In an op-ed published Wednesday in CNN,
the adult daughter of a gay couple opined that she's proud of her
two-dad family.
In
the column, Sienna Craig said she was a 15-year-old freshman at a
public school in Southern California when she was called on as editor
of her school newspaper to take on controversial issues.
She argued that gay couples should be
allowed to have children.
“My argument hinged on love,” she
wrote.
“If two people of the same sex loved
each other, were secure in their relationship and wanted to have a
family, what made them any less 'fit' as parents than a heterosexual
couple? Indeed, one might even say that given the societal pressures
and challenges they must be prepared to face, a same-sex couple might
even be better role models than two people who had had an easier path
to parenthood.”
“I was proud of my piece, but public
opinion clearly lay on the side of my opponent. I was surprised to
find that not only did virtually none of my friends commend me for
it, but some of my fellow students decided it would be fun to call me
a 'fag hag' and a 'dyke' for weeks after its publication. This hurt
my feelings, of course. But what they did not know – and what I had
not dared to write about publicly – was that I lived with my father
and his partner, a man he has now been with for more than a quarter
century.”
“Was I a coward for not broadcasting
the nature of my family, for not going public in that first op-ed? I
have often felt, after the fact, that I should have been bolder. But
remember, it was 1989.”
She concluded: “Today, if I were in
the position my high school journalism teacher had been, the prompt
'Gay people should be allowed to be parents – pro or con' would,
mercifully, be barely worth arguing in many parts of the country, if
not the world. Listening to my daughter ask casually if I could call
Chloe's moms or Grace's dads to arrange a playdate provides a kind of
existential relief I find difficult to put into words.”