By Matthew Anderson
August 20, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The acting head of the New Zealand Family Court called today for homosexual couples to have a right to adopt children.
According to the New Zealand Herald, Judge Paul von Dadelszen said that homosexual couples, who have had the right to “marry” in New Zealand since 2004, should now be allowed to adopt children as well.
New Zealand already allows homosexuals to adopt, but only as individuals. According to Von Dadelszen, “If one partner can adopt but a couple can't, the imbalances and inequities of that within a relationship actually cause a lot of pain.”
The judge also pointed to the number of countries that now allow homosexual adoption, saying that New Zealand was falling behind the rest of the world.
“Normally New Zealand's a step ahead of others in the area of family law but in this area we're not.”
Von Dadelszen, who is filling in for Principal Judge Peter Boshier while he is away for a month, spoke at the same time that a bill was being presented in the New Zealand parliament that would legalize homosexual adoption.
Keven Hague, an openly homosexual Member of Parliament, is sponsoring the bill.
The bill was not able to be debated today, though, since it was not picked from the ballot for broader discussion.
Judge Paul von Dadelszen supported his call for homosexual adoption by claiming that homosexual parents do not negatively contribute to the upbringing of a child. He said current research “does not support any scientific basis for discrimination against homosexuals with regard to fitness to parent.”
“In a 2003 study it was shown that there was no evidence of gender confusion in boys and girls brought up in lesbian-led families.”
However, numerous other experts in the field, including author Timothy J. Daily, Ph.D., disagree. In his article “Homosexual Parenting: Placing Children at Risk,” Daily points out that “Homosexual relationships are characteristically unstable and are fundamentally incapable of providing children the security they need.”
Daily points out many statistics in which homosexual couples cannot sufficiently supply this security.
“In The Male Couple, authors David P. McWhirter and Andrew M. Mattison report that in a study of 156 males in homosexual relationships lasting from one to thirty-seven years: Only seven couples have a totally exclusive sexual relationship, and these men all have been together for less than five years.”
However, Daily said that anywhere from 75% – 90% of heterosexual married individuals have remained faithful to their spouses.
He says, “While the rate of fidelity within marriage cited by these studies remains far from ideal, there is a magnum order of difference between the negligible lifetime fidelity rate cited for homosexuals and the 75 to 90 percent cited for married couples.”
Further, Daily indicates the importance of having a mother and a father in children's live, because men and women bring many different yet necessary gifts to parenting.
“The complementary aspects of parenting that mothers and fathers contribute to the rearing of children are rooted in the innate differences of the two sexes, and can no more be arbitrarily substituted than can the very nature of male and female.”
For Daily, then, “the homosexual lifestyle is inconsistent with the proper raising of children. “