The Gay Child Left Behind

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/17/opinion/17savage.html?incamp=article_popular_3
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Gay Child Left Behind
By DAN SAVAGE

Published: February 17, 2005

SEATTLE

SO far 2005 hasn't been a very good year for gays and lesbians. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings slammed Buster, an animated rabbit, for visiting a Vermont girl with same-sex parents; President Bush renewed his call for an anti-gay amendment to the Constitution; and a deadly new strain of H.I.V. has surfaced.

......Learning that a prominent conservative like Mr. Keyes (or Randall Terry, the anti-abortion-turned-antigay-rights crusader whose son revealed last spring he is gay) has a gay relative is nothing new. Newt Gingrich, for instance, has a lesbian half-sister. But for gays and lesbians there's something particularly satisfying about watching a prominent antigay conservative learn that his or her own child is homosexual. It smacks of cosmic retribution: Mr. Keyes now has to choose between his antigay "pro-family" rhetoric and a member of his own family........

There are more gay and lesbian couples having families than you may think; according to the 2000 census, there are 250,000 children in the United States being raised by same-sex parents. The debate over gay marriage can be particularly infuriating for us. Allowing gays and lesbians to marry, people like Alan Keyes and Randall Terry argue, would somehow harm children. In Washington a group calling itself Allies for Marriage and Children, co-founded by Jeff Kemp, the son of the former presidential candidate Jack Kemp, advocates a ban on gay marriage.

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