Two daddies are better than none.

Between this blog and the last one, I'm sure I've pimped my sister's blog to hell and back, but dammit, sometimes she says stuff that merits a big fat Word 'em up, and she posted something Thursday that fits that description. That post gave props to a young lady from metro Atlanta who wrote a column in the Journal-Constitution's "New Attitudes" section suggesting that -- good heavens! -- her adoptive parents, two gay men, might actually be doing a bang-up job of raising her in a positive, loving fashion, despite what folks like Jerry Falwell and James "SpongeBob Is Turning America Gay" Dobson might have you believe.

Ann does an especially good job taking down some schmoe who wrote a letter to the editor in response -- the letter-writer wanted to know where the middle-school-aged columnist was going to get all her information about birth control and her period and blah blah blah, and basically presumed to know more about the girl's relationship with her two dads than she did. Stunningly arrogant, yes, yet no longer all that surprising coming from the religious right.

Ann responds thusly:

Well, I'm not there, so I can't answer that with any certainty. But I'm gonna guess they'll do a lot of the same things that my friend's dad did. Her mother died when she was eight, leaving her father to raise three daughters by himself. When she got her period, he bought tampons. When she got boobs, he took her to JC Penney for a bra fitting. When she had questions about sex, he answered them, and when she started dating, he started cleaning his gun every weekend (this is the south, after all). He did better as father and mother than a lot of two-member parenting teams that I know. And thusly raised, she has grown into a smart, beautiful, capable young woman, nonetheless feminine for having a man in charge of her upbringing.

Bingo. And it's really funny to see how the rationales these right-wing homophobes come up with for opposing adoption by gay parents (and really gay rights in general) get shot down almost as soon as they come up with them. B-b-b-but gay parents will turn their kids gay! Well, if they can do that, how come the straight parents of gay kids couldn't "turn" their kids straight? B-b-b-but children need the influence of a mother in their lives! OK, so should we just get DFCS to track down all the widowers and yank their kids away from them? And on and on and on. Look, homophobes, if your real reason for not wanting gay parents to be able to adopt kids is that you just think gay people are icky and that prejudice makes it impossible for you to believe they could be loving, caring people, just say that already. While the rest of us still wouldn't respect your opinion, we'd at least respect your honesty -- whereas now, we respect neither.

But where this letter-writer really shows his idiocy in thinking that not having a mother will prevent this girl from being able to do girl stuff with one of her parents. I mean, come on -- her parents are two gay dudes. I'll bet you anything that, thanks to her parental influence, she already accessorizes better and has better skin than just about any of the girls in her middle-school class. And when she gets to high school and starts thinking about boys and social events and whatnot, who do you think is going to help her pick out a prom dress? Dad and Dad, that's who, and they will not let her go to that prom in a dress that's anything less than stunning. And she is going to be faaaabulous.