The 'rights' or otherwise of homosexuals to be parents is a contested issue.

There are passionately held moral, and sometimes religious,  views on both sides.

My own view is this: that the 'right' to be a parent should depend on the qualities brought to the job. And it one were to list the 'essential ' and 'desirable' qualities for the job, would it not be in terms of things like child-centredness, rather than private sexual orientation? Obviously it would be unacceptable to be too overt or to have too sexualised a life style  with children too young, but this should surely apply to straight people as well as gay?

But there have been recent interesting legal twists that should make shared parenters favour tolerance. It is that gay non-residential  parents are being given more rights that straight ones. We should welcome that, because it will then become more difficult to deny them to all non-residential parents.

In a case reported in the serious press on 02.12.10 a father who had been in a gay relationship for 25 years was given nearly half the parenting time with his two children, a boy aged 10 and a girl aged 7 conceived as a result of his donating sperm to a lesbian mother. He had been an involved father since their birth, but the mother had later sought to exclude him, citing his alleged hostility to her partner.

Absolutely right to recognise the children's rights to both their parents in this way, in my view.  And surely even those who disapprove of the circumstances of their conception would not want to deny them that. Given that that was the factual situation, even if wished it had not been.

So what about extending this principle? And allowing a straight father who had been involved with the children since birth to have lots of parenting time, even if the natural mother has another lover?