You see it often, how conservative parents of gay kids fight a bitter, vitriolic battle against gay equality, as a way of punishing their children.  There was Robert Knight, who fought gay rights in California till the day he died.  Alan Keyes.  Phylis Schafly.  Charles Socarides.  There’s a bromide about how so many anti-gay KulturKriegen are closeted gays themselves.  But often, it’s not that they’re gay, but that one or more of their children are.  So they lash out at the gay community, as a way of punishing their kids for being gay.  Less often you hear about children of gay parents, doing the same after they’ve grown up and left the nest.  But it’s there.  Just as bitter, just as vitriolic.  Case in point, Dawn Stefanowicz, whose new book, Out From Under, about being raised by a gay father, is being pushed by the usual suspects.  Here’s Peter LaBarbera gushing over it…

Folks, this is a beautifully written book that testifies to the lunacy of encouraging homosexual parenting in public policy. It can be ordered through Dawn’s website:

Of course…it’s about more then "encouraging homosexual parenting"…

Stefanowicz said she was prompted to write the book in 2004 after testifying before a Canadian senate committee against hate crime legislation and expressing public opposition to the sexual diversity curricula used in her country’s schools.

…it’s about opposing hate crime legislation…and teaching tolerance to kids…because god knows if we don’t bully the little dickens mercilessly when they’re young they might grow up to be well adjusted gay people.  But look at this…really look at it.  Here’s a woman whose claim to fame is that her childhood was made miserable from having a gay dad, and she’s out there vigorously working to make school kids less accepting of their gay peers, thereby insuring that their childhoods will be miserable too.  Does she want kids to suffer abuse in school?  No.  So long as they’re heterosexual.

But, as it turns out, she doesn’t want other kids, gay or straight, to miss out on the suffering she went through either.  Look at this, from LaBarbera…

The author and speaker said writing down her memories about being raised by a father who welcomed numerous male sex partners into the family’s home on a regular basis was a painful process. Stefanowicz said her father’s destructive homosexual behavior created confusion about sexuality in her own life. In the book she chronicles how, as a young girl, she often wished she were a boy.

Of course, and conveniently, Stefanowicz’s dad isn’t around anymore to tell his side of it.  Stefanowicz says elsewhere that it was only after both her parents had passed away that she was able to come forward with her story.  Okay…that’s entirely plausible.  But it’s also very convenient and you learn to be suspicious of these kinds of happy advantages a speaker has when it comes to the religious right.  But let’s take that story at face value.  There’s two problems here, and below the surface of both, a terrible third.  First, any parent, gay or straight, who "welcomes numerous sex partners" into the household isn’t thinking of the effect that has on the kid, on their sense of being loved, and being secure.  So right away it’s obvious that it wasn’t her father’s homosexuality that was the problem there, it was his indifference to his kid’s emotional needs. 

Second, and reliably, there’s LaBarbera describing that as "homosexual behavior".  This is how bigots think.  It’s exactly like an antisemite talking about greed as a particularly Jewish behavior, or a racist speaking of black criminality.  LaBarbera, who almost certainly knows what he’s doing, deals professionally in every anti-gay stereotype you ever heard.  He’s a professional hate monger, who works tirelessly to inflame passions against gay people.  That’s how he earns a living.

But look closer into Stefanowicz’s story.  Her dad grew up in a time when gay men were deeply closeted, when we were all taught that we were depraved monstrosities deep down inside.  That doesn’t excuse his behavior, but it puts it into context.  We were given no moral guidance from the men of "virtue" in our culture, other then the knowledge that because we were homosexual, we were beyond the pale.  We were given nothing to aspire to beyond the gutter.  Some of us managed to escape that trap, and live decent whole lives in spite of the constant message being drummed relentlessly into us, that we were human garbage.  But it’s that message that Stefanowicz insists the culture keep teaching to gay men and women.

Stefanowicz may claim that writing about her childhood has helped her to heal, but in painting her experience as a warning, not about what homophobia does to gay people and to their families, but rather a warning not to accept the homosexual into society, she’s working diligently to guarantee that other children have exactly the same childhood she did.  Because when the message is that homosexuality is abominable, and that to be homosexual is to be lower then dirt, gay men and women will try everything in their power to not be gay…including getting married and having children.   But the human identity isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will upon, and the sex drive is an instinct older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates.  You suppress your sex drive and the next thing you know it’s rushing out in all manner of self destructive ways, and you have no control because you never learned control, because denial isn’t control.  So what we end up with, when we make the culture more homophobic, are a lot of married homosexuals, in denial about their sex drives, and utterly unable to control them.

Just ask this lady what it’s like being married to one. 

Unlike that poor woman who told her story to MSNBC, Stefanowicz is working to insure that more kids will have childhoods like hers.  Because she has to.  Because if other kids can have happy, fulfilling lives being raised by gay parents, then she’s still all alone in the misery of what happened to her.  Instead of rising above it, she’s made it her home.

More on  Stefanowicz Here, and Here, and Here…