Life is choice. Continually, you are forced to choose between blockbuster DVDs, onions in the market and the cell phone of the month.

Or, whether homosexual couples should be able to adopt children. Seneca, the famous Roman philosopher, believed people, in general, are too optimistic. That’s probably why, instinctively, we try to choose the “best” choice in any given situation. But life – as you already might know- is highly imperfect, and sometimes the “best choice” simply doesn’t exist. Instead, one should learn to choose the least bad among all the options.

This dilemma is epitomized by the possibility in a not-too-distant future that homosexual couples could legally adopt children in the United States. Should they? Shouldn’t they?

The first gut reaction is to think Mother Nature elected a father and a mother to raise offspring. But in human matters, Mother Nature is just another “Senator” in our planet’s “Congress.” Many other factors created by human society, like orphans and parental abuse, have sadly evolved, and the accepted “father-mother” paradigm seems to be inconclusive.

Honestly, what would you have preferred as a child: being an orphan your entire life, or being adopted by a homosexual couple that would have taken care of you with the same love as a heterosexual one? We all would like 100 percent of orphans to be adopted eventually, but realistically speaking, there aren’t enough heterosexual couples to cope with it. If society wants to close in to a 100 percent adoption rate, homosexual couples should be able to come help.

Lluisa Cabre, a children speech pathologist in Hospital del Mar in Barcelona, Spain, said the longing for some kind of love can be seen in the eyes of children living in orphanages. A type of love and child-rearing that only a couple -ÿno matter its sexual orientation – would be able to provide.

Christian fundamentalists and other religious movements caution that enabling homosexual couples to raise adopted children will expose the tots to potential “deranged” or “perverted” treatments. But that’s just a boogeyman scare that forgets all the scores of proven deranged and perverted heterosexual fathers and mothers out there that are presently, and sadly in the future, being convicted for mistreating and abusing their offspring. Sometimes it seems as if heterosexuality is an alibi for whatever abuse.

Another fallacy anti-adoption supporters try to sneak in is trying to convince the public that exposure of newborns to homosexual behavior will bias them toward gayness. Nonsense! If nature followed this rule, heterosexuality should bias toward heterosexuality, but the majority of homosexuals in this country have been raised by a heterosexual couple.

In our imperfect world, citizens, politicians and lawmakers alike in this country should be able to look at the whole picture before coming to a quick conclusion.

Only then will we be able to access what is the least-bad-choice for our society in dealing with homosexual adoption rights.

David Soler is a biomedical sciences graduate and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact him at [email protected].