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8. Not a Few Last Words
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8 Not a Few Last Words There are better ways to protect homosexual people than to monitor and interfere with parents’ choices about what kind of children they will have. Improving the social and legal status of gay men and lesbians will do more to protect them than anything else. For one thing, parents’ resistance to gay and lesbian children would dissolve if they have fewer worries about the social fate of their children, believe that those children can fare as well as anyone else in society, and believe that their welfare will not suffer because of their sexual orientation.1 At the present time, negative forecasts about their children’s lives as homosexual might be why parents would not want to leave sexual orientation to chance. In 2008, law professor José Gabilando offered a sometimes theoretically overwrought and sometimes playful explanation for the preference for heterosexual children over homosexual children.2 Gabilando offers an economic explanation in which anything of value counts as capital. He recommends understanding parents’ preferences as if they were seeking a return for their investment in their children. In his view, “all anticipated inflows” are treated as capital, and these inflows include money and all social and symbolic capital that attaches to having a child, such as enhanced reputation in social networks, the benefits of alignment with widely held norms, social approval, the value conferred on babies of a particular kind, and any other kinds of status conferred by social approval . In general, a rational, economically self-seeking parent—modeled as a homo economicus and narrowly self-interested—will ordinarily seek a maximal return on any investment. In many ways, children are not only no different than other kinds of investment; they are among the most important investments that anyone will make in a lifetime. In fact, in terms of returns on investments, they can exceed the investment that is made 124 Chapter 8 in a home, which is usually thought of as the most important investment that people make in their lifetime. When gay and straight children are segregated on the opposite sides of a scale that measures social capital, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that gay children are worth less than straight children because they “elicit less social income.” According to Gabilando, parents can see homosexuality as, among other things, impairing the child’s dynastic potential, which cuts their own reproductive ambitions short. He does not agree that this outcome is necessary in all cases, since many gay men and lesbians have children, but he understands that parents might foresee homosexuality as preventing them from having grandchildren. Homosexuality can also—in a foreseeable way—threaten to disrupt existing family relations by adding costs of negotiating relationships between parents and their children and between their straight children and gay children. Seen this way, homosexual children impose costs on parents and families that heterosexual children do not. In addition, parents know that homosexual children are socially discounted in a variety of ways. Gay and lesbian people face, to mention one of Gabilando’s examples, obstacles to the public display of their affection. These displays in public can trigger hostility, and for self-protective reasons , gay and lesbian people refrain from activities that are pleasurable to them and that help cement relationships with the people who are most important to them. By contrast, displays of heterosexuality usually go unremarked or are actively rewarded with social approval and ceremony. This means that parents could expect gay and lesbian children to engage in protective behavior that cuts against their own self-interests. To the extent that homosexual children run into these kinds of obstacles across the spectrum of their interests, they will flourish less than straight children and amass for themselves and for their families less social capital. When all cost differentials are taken into consideration, gay and lesbian children cost the parents more and return less to them than straight children. Some parents are willing to shoulder these costs when they find that they have, in fact, gay and lesbian children, but some parents would shy away from homosexual children in advance if they could because they see these costs as too much to bear relative to their comparative return. Gabilando argues further that heterosexual parents also want the continuation of the structures through which they understand their lives as [44.200.74.73] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:36 GMT) Not a Few Last Words 125 valuable, and they do what they can...