Wednesday, December 01, 2010

So, tell me if I've got this right

It's discriminatory to refuse to allow homosexuals to adopt.

(But of course, it's not discriminatory to force all the Catholic adoption agencies in Britain to close because they disagreed with the above.)

It's discriminatory to refuse to allow unmarried, cohabiting couples to adopt, even though it is statistically provable (and freaking obvious!) that they tend to break up and that it's proven that such break-ups are bad for the kids.

Now because it's discriminatory to refuse to allow homosexuals (whose "relationships" have...ah...a somewhat higher rate of "break-down", but never mind that) and unmarried cohabiting couples to adopt children, even though it harms kids,

now we have to allow convicted sex offenders to adopt.

Because avoiding discrimination is more important than children.

Did I get it?

What do I win?



~

13 comments:

Left-footer said...

You got it!

You win a free tweet for an excellent post.

I'd rather stand you a pint! Seriously, thank you - brilliant!

Anonymous said...

You need to be careful bandying this scarlet letter about.

"Sex-offender" CAN be a rather vague category; in the US adults who were arrested for streaking (even when horribly drunk) are often forced to register and report with the police for life just like convicted child rapists.

The suitability of the two cases mentioned above for working with children is obviously vastly different, and does indeed merit a "case by case" approach.



-Thierry

Anonymous said...

I should amend my offering: "adults who were arrested for streaking while drunk as teenagers..."

Thierry

HJW said...

I was mostly commenting on the woman's logic: even though we know that allowing unmarried couples to adopt children is often bad for the kids, we allow them to do it anyway because of their "rights". Therefore, we *must* allow sex offenders to be considered, even though the evidence is even stronger that it is bad for the kids. It is a kind of logic that accounts for no other factors in the equation than the putative rights of adults and completely shuts the best interests of children out of the picture.

HJW said...

The point being, that since no one is considering the needs or the best interests of children, no one is thinking about the wisdom of allowing unmarried couples to adopt.

That it never seems to have occured to this woman to say, "Unmarried couples adopting tends to be bad for kids, therefore we should change our minds about it." Instead, the only thing she can think of is to expand a situation that she herself admits is detrimental to children.

And your caution, though it might be argued in law, is again not considering the children first. What you are saying, essentially, is that because some people are unjustly and inappropriately labelled as sex offenders, there should be no "blanket ban" on sex offenders adopting children. But this point, whether it is valid, is immaterial. The solution to the first injustice is not to expand the putative "right" to adopt children to convicted sex offenders, but to return to the previous practice of only allowing children to be adopted to married couples who have no, or very little, questionable moral or legal backgrounds.

The whole problem rests on the assumption that there is such a thing as a "right" to adopt children.

It reminds me of the arguments made by people who want their IVF treatments paid for by the state based on the idea that they have a right to be parents.

The only way to be a parent is to have a child, a living human being, made free in the image of God, not a chattel property. It therefore follows that if there is a right to be a parent, there has to be a right to "acquire" a child. The child becomes a commodity, a thing to be obtained in order to fulfill this assumed "right" to parenthood.

The solution to innocent people not being excluded unjustly from consideration for adoption is not to include sex offenders in that consideration as a matter of course. It is to change your laws to be more reasonable about who gets labelled a sex offender.

N. Trandem said...

Well of course! We can't have the little brats that escaped the abortion mills growing up well-formed and balanced, now can we? We need to ensure that they're f-ed up from the get-go so that they'll be utterly incapable of fending for themselves as adults and thus be totally dependent on the nanny state. It's a win-win!

HJW said...

Errr... yes. Thank you, Nick, for your interesting contribution.

Anonymous said...

I can certainly understand why you write what you write, and agree with most of it.

But the cold hard fact is this:

if you are 18 years and one day old, and go to a party with your classmates and get sloshed enough to get naked in the garden to cool down because you're afraid of passing out (it happens), and the neighbors call the cops, and the cops, when they come, wake up a a 15 year old neighbor who goes into the garden to put a blanket over you, the police can, and have in the past, booked such people for "indecency with a minor," and gotten convictions. The poor bastards have to tell their neighbors for the rest of their lives that they are a "convicted sex offender."

Now these people can't go to a court and argue that they aren't sex offenders (indecent exposure to a minor is a sex offense,) but they certainly can go to a court and argue that such a triviality should not bar them from adopting, and, quite frankly, I hope they win, if they're otherwise suited to be parents. If the law is an ass, it should be kicked.

I'd rather have parents who partied too hard a few times than goody two shoe parents who locked themselves up in libraries their entire lives.

Thierry

HJW said...

Hard cases make bad law.

I'll try to put it more simply, since you seem to have missed the point.

The solution is to make the sex offender laws more reasonable so that people are not declared sex offenders for such trivial offenses.

It is not to create a blanket permission for sex offenders to adopt children.

The fact that children are harmed by expanding adoption rules to include groups who are inappropriate should indicate to this idiot woman lawyer that the reasonable answer is to rescind these wide-open permissions, not to extend them even further.

BillyHW said...

It's no point talking sense to a Frenchman, Hilary.

hjw said...

Oh, is he French?

Never mind then.

Anonymous said...

Dear Ms. White,

We both agree; this is getting to be tiresome.

Your proposed solution makes perfect sense, but for the real world fact that the people with the low character necessary to thrive in politics rarely if ever will do something that lets rivals describe them as "soft on perverts," no matter how just it is.

This being a cold, hard fact, your proposal is unworkable; the only avenue such people have if they wish to adopt, is human rights litigation which would not create "blanket permission."

If you begin a post with "so, tell me if I've got this right," you should have the good grace to accept that you are mistaken.

The larger reason I write this is not to discussion the minutiae of what a sex offender is, but to point out that this is not the apocalypse, which you wish to sod, or even the end of Western Civilization, but a real world answer to a real world question. I can only urge you to devote yourself to more real and pressing problems.

Billy gets a gold star for effort, but not for brains, as French is spoken in more countries than France, and I am not French. He made a joke, but it's on him. One can only hope that he can do better.

Thierry

Felix said...

Well, the report was a bit more "nuanced" (to use a horrible word). It was reflecting the existing law on "human rights" and "discrimination", rather than advocating.

But the basic point is that authorities should justify preventing sex offenders from working with kids or adopting them.

Apparently the new human rights law says that authorities can't give priority to kids' welfare (or to the a priori risk of recidivisim).

And Thierry, the link clearly indicates that this analysis of the current law extends to real sex offenders, not just people who were silly teenagers.