I'm a walking cautionary tale

Just when I had started thinking the midterm election season might be quiet on the rightward culture war front, the social conservatives have a new and especially offensive battle cry: Having supposedly vanquished gay marriage by passing bans in 11 states to date with more on the docket, our fine holy warriors and protectors of virtue are now fighting to preserve the purity of "traditional family makeup."

And how will they actualize this fine, condescending ideal? By banning gays and lesbians from adopting children. (Florida's already done it, so it must be good policy.) It's not necessarily because they're gay, either–it's because they're not married.

"Now that we've defined what marriage is, we need to take that further and say children deserve to be in that relationship," says Greg Quinlan of Ohio's Pro-Family Network, a conservative Christian group.

Now, I do speak from an "undeserved" position as a child of a single parent family so feel free to write me off as piteously intellectually and morally deprived, but this one has a real chance of blowing up in their smug, righteous faces.

Less than one fourth of the households in this country are made up of married couples with children, and their lot is declining each year.

Everyone knows someone whose parents are not married. Are we all really so irrevocably fucked up by that that the masses can be mobilized to demand the family structures that spawned us be legislatively abolished?

When they can't have children of their own, married couples toss aside the biological hint and spend tens of thousands of dollars on elective medical procedures to conceive genetically "authentic" progeny.

These are the same people who tell us we're supposed to outlaw medical research on their excess embryos, and always choose adoption over abortion out of respect for life.

Yet according 2004 government data, one third of the children adopted from foster care were adopted by unmarried couples or singles. Estimates are that 500,000 children are in foster care at any given time in this country, with a fourth of them waiting to be adopted. Why narrow the pool even further?

Oh, right–because no family at all is better than a family headed by anything other than married parents. I mean, just look what it's done to me.