Children's Rights In Gay And Lesbian Family Analysis

In the time in which our conception constitutes a “normal” family has undergone incredible changes, many questions have been developed regarding the role of the state in “normalizing” household families. According to authors Morris B. Kaplan, Barbara Bennett Woodhouse, and Ayelet Shachar, in Child, Family, and State there is a lot of discussion and arguments based upon children being adopted by gay/lesbian couples, and whether the children will be raised “normal” or “not”. Gay and lesbian rights have emerged from the closet, involving the adoption of children. Children, while not closeted, have also been treated as inherently unequal and lacking in capacity – consigned to being “seen, but not at all heard.” In the sixth chapter of this

The perspective in which Woodhouse takes action is one from a child-centered standpoint; one that she believes keeps the best interest of the child at center stage. There have been legal decisions involving custody, adoption, marriage, and assisted conception by same-sex couples that will have important implications for the well being of children in these specific families. Woodhouse also looks at a wide variety of scenarios, which are listed throughout the chapter, representing actual, legitimate legal arguments over the parenting rights of same-sex partners (pg 277). She continually argues throughout the chapter that when legal disputes such as these are discussed on the basis of the best interests of the children, it becomes very clear that it is unfair to single out children for less favorable treatment just because of the sexual relationship their parents share. Children who are cared for by persons in same-sex relationships have the same wants and needs to maintain close ties to particular individuals, just as children in heterosexual households do. It’s said that the children’s developmental needs speak strongly in favor of ending the subjective inequalities imposed upon same-sex

There are a couple questions concerning the two principal grounds on the basis of which political societies automatically attribute citizenship to children: birth to certain parents or within a certain terrain. “Birthright citizenship in either form,” Shachar argues, “is both unjust and mystifying.” (pg 354). He claims that it functions to grant some children unfair access to wealth, opportunity, and sometimes even lacking certain characteristics, all while shielding these distributive effects from normative valuation because of the obvious unaffectedness of citizenship based on the family’s inheritance. Being born into a gay or lesbian family is not only hard on the parents taking the child, but also for the child itself. It’s important for children to be placed in a home that is suitable for them. Shachar continues to argue that the circulation of this trait should be subject to principles of distributive justice. In our world, citizenship is, in effect, a valuable form of property, and the laws by which we decide who qualifies for citizenship sustain massive global inequalities. Although all of this may be true, membership in states, like membership in families, is indeed distributed in somewhat arbitrary ways, and these ways eventually lead to unequal access to wealth and