Last week we noted how a new book “showed a significant shift toward counting same-sex couples with children as family” and how this trend was not sitting well with the Religious Right, especially Focus on the Family’s Glenn Stanton, who refused to accept the idea that legally married gay couples constitute a family.
And Stanton is apparently so very intent on restricting the use of the word “family” to only situations that meet his narrow definition, which is why he is lashing out against it once again, saying that people who think gay couples are a family are young and naive and generally have no idea what they are talking about:
“If they want to be called a family, that’s fine. But, first of all, the conviction is not very deep,” contends Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family. “It’s absolutely not well thought out because if you ask them — and other scholars have done this — what supports [their] conviction…there’s not a whole lot they can tell you.”
He further argues that the demographic target of the study greatly influences the polling outcomes.
“This is primarily among young people, and young people are especially akin to that kind of ‘whatever’ attitude,” Stanton points out. “Plus, one of the ideals of being young is sort of your open-mindedness, your idealism. [But] when you get older — when you start to get married, when you start to have kids yourself — you…become more conservative in the sense of they start to realize…kids do need a mom and a dad.”
Stanton is the “director for Family Formation Studies at Focus on the Family” and he sure does seem focused on making sure that the term “family” does not include gays.
