Last updated at 11:55 AM on 30th January 2009
Many men become fathers for the first time in their 50's, grandparents care for children while parents are ill, in prison, or unavailable sometimes for the child's entire childhood. The grandparents have age as a PLUS, its experience, they have already raised the child's mother. Age should not be the test, the fact that AGE has been used , means it is only an "excuse" for denial, the authorities in this case "engaged in the process of justification", that had NO justification to deny the grandparents the right to adopt, they simply have their own SICK agenda that's all about Gay rights and anytthing heterosexual is just politically incorrect. History will show we live in sick times. www.OttawaMensCentre.com
ELANIE PHILLIPS, WRITING EXCLUSIVELY FOR MAIL ONLINE
Embrace for comfort: The grandparents yesterday were distraught
When homosexuality was legalised back in 1967 did anyone dream that some four decades on a British grandmother and grandfather wanting to adopt their own grandchildren would be refused permission and the children adopted instead by two gay men?
The case in Edinburgh reported today, where precisely this grotesque development has occurred, illustrates the sickening way in which what started out as a decent attempt to be tolerant towards a minority lifestyle has turned into a totalitarian assault upon family life and human rights.
For two years these grandparents fought for their right to care for the children, a five-year-old boy and his four-year-old sister, whose 26-year-old mother is a recovering heroin addict. But at 46 and 59 they were ruled to be too old to adopt.
Reluctantly, therefore, they agreed to the children being adopted by another couple, on the basis they would be brought up by a loving mother and father figure. But although several heterosexual couples were available to adopt them, the children were handed over instead to two gay men.
When the devastated grandparents objected they were threatened that unless they dropped their opposition they would never see their grandchildren again on account of their ‘negative’ attitude towards gay adoption.
There are so many layers to this gross and terrifying abuse of power that one hardly knows where to start.
The reason why adoption is so successful at raising healthy, well-adjusted children is that it replicates as far as possible the biological mother and father whose presence in the family is so crucial to the well-being of their children.
The prevailing argument that all types of family are as good as each other as far as the children are concerned simply isn’t true. While some children emerge relatively unscathed from irregular households, children need to be brought up by the two people ‘who made me’ - or, in adoptive households, in a family which closely replicates that arrangement.
Where that does not happen, the child’s deepest sense of his or her identity as a human being is at some level damaged.