The writer doesn’t say so, but I think she was responding in part to the post “Punishing Singles.”

Question:

I think that when you show why single parents or gay parents are not as good for children as a normal couple would be, you might overlook the number of children who have much worse growing environments.  As you yourself point out, even the best run orphanage is not the best place to raise a child.  Would you use that as a reason to leave a child sleeping in the street, because you could only put him, or her, in an orphanage?  Of course not.

As for homosexuality, well, God’s plan is to have two complementary sexes, but then God’s plan is that we all have two good eyes, two good arms, two good legs, and two good ears for hearing -- and we run across people who lack at least one of those on a regular basis, and no amount of explaining what God’s purpose is will make the deaf hear, nor the blind see.

Reply:

Thank you for writing.  Let me take each of your suggestions in turn

First one:  It is better to have a child adopted by a single parent than to let him sleep in the streets.

My argument is that we should do the best for children that we can.  When good moms and dads are available, we should give them moms and dads.  How does it follow from this premise that when the best is not available, we should deny them the second and third best too?

By the way, for the vast majority of children good moms and dads are available; there is no shortage of couples who want to adopt children.  The problem is that the government treats prospective parents so badly and makes adoption so difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.  We don’t have to resort to triage.

Second one:  Yes, God’s plan is to have two complementary sexes, but then God’s plan is that we all have two good eyes, and that doesn’t always happen.

Suppose a friend of yours suffered an abnormally strong temptation to drink too much alcohol – it doesn’t matter why.  Would you tell this poor soul, “Because you are so strongly tempted, go ahead and stay drunk all the time”?  I would tell him “Because you are so strongly tempted, I know you have to work harder to stay sober than other people do, but you can count on me for support and encouragement.”  I think we should respond the same way when our friends suffer abnormally strong temptations to sexual incontinence.  And I am talking about heterosexuals too.

One of the more illuminating incidents of my life was to be asked to share a freshly baked cake from a wood-burning oven in a house with cardboard walls, cellophane windows, and a tarpaper roof.

My wife’s early experience of life was a good deal broader than mine.  We were visiting one of her childhood friends.

St. Ambrose writes, "It is the intention that makes the gift valuable or poor, and gives to things their value.”  This gift, I thought, was kingly.

-- St. Ambrose of Milan, On Duties, Book 1, Section 149

A few years ago, one of my daughters thanked me just because I had never broken up with her mother, as so many of her friends’ dads did.  She said that when she was growing up, she always knew she never had to worry about that happening, because we had said so.

It was a sweet moment, but also a strange one, as though she had warmly thanked me for never starving her to death.

As people live now, children can take nothing for granted.  If you are looking for a reason to live differently, you could do worse than to start with that fact.

Book:  On the Meaning of Sex

Although the temperamental differences between men and women cause friction, they are also what make us attractive to each other.  We like the difference.  Mostly we laugh about it.  Human life is a much more profound affair because there are two kinds of us; but also more musical, more colorful, and much more amusing.

Then why does the difference embarrass us?  What used to be called the war between the sexes is turning into a war against the sexes – against having two sexes in the first place.

In childhood we put increasing pressure on little boys to suppress their boyishness.  If a boy hasn’t learned to sit still we don’t say he has the wiggles; we say he has a “disorder” and give him drugs.  Normal male play is considered antisocial.  You may have heard the story of the seven-year old Maryland boy who was suspended from school for two days because he chewed his strawberry breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun.  (Actually he was trying to make it into a mountain, but as he explained, "it didn't look like a mountain really, and it turned out to be a gun, kinda.")

The greater pressure comes in adulthood, when women are expected to suppress their womanliness.  If they are more interested in their children than their jobs, we don’t praise them for being good mothers; we shame them for “wasting their college degrees.”  Pharmaceutical firms search for potions to make female sexual response more like male sexual response, as though being female were a sexual dysfunction.  Now the armed forces are pushing women into combat.  (They call it accepting women in combat roles; how generous.)

Many readers will have concluded from these words that I am against women’s equality.  Why?  Because the persecutors of women teach that equality means the sexes are the same.  The same, are they?  The same as what?

Protesting the classical understanding of marriage, a young man said to me, “What two guys have with each other is the same as what I have with my wife.”

I take him at his word.  If he insists that what he and the young woman “have with each other” has nothing to do with the polarity and complementarity of the sexes, who am I to insist that it does?

Today, the erotic pairings of many heterosexuals are essentially homosexual:  Even though they are of opposite sex, they might as well not be.