Game over! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

*Insert lame joke about finally being able to blame video games for an increase in violence.*

Great, I haven't even finished my morning coffee and already I want to just lay down and die. You could also tag these stores as "Evidence We Are Already in Hell"...

@ 3 - that's a GREAT idea; I second that. Dan - take note. :-)

Hey dumbfuck Dan,

It wasn't the childs father, it was the skank of the mothers BOYFRIEND.

IF you are going to make yourself look like an idiot, at least get the basic facts right.

Like, maybe the whore of a mother should have kept her legs closed while she was single. But then, she wouldn't fit your ideal sexually liberated person model.

Ecce Homo for president!
He's not afraid to expose the LIES of the ESTABLISHMENT!
VP: Insane Clown Posse

Ecce! Touch me!

yeah, mr. poe, game's over for a child at the age of 2, never going to experience any more milestones beyond walking and her first words. hi-larious!

While not as harsh as ECCE, maybe this child did deserve a mother and a FATHER. Where the Fuck was he?

@8

I kneow!

If you want to get really depressed about blended families and adoption, read Daly & Wilson's book Homicide - in which they show that, among other disturbing things, that babies are about 100 times more likely to be murdered (by a caretaker) if they live with a stepfather (including a mother's boyfriend), compared to babies living with their genetic fathers. (Studies from North America and Europe bear this tragic fact out.)

I still think adoption is good, though.

@11, my wife's a social worker -- I've heard enough depressing stories about kids to keep me awake at night, crying, for the rest of my life.

Did anyone notice that the mother HEARD the beating but did NOTHING until she noticed the kid was unconscious. WTF. I can't even find words to begin.

Halo 3 kills.

I'm kinda new here ... what exactly is the point to these daily Every Child Deserves posts? That innocent kids get abused and killed in horrid ways by horrid people? That there are really vile and evil people out there that should probably be drug out into a swamp and shot in the livers and left to die?

C'mon. Maybe you all want to start a t-shirt company with dead babies and kids on them or a set of child abuse playing cards.

I don't see the social value, awareness? Oh please. Keep one person from smashing their girlfriend's babies head against a wall? Unlikely.

As the final frontier for the uberironic hipster who has run out of sick crap to crack jokes about?

Halo 3 kills.

hahahaha

Fucktard.

Poor baby girl :(

Bob, it's best you just leave.

I'm not so new here, but I'd like to know what the point of Mr. Poe is.

Or ecce homo, while we're at it.

bob @15: "As the final frontier for the uberironic hipster who has run out of sick crap to crack jokes about?"

mr. poe resembles that remark. and he's right: you should just leave, for your own good. and so should i.

Since when is "mother's boyfriend" considered the father by default? I've got a number of friends dating single parents who would disagree with that equation, Dan. These posts lose their potency if you start including every single incident where a heterosexual abuses a child.

Peter F, yeah I don't know how they do it - props to social workers, nobody ever recognizes what they do except to shit on them when they make a bad call.

#15 kinda makes a point - Dan posts these stories to show that it's not The Gays who are a danger to Our Children, and that having two hetero birth parents doesn't guarantee you a life of happiness and flowers. But this post - stepfather beating death - just shows that, while parents are more likely to injure or kill their children than strangers. non-related people who live with the child are the most dangerous of all, more dangerous even than birth parents. I don't think that fact should be used to outlaw adoption or anything - I am solidly pro-gay-adoption - but this kind of story doesn't necessarily make the case for gay parenting, where by definition at least one of them must be unrelated to the child.

Still - this baby girl would have been a hell of a lot better off with an adoptive family than in her fucked-up deadly situation. I don't know if adoptive families have a better track record than live-in stepfathers/mother's boyfriends, but I bet they do.

For all we know it was Rosemarys Baby. I think it's horrible to blame either of the adults in this situation when we're not entirely sure what has happened. For example: nobody is talking. So until we know whether or not the little girl was Lucifer's child, we should all can it or make jokes about it.

5, 9, 20, whether the boyfriend was the child's biological father or not is not the point. Homophobes insist that children need both a female and male role model in the house. Dan's point is that having hetero parents is no guarantee of a good childhood.

@23 - So, if I decided to date a woman who had a child, I automatically become that child's "male role model"? I don't think so. Truth is, there's no details in the original article to define the boyfriend's actual role in the child's life. As far as "Every Child..." posts, I just think this one's a bit of a stretch.

non-related people who live with the child are the most dangerous of all, more dangerous even than birth parents.

So even adoptive parents? That doesn't make any sense. Adoptive parents choose to be parents and they choose a child to adopt. Stepfathers and stepmothers choose to be with someone who has a child. It's a rarely stepparent who enjoys having the kid around and doesn't see the kid as a rival for love and attention.

Seriously? Dragging out daily horror stories of kids being killed by hetero parents is some attempt to make a point about people criticizing gays as parents? Wow. That's using a chainsaw when a toothpick would do. Let alone the fact that the potential victim pool of children being parented by heteros is so much bigger I'm not sure this isn't trying to pick low hanging fruit and even missing at that.

How about some comparative data? Why not step away from methods that don't even rise to the anecdotal and try to find some real support for the contention. Or is this just some emotional shriekathon?

Fine. We get it. Stop revictimizing these babies to make your political point. It's voyeuristic and icky.

Mr. Poe isn't a real person. He is a human sized sore covered cock that issues puss from his piss hole like liquid feces from the anus of a street person.

He is pathetic and unfunny.

"So, if I decided to date a woman who had a child, I automatically become that child's "male role model"?"

Of course you do. You may not be a good one, but you're a role model, whether you like it or not. Kids learn how to interact socially by watching how others interact. Even if you're just "mom's boyfriend, who's not around much", the kid is taking in information about how moms behave, how male-female relationships work, and what kinds of roles men play.

In this case, the guy's role was pretty clear: he was a bullying, abusive asshole. But hey, apparently God gives him points for being straight.

Bob @26,

The argument against gay adoption, that "every child deserves a mother and a father", is not supported by data and will not answer to data. It can only be confronted with rhetoric.

It's called fighting fire with fire.

Sorry 29 I'm not buying it. You don't prove the positive by consistently dragging out the negative. In other words, the fact some hetero couples abuse and kill babies doesn't mean homosexual couples won't. Or will. They are independent of each other.

I guess if it makes gays frustrated with those arguments feel better to keep running dead babies up flagpoles then I guess it's not the sickest thing I've ever heard.

But it's maybe worse. It's ineffectual.

@30, I suspect you read the tone of these posts as flippant or sarcastic. I would argue that they're angry. You do know that Dan Savage has an adopted son, right?

And they're not out to prove the positive; they're out to undermine the opposing argument (the stubborn insistence that Every Child Deserves... presumably at any cost). Hey, they're blog entries, not formal essays, but sometimes a blunt instrument is needed to counter a blunt instrument. You're welcome to disagree, but I think they make their point.

The point is to point out Dan Savage's fetish with child abuse.

He is like the old mother in the Sopranos.