The primary group opposing passage of a gay marriage bill in Illinois has joined the chorus of social conservatives promoting the anti-gay parenting rhetoric of Robert Oscar Lopez.

Lopez has claimed that gay parenting is a form of “child abuse” and that any attempt by gay couples to form families is a “crime against humanity.” He is celebrated among social conservatives due to the fact that he was raised briefly in a same-sex household – his mother and her partner lived in separate homes for years before moving in together shortly before Lopez's mother died.

“When your home life is so drastically different from everyone around you, in a fundamental way striking at basic physical relations, you grow up weird,” Lopez wrote in an op-ed. “I just grew up in a house so unusual that I was destined to exist as a social outcast.”

In a post titled Same-Sex Parenting: A Form of Child Abuse, Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute (IFI) touts Lopez's writings.

“Lopez describes what all conservatives activists already know: The homosexual community and its ideological allies have become a tyrannical, oppressive, poisonous cultural force that compels conformity and compounds the suffering of children intentionally denied mothers or fathers,” Higgins wrote.

“And still most Christians – and shockingly their leaders – say relatively little. Ever anxious that the non-believing world in its relentless misuse of Scripture will excoriate them for judging (rightly), speck-looking, or stone-casting Christians opt instead to become complicit in child abuse.”

Writing at progressive blog ThinkProgress.com, Zack Ford responded: “Studies of same-sex parenting have generally found no differences among the children in such families, including any claims of 'suffering.' Higgins and the other groups that have shone a spotlight on Lopez, magnify stigma against same-sex families, creating the very harm they claim to be protecting the children from.”