I've come to a conclusion that I'm against gay marriage.

[Ben Kenobi]

restate the "point" you think you made or was conceded. Do it concisely and clearly with words like " my point was".

Rah finally conceded that yes there is a shortage of babies up for adoption. Most adoptions (not fostering, there is a difference!) are done with babies. Ergo, there is a shortage of children available for adoption in America.

[Wezil]

There you go guys. You can spend the next 3 pages continuing the "debate".

He's got you hook, line and sinker.

[rah]

When you stated that yes, there is a shortage of babies available for adoption. That was my point - you're trying to nitpick now to state that that wasn't my point because that would require admitting that I was right.

No, I don't think I was nitpicking. You said "CHILDREN" not Babies. Now that you realize that you were indeed wrong you're backpedaling and saying that's what you meant. (a common habit of yours) Just say you were were wrong when you said there was a shortage of CHILDREN. It's not that hard. Do you still think there is a shortage of CHILDREN? Please answer that. (without saying "I really meant")

[Flubber]

Rah finally conceded that yes there is a shortage of babies up for adoption. Most adoptions (not fostering, there is a difference!) are done with babies. Ergo, there is a shortage of children available for adoption in America.

Your logic must be great comfort to the 115,000 children waiting for adoption in the United States ( new York times ... June 2011.)

[Ming]

Most adoptions (not fostering, there is a difference!) are done with babies.

Wrong yet again Ben.... Taking a look at the latest figures available... (Sources: Foster/AFCARS reports, FY 2008-2010; International/Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, 2008-2010 editions; U.S. Infant/NCFA surveys, reported every five years.)

The Adoption Numbers

Adoptions from Foster Care
2010: 52,891
2009: 57,466
2008: 55,000

International Adoptions
2010:11,100
2009: 12,782
2008: 17,229

U.S. Infant Adoptions
2007: 18,078
2002: 22,291
1996: 23,537

So... MOST adoptions are NOT done with Babies...
Gee Ben, you can't get anything right.

[Flubber]

Ming

I did a a quick google and for more succinct numbers the Evan B Donaldson Adoption Institute states that of non stepparent adoptions in the United States
59 percent are from the child welfare system
26 percent are international
15 percent are domestic infant adoptions.

These ratios seem similar to your cited numbers with some annual variation of course. But it's quite clear that domestic infant adoptions do not make up most adoptions

Stay tuned for how Ben restates his case again. Should be hilarious.....

[Ben Kenobi]

http://adoption.state.gov/about_us/statistics.php

There's your source for the international adoptions. Wow - they are way down. They used to be 23k a year.

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/waiting2009.pdf

That's the total number of foster kids - down from 130k to about 110k. Divide by 16 - that gives you an influx of about 8k or so per year.

I call bull**** on your numbers Ming. Inflow of about 8k/year with outflow of about 11k per year seems about right.

[Flubber]

Ben

Quibble on the exact numbers all you want but it's crystal clear that domestic infant adoptions make up far less than half of all adoptions in the US so unless you are choosing to redefine the word "most"' there is nothing left to discuss on this

You were wrong so just admit it and move on

[Ming]

http://adoption.state.gov/about_us/statistics.php

There's your source for the international adoptions. Wow - they are way down. They used to be 23k a year.

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/waiting2009.pdf

That's the total number of foster kids - down from 130k to about 110k. Divide by 16 - that gives you an influx of about 8k or so per year.

I call bull**** on your numbers Ming. Inflow of about 8k/year with outflow of about 11k per year seems about right.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

As usual, your whole argument is BS.
You can not prove that MOST ADOPTIONS are BABIES
All the available actual FACTS, prove you wrong. AS ALWAYS....

But then again, you have never let something as simple as real facts to get in the way of all the BS you kick out.

[Ben Kenobi]

You can not prove that MOST ADOPTIONS are BABIES
All the available actual FACTS, prove you wrong. AS ALWAYS....

What facts have you cited? I had to cite your own facts because you were too lazy to cite them yourself.

None of them state the proportion of infant adoptions. Odd that.

[Ming]

What facts have you cited? I had to cite your own facts because you were too lazy to cite them yourself.

None of them state the proportion of infant adoptions. Odd that.

Odd that you have yet to prove your point... which you can't, because you are wrong YET AGAIN.
MOST ADOPTIONS are NOT BABIES. Clear enough for you.

Now you can claim you actually meant something else, or that we can't read your mind and see what you actually meant to say, but the facts are clear here... WRONG.
You just keep making stuff up.

[Ben Kenobi]

Well, seeing as your source shows that all forms of adoption are in fact declining, and:

One of the reasons for the decreasing number of domestic adoptions may be a parallel decrease in the percentage of unmarried women relinquishing children for adoption. According to data from the National Survey of Family Growth, relinquishments have declined from nearly nine percent in the 1970s to under one percent of births to never-married women by 1995

Which corroborates with what I said. There are far more people willing to adopt than there are children available to be adopted. The number in foster care is declining too.

If what you said were correct, why then are we seeing a dramatic decrease in the number of adoptions? If there were 50 thousand adoptions both domestic and internation done, not that long ago, and now there are only 15 thousand - that leaves a demand of 35 thousand or so which is currently unmet. If all the foster kids were given to be adopted - they would not be able to meet the demand. So what they do is they make them wait.

[Ming]

Well, seeing as your source shows that all forms of adoption are in fact declining, and:

So... it has nothing to do with your CLAIM that most adoptions are babies...

Which corroborates with what I said. There are far more people willing to adopt than there are children available to be adopted. The number in foster care is declining too.

No again... there are far more children that need adoption than there are people willing to adopt... The operative word here is CHILDREN... You can keep trying to change the argument to babies, but originally, you never said babies UNTIL you were PROVED WRONG.

If what you said were correct, why then are we seeing a dramatic decrease in the number of adoptions? If there were 50 thousand adoptions both domestic and internation done, not that long ago, and now there are only 15 thousand - that leaves a demand of 35 thousand or so which is currently unmet. If all the foster kids were given to be adopted - they would not be able to meet the demand. So what they do is they make them wait.

Is this Ben math yet again... Where do the numbers show that there are only 15 thousand adoptions... you need a math lesson.
You keep finding new ways to show just how wrong you are about everything.

[Jaguar]

I began supporting gay marriage in my early teens, around 2002 or so. For my views on gay marriage, I will simply refer you to David Blankenhorn, a smart social conservative who has converted to supporting gay marriage earlier this year and wrote about it in the New York Times. In my view, nothing further needs to be said on the subject.

IN my 2007 book, “The Future of Marriage,” and in my 2010 court testimony concerning Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that defined marriage as between a man and a woman, I took a stand against gay marriage. But as a marriage advocate, the time has come for me to accept gay marriage and emphasize the good that it can do. I’d like to explain why.

I opposed gay marriage believing that children have the right, insofar as society makes it possible, to know and to be cared for by the two parents who brought them into this world. I didn’t just dream up this notion: the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which came into force in 1990, guarantees children this right.

Marriage is how society recognizes and protects this right. Marriage is the planet’s only institution whose core purpose is to unite the biological, social and legal components of parenthood into one lasting bond. Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you. In this sense, marriage is a gift that society bestows on its children.

At the level of first principles, gay marriage effaces that gift. No same-sex couple, married or not, can ever under any circumstances combine biological, social and legal parenthood into one bond. For this and other reasons, gay marriage has become a significant contributor to marriage’s continuing deinstitutionalization, by which I mean marriage’s steady transformation in both law and custom from a structured institution with clear public purposes to the state’s licensing of private relationships that are privately defined.

I have written these things in my book and said them in my testimony, and I believe them today. I am not recanting any of it.

But there are more good things under heaven than these beliefs. For me, the most important is the equal dignity of homosexual love. I don’t believe that opposite-sex and same-sex relationships are the same, but I do believe, with growing numbers of Americans, that the time for denigrating or stigmatizing same-sex relationships is over. Whatever one’s definition of marriage, legally recognizing gay and lesbian couples and their children is a victory for basic fairness.

Another good thing is comity. Surely we must live together with some degree of mutual acceptance, even if doing so involves compromise. Sticking to one’s position no matter what can be a virtue. But bending the knee a bit, in the name of comity, is not always the same as weakness. As I look at what our society needs most today, I have no stomach for what we often too glibly call “culture wars.” Especially on this issue, I’m more interested in conciliation than in further fighting.

A third good thing is respect for an emerging consensus. The population as a whole remains deeply divided, but most of our national elites, as well as most younger Americans, favor gay marriage. This emerging consensus may be wrong on the merits. But surely it matters.

I had hoped that the gay marriage debate would be mostly about marriage’s relationship to parenthood. But it hasn’t been. Or perhaps it’s fairer to say that I and others have made that argument, and that we have largely failed to persuade. In the mind of today’s public, gay marriage is almost entirely about accepting lesbians and gay men as equal citizens. And to my deep regret, much of the opposition to gay marriage seems to stem, at least in part, from an underlying anti-gay animus. To me, a Southerner by birth whose formative moral experience was the civil rights movement, this fact is profoundly disturbing.

I had also hoped that debating gay marriage might help to lead heterosexual America to a broader and more positive recommitment to marriage as an institution. But it hasn’t happened. With each passing year, we see higher and higher levels of unwed childbearing, nonmarital cohabitation and family fragmentation among heterosexuals. Perhaps some of this can be attributed to the reconceptualization of marriage as a private ordering that is so central to the idea of gay marriage. But either way, if fighting gay marriage was going to help marriage over all, I think we’d have seen some signs of it by now.

So my intention is to try something new. Instead of fighting gay marriage, I’d like to help build new coalitions bringing together gays who want to strengthen marriage with straight people who want to do the same. For example, once we accept gay marriage, might we also agree that marrying before having children is a vital cultural value that all of us should do more to embrace? Can we agree that, for all lovers who want their love to last, marriage is preferable to cohabitation? Can we discuss whether both gays and straight people should think twice before denying children born through artificial reproductive technology the right to know and be known by their biological parents?

Will this strategy work? I don’t know. But I hope to find out.

Emphasis mine.

[Wezil]

...and we're off!