In class on Wednesday, someone had mentioned how there might be some challenges for kids growing up in a same sex household in regards to possibly being judged by other kids at school and thinking differently than others. Though I wish it weren’t I do believe that some of this is true. I automatically thought back to an episode of Modern Family where Mitchell and Cameron are a gay couple who adopt a Vietnamese girl named Lily. In one of the episodes, she begins going to school and telling everyone she meets that she is gay. She won’t stop saying this because she believes that who you are is derived from your parents. Because her fathers are gay, then she must be as well. This relates back to how kids with same sex marriage view things differently. Yet, I think that if the public as a whole was more accepting and stopped portraying homosexuality as something that is out of the norm and something that is so different or wrong, I think that this notion will go away. This show to me portrays just how normal homosexuality is and how gay or lesbian couples are capable of raising kids and having typical lives just as much as heterosexual couples are. They did a good job in showing how to educate younger kids and families as whole on the concept of homosexuality is completely and undoubtably normal. If more people were open to this and started educating others, then I think that kids raised in same sex households will become something as normal as kids raised in interracial households, hetero households, and much more.
I do agree that it is a shame that children are bullied for having gay parents, but I also think that’s a wear argument against allowing homosexual parents to adopt. Children are bullied for all types of things. Interracial marriages were at one point illegal and I’m sure that children of those marriages were bullied as well, but now they are legal. I think representation in the media is the most important thing to ending bullying with things such as the identity of one’s parents.
I thought of this exact episode of Modern Family too during the class discussion! In class I didn’t mention this point, but I kept coming back to how similar the comparison between same sex marriage and interracial marriage is. There are many people who still view interracial marriage as being wrong even though it was legalized before same sex marriage was legalized. The acceptance of both of these types of marriages seems to be becoming greater as each year passes, and this helps with the bullying issue that is being found in children. Portraying all kinds of marriage as normal is the best way to get rid of this bullying.