Robert Oscar Lopez Goes to Italy

Jim Burroway

April 29th, 2014

Thanks to a tip from an Italian BTB reader, we’ve learned that Robert Oscar Lopez, the rabidly anti-gay maybe-bi son of a lesbian mother who lived oh-so-briefly with a lesbian partner, was in Italy last week as the guest of right wing Catholic groups to warn about the “engine of world-historical evil” — that would be you. While there, he tried to respond to a blog post in the Italian version of The Huffington Post by Josephine La Delfa, president of Famiglie Arcobaleno (“Rainbow Families”, an Italian LGBT parents association), HuffPo simply ignored it. So he had his response published in Tempi, a mouthpiece of the right wing Catholic movement Communion and Liberation.

What we have here is his English article translated into Italian, and then back to English again. That round trip does little to alter his familiar argument:

The thesis is that a “different” right — the right to be raised in conditions that sociologists and experts consider ideal — overcomes and erases the right to have a father and a mother. It is a reasoning deeply offensive, especially because it comes from those who present themselves as a defender of gay rights.

This is standard issue fare from just about all anti-gay opponents of marriage equality. But of course, what sets Lopez apart is his rather unhinged ideas about adoption amounting to an “international slave trade.” He drops the “slave” word in his Temp post, but his point remains the same:

[W]hat is the attitude towards children forced to live in homes of homosexual couples? The key word is just “forced” because no child ends up in a gay parenting household if not because of the adults resort to extraordinary measures to submit to the authority of one or two people with whom he has biological ties or blood.

Lopez claims there are “countless statistics showing how gay relationships have a high rate of instability, domestic violence and emotional abuse” among gay couples, although he doesn’t bother to mention any of them. Strictly speaking his “countless” claim may be true, since you can only count what exists. But he then goes on to suggest that the only people qualified to determine who can marry and who can’t are sociologists:

[G]ay activists say, “you do not need the legal recognition of your relationship with the mother and father who gave you the identity that made you as you are now, because you know, we scientists who have shown that it is enough for you to live the way we want it and you have to love the people who have decided that you should love. If this is the way we give rights to relationships because we’re discussing the wedding? We could say: “you do not have the right to get married with people of the same sex , you cannot marry the person you love, you have to be in a relationship that sociologists define good for you, it could be, statistically speaking, a relationship with a person of the opposite sex.” Of course, this last statement is offensive to the supporters of gay marriage.

That last statement is offensive to anyone contemplating marriage, not just gay couples. Can you imagine anyone else being willing to submit to a sociologist’s stamp of approval? But what Lopez conveniently leaves out in his convoluted letter is that sociologists have weighed in on marriage quality, and they support it, saying that countless statistic, to borrow Lopez’s phrasing, show that “parents’ sexual orientation has no bearing on children’s well-being.” But that inconvenient fact would keep Lopez from pulling his outrage card, and he can’t have that.:

Why say that children do not have the right to have a mother and a father is abusive to me? Because I was raised by a lesbian and her partner and my father was not in the family portrait. Giuseppina La Delfa could look into my eyes and tell me that I have not lost anything? That I have not suffered anything? I would have no right to I love my father as my father, and just for the fact that he is my father?

Well, between these two positions, that of the child must prevail because: 1. Loss of a parent does not take place with the consent of the child while adults gays are big enough to choose 2. Loss to a child is something universal: not all people get married, but all people have a father and a mother. 3. Loss to a child is permanent. Two adults gays can get divorced while the child can not remove half of her genetic heritage.

For these reasons, I ask you to apologize to all children — to humanity in fact — for saying this heinous thing: that people do not have the right to a father and a mother.

It looks like Lopez’s logic translates about as badly into Italian as it sounds in English.

Regan DuCasse

April 29th, 2014

Over and over again, people like Lopez continue the meme that MARRIAGE requires mothers, fathers and children when it does not.
Non parent adults are insulted as if they cannot and do not make any other contributions that matter as if ONLY mating and making babies is the beginning and end of human worth.

And further, there aren’t any morals, endurance, skills, health or religious requirements to marry OR parent.
Marriage IS considered a fundamental right accessible to anyone even those convicted of murder with a history of violence.
The state doesn’t require you be good enough to marry.
But that marriage is good enough for anyone who wants it.
And it’s rather obvious to anyone paying attention that one’s gender isn’t a character value, nor any form of guarantee the quality that marriage or parenting will be.

Evidenced PRECISELY by the amount of DIVORCE and children living in poverty, domestic violence, who have been abandoned, abused and even murdered by the man/woman biological model in their lives.
To say nothing of just the routine violence against females by males in any given society.
And how long it’s taken for women to have some legal recourse when it occurs.
This is hard core proof that being a man and woman is hardly a divinely wrought concept of compatibility.
Otherwise such suffering BECAUSE of gender wouldn’t exist.

But then, logic is NOT the strong suit of any of our detractors.
Let alone some pretty obvious solutions to these problems.

Priya Lynn

April 29th, 2014

If children being raised by gay couples were “forced” into that family because they didn’t have a choice then I was just as forced into being raised by my biological father and mother. They were terrible people and I would have liked the choice to have been raised by a gay or lesbian couple.

But it doesn’t work that way. You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family.

SharonB

April 29th, 2014

By Lopez’s standards, I guess only affluent suburban Asian parents will be able to procreate.

What a self-hating maROON.

Hyhybt

April 29th, 2014

Good news: he’s left the US. Bad news: he’ll probably be allowed back in.

JEM

April 30th, 2014

Perhaps it’s the fault of putting his words through a translator, but they make no sense. Is it just me, or does he always come off as a legitimate lunatic (not just rabidly anti-gay)?

By his logic, as best I can fathom it, babies should be left where their biologicals dropped them so they can choose who will parent them. Is that what he’s trying to say?

Priya Lynn

April 30th, 2014

I too think he comes across as an extremist Jem. He’s saying if anyone is allowed to raise a child other than that child’s biological parents its the same as putting the child in slavery. He’s absurdly claiming that all children, including those too young to know the difference, are desperate to be raised by their biological parents which is obviously not the case. Some adopted children wish to know who their biological parents were but many want nothing to do with their biological parents as they believe the people who loved and raised them are their only real parents. Lopez would tear those children away from the parents they want and love and force parents who didn’t want the child to raise him or her. That’s extreme.

Chris McCoy

May 1st, 2014

As a person who was adopted at the age of 2 and raised to adulthood by adoptive parents, the “biological parents only” argument disgusts me. It completely dismisses the excellent job my adoptive parents did raising me and my sister, who is also adopted, into the adults we are today.

My question to all these “biological parents only” people is, “Are you suggesting that the best possible parents for a child conceived during incest-rape are the mother and the relative that raped her?”

Priya Lynn

May 1st, 2014

That is a powerful refutation Chris. Thanks for giving it to us.

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