A legitimate child is one with a mother and father who were married when the child was born (or when one died prior to the child's birth). An adopted child can be legitimate, regardless of the status of the birth parents, if the adoptive parents are married and are recorded as being the child's official parents.
If a child is adopted by a man and woman who are married, that man and woman will be forever known as that child's mother and father. Whether they are the biological parents is irrelevant.
No man, homosexual or otherwise, can be a mother; nor can any woman, homosexual or otherwise, be a father. Same-sex "marriage", therefore, cannot give a child legitimate parentage.
So obvious, yet our society doesn't comprehend it anymore. Thanks for your insightful comments.
No society can survive when it rejects self-evident truth.
OK. I assume that this is your definition of "legitimate", unless you are referring to something more institutional. Male and Female are phenotypes -- a requirement for physical reproduction; i.e. hardware. There's more to it these days. There's culture; i.e. software. I claim that the "American" spirit is more software based than "who" is actually practicing it. In this case, it isn't about a male and female parent raising children that is so significant, but rather about a masculine parent and a feminine parent raising a child that determines quality. You talk about "legitimate" as a tag that gets stamped on a child as though the label itself was significant. That is the basis of a caste system -- something that America is supposed to abhor. I'm more concerned with what the child actually becomes when they mature. Does she become a brilliant scientist, a military hero? Or does she become a drug addict, or criminal. Two masculine parents, or two feminine parents (regardless of their actual sex) tend to raise children far differently than by parents who specialize oppositely. I would take a bet that one day, we will find that a gay couple, where one is masculine and one is feminine, will statistically raise more successful children than a straight couple each sharing the same gender. Consider today what happens to children when both parents are working in the masculine corporate world (for the sheer sake of income). What do we know today about how children turn out when raised by a single parent (a highly skewed gender spectrum)?