By Don Feder, Creators Syndicate

November-December 1993 – Regarding his colleagues’ support for gay adoption/custody, psychologist Joe Nicolosi observes: “One of the beautiful things about a democracy is that social scientists can ruin a generation, and then come back 20 years later with our objective measures to validate what common sense should have told us.”

Social science is far from the only transgressor here. Recently, a juvenile court commissioner in Whatcom County, Washington, ordered a three-year-old boy placed with two male homosexuals as the first step toward adoption.

The child is the center of a raging controversy. His mother, who had placed him for adoption, changed her mind when she learned of the arrangement. “I don’t want my son raised like that,” says Megan Lucas. But that is precisely the way her son will be raised, if Washington State has its way.

In this matter, courts are anything but consistent. Last month, a Virginia judge took a child away from his mother and her lesbian lover, awarding custody to the maternal grandmother.

In a few states, when homosexuality is an aspect of divorce, courts invariably grant custody to the heterosexual parent. In others, it’s a factor, but by no means decisive. New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Minnesota and California allow gay adoption, usually by the partner of a biological parent.

Psychologists have added their voices to the trendy chorus. The American Psychological Association complains that courts “often have assumed that. . children are likely to be emotionally harmed, subject to molestation, impaired in gender role development or themselves homosexual. None of these assumptions is supported by extant research data.”

But there was a time when psychologists insisted there were no long-term effects of divorce on children. Then researchers like Judith Wallerstein discovered that the children of divorce are far more likely to be withdrawn and afraid of commitment.

Twenty years ago, Jay Belsky, a Pennsylvania State University psychologist, was running around telling anyone who would listen that there was nothing wrong with putting infants in day care. Today, he’s one of the most outspoken critics of collective child rearing, contending that children placed in day care at an early age form weak parental attachments and have emotional problems later in life.

When it comes to child welfare, the claims of social scientists must be viewed with extreme skepticism.

Most researchers, who are biased in favor of homosexuals, ignore their own data. Dr. Paul Cameron, Ph.D., of the Family Research Institute has surveyed the admittedly scant findings of his profession on children raised in households with at least one homosexual.

In these studies, between 8% and 33% of adult respondents said they considered themselves homosexual or bisexual, far above the national norm of 2% of the adult male population.

How surprising is this? In almost every area, parental behavior has a profound, at times predominant, impact on children. The children of smokers frequently become smokers. Kids from abusive homes often become abusers.

Children from broken homes are more likely to divorce. Only in the case of homosexuality are we asked to believe that what happens in the home is irrelevant to emotional development.

Jaki Edwards of Milpitas, California, who runs a support and recovery program for those coming out of the homosexual lifestyle and their families, has knowledge beyond questionnaires and graphs. From age 10 to 16, she and a younger brother lived with their lesbian mother and a succession of her companions.

“I realize that homosexuals feel they can give a child love and support that even many straight families can’t provide,” Edwards admits, “but I’ve been there. I know the finger-pointing and the shame one carries.

“For years, you struggle with the thought that you might be a homosexual. People say ‘like mother, like daughter.’ Most of us become promiscuous to prove we’re straight.”

The absence of role models presents its own problems. “How will a man raised by two men know how to relate to a woman? A woman brought up like this doesn’t know how to emotionally connect with men. I had to struggle for years to believe a man could really love me.”

How many lives will be broken, how many little experiments will suffer in silence (unobserved by omniscient researchers) before courts and social scientists learn you can’t fool nature? Children were meant to be nurtured by a man and woman together. Absent that, at least they shouldn’t be placed in a situation where a distorted version of human sexuality is presented as the norm, to satisfy the latest bizarre demands for equality.