When you have a child that

is gay that you love with all your heart, it becomes impossible to sit

passively while seemingly respectable people write articles that stereotype

one group so negatively.

While I do not mind a healthy

debate on this subject, in fact that is what is seriously lacking about

this subject. Mr. Maier is guilty of the same sins he claims for his opponents.

He claims the studies on gay adoptions suffer from numerous methodological

problems, including inadequate sample size, biased sample selection, lack

of proper control groups and the failure to account for confounding variables.

To prove his point that gays

are bad parents, he lists two books about children who suffered at the

hands of two obviously mentally ill homosexual parents. His sample size

is two and if that isn't biased sampling, I don't know what is. It also

seems that the children's parents are their natural parents and not adoptive

parents at all.

I don't know of anyone that

has claimed that homosexuals, as a group, don't have some mentally unstable

people within that group. What group, of any size, do you know that could

make that outlandish claim? However, Mr. Maier wants you to draw the conclusion

that mentally unstable homosexuals would be the norm as adoptive parents.

Being the adoptive parent of

my second son, I know what scrutiny Patti and I had to endure by the social

workers to prove our ability to provide a loving home. Whether gay or

straight, adoptive parents are required to prove that they can provide

a stable and loving environment for the adoptive child.

While I believe that a mother

and a father, providing that both are mentally stable, would be the best

condition for an adopted child in a perfect world, we must confess that

we don't live in a perfect world. There are many children today that lack

for a loving home because no one is willing to take them. Therefore, don't

automatically deem gays and lesbians as unfit to be adoptive parents before

they have been given the chance to prove themselves.

In the future, please refrain

from pushing your "anti-gay agenda." Then I won't feel compelled

to write you a letter in defense of my son and all the other moral, hard

working, civic-minded gays and lesbians out there. Surely, you must realize

that most of your readers are intelligent and fair-minded people that

no longer judge homosexuals by those outdated prejudices of the past.

They judge people by their character and the goodness in their hearts.

Jeff Ellis

Fayetteville

www.familyacceptance.com