Life

NOM board chairman says families with adopted children are ‘second best’

NOM board chairman says families with adopted children are ‘second best’

Just two weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act and California’s ban on same-sex marriage, National Organization for Marriage (NOM) Board Chairman John Eastman referred to families with adopted children as “second best.”

John Eastman

Eastman made the remarks to the Associated Press in reference to Chief Justice John Roberts, who has adopted two children with his wife.

Eastman, who argues that families headed by a man and a woman with biological children are best for society, said of the Chief Justice’s decision to adopt:

“You’re looking at what is the best course society wide to get you the optimal result in the widest variety of cases. That often is not open to people in individual cases. Certainly adoption in families headed, like Chief Roberts’ family is, by a heterosexual couple, is by far the second-best option.”

Eastman’s comments stand in direct opposition to facts introduced at trial in 2010 in the federal court challenge to Proposition 8, California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage.

Chief Justice John Roberts’ “second best” family.

That case is now due to go before the Supreme Court in less than two weeks. At the 2010 trial, David Blankenhorn – an expert witness for the proponents of Prop 8 – testified that children raised by gay or lesbian adoptive parents did just as well, if not better, than those raised by their biological parents.

Proponents of Proposition 8 — as with most defenders of “traditional” marriage — assert that the historical traditions of heterosexual marriage is designed to foster procreation in society.

ProtectMarriage.com, the original sponsor of Proposition 8, has argued that preserving traditional marriage furthers society’s “existential interests in responsible procreation and childrearing.”

“An animating purpose of marriage is to increase the likelihood that children will be born and raised in stable and enduring family units by their own mothers and fathers,” wrote Charles Cooper, a lawyer for ProtectMarriage.com, in the group’s Supreme Court brief.

The National Organization for Marriage was an early backer of Protectmarraige.com.

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