very well correct me here but i understood that the nuclear family (being mum,dad and the kids) was a fairly recent development in human behaviour. Have we not mostly used community parenting until we began to develop civilisation. Even then in some cultures community parenting and more common the extended family took responsibility for the raising of children.
I see no reason why a diverse range of family structures cannot offer the safe and secure environment that a child needs. My point was and remains that by limiting that environment, IE: single parents or single sex parenting, we restrict the diversity required to deliver the child an ideal environment in which to develop.
Though many family structures will occur in the community i saw adoption as a oportunity to get the balance right for the child rather than constantly worrying about our own rights.

Nairbe
I think that limiting parenting to a single-sex structure may be limited by the 'single' rather than the sex. The benefit in having a partner to parent with, is in having the benefit of balance to the equation. Two parents can bounce ideas off one another and reign the other in if the parenting style gets too intense from time to time. The child can learn from seeing two parents in a loving relationship together. They can learn about how people care for one another from seeing their parents do this. In my observation, many fathers can be very 'motherly' if they are given the opportunity to express this gendered perception of the ability to be nurturing. But also, many single parents do a wonderful job, and while single parenting is probably more stressful due to the lack of partnered support it can still be better in some cases when compared with coupled parenting. It depends upon so many variables in life that it's difficult to really assess if a child from a same-sex or simply single parent family would actually be disadvantaged. My guess is Nairbe, that someone like you who would take the initiative to give this topic such in-depth thought, probably means that you are a very thoughtful parent. What you may see as a problem may not be recognised as a problem in your child's eyes. They may never see it as a problem for themselves in the future,either.

dotto,
Thanks for the thoughtful insight, it was a bit lacking at times during this conversation. Opinions such as yours do help me to moderate some concerns i have over parenting issues. It is no fun as a single parent and i would not promote it to anyone. I do understand that it can be unavoidable and in some situations better than the destructive relationship it was born from.
Thanks everyone for your contributions, we may not all agree but let's hope we all learned something new.