Heather MacDonald’s latest piece at National Review explores some of the questions surrounding gay marriage, and the difficulties that arise when parental status and identity is established solely by intent, rather than by biology–as it is in the case of homosexual marriage.
The question, of course, that MacDonald has to answer is why this separation matters at all. She answers:
The institutionalized severing of biology from parenthood affirms a growing trend in our society, that of men abandoning their biological children. Too many men now act like sperm donors: they conceive a children then largely disappear, becoming at best intermittent presences in their children’s lives.
If parental status is a matter of intent, however, not of genes, absent fathers can say: “I never intended to take on the role of that child’s parent; therefore I’m not morally bound to act as a parent.”
The separation of biology and parenthood, then, has two problematic effects: on the one hand, it undercuts the argument that fathers have obligations to any offspring they do not conceive intentionally, further perpetuating the social problems absenteeism has caused. On the other hand, it undercuts the complementarity that men and women have in raising children, a complementarity that MacDonald thinks can be established even at a biological level.
MacDonald realizes the muted force of her argument, as she hedges her position on the final page. But it is still an interesting line of thought.
And if it’s right, it might have significant repercussions for younger Christians who want to claim that they are pro-life while still allowing homosexual marriage. The force of MacDonald’s piece is that she establishes a link between the technological subordination of procreation (as expressed through making procreation only valid when it is intentional) with marriage practices, arguing that, “The primary challenge to traditional notions of parenthood comes from gay conception, not gay marriage.”
The first line of argument indicates that intention alone is not the sole criterion for parenthood, a position that the pro-life community has vigorously asserted and that homosexual child-rearing has to deny. This, however, might call the coherence of simultaneously being pro-life and pro-gay marriage into question.
I say “might” because McDonald’s line of argument might also cause problems for the adoption movement, which also establishes child-rearing on a non-biological basis. But even on that front, it’s not clear that encouraging adoption and including adoptive children as regular, normal children on the same level as biological ones makes adoption normative in the way biological children might be. And it preserves (in most cases) the biological complementarity of a mother and father.
MacDonald’s piece is by no means conclusive, but it does move one up some important lines of inquiry that are worth reflecting on. At the least, it offers up a few more questions for proponents of gay marriage and explains the cautiousness of social conservatives to give weigh to libertarian ideals.
February 9th, 2010 | 10:28 am
It seems to me that this reasoning is based on two massive assumptions: that same-sex parenting necessarily entails “planned parenting”, and that “complementarity” is a concept that actually has meaning. I will address these two in turn.
i. As for homosexual parenting being established solely by intent, not biology, this is not always true. These days, any number of homosexual people have biological children from previous heterosexual relationships, and continue to parent those children once they enter same-sex marriages. Naturally, one would expect the instances of homosexual people engaging in heterosexual relationships to decrease as social acceptance of homosexuality continues to rise. But even for those homosexual couples who wish to adopt children, there is no reason why they should be looked at any differently than other adoptive parents, or any differently than any heterosexual couple who cannot conceive without medical assistance. Heterosexual couples do not face fertility tests when they want to get married, yet clearly their efforts to engage in reproductive assistance or adoption make intentionality the sole criterion for parenthood. It is fundamentally mistaken to conceive of this as being caused by homosexual marriages. As noted above, homosexual marriages do not necessarily require intentionality to result in children. Adoptions, like biological births, are not always the result of careful planning – the legal process of adoption is simply the recognition of a parental relationship that has already formed, much like a legal marriage is the legal recognition of an interpersonal relationship that has formed. The law cannot create such relationships; they can arise organically, and are not solely the result of planning. So it is intellectually irresponsible to assert that gay marriages can only lead to children as the result of intention, and it is intellectually irresponsible to claim that the legal recognition of gay marriages will affect the behavior of heterosexual couples.
ii. I have never fully understood what is meant by “complementarity” of the genders. Is this supposed to mean that men and women have some sort of innate gender-based interlocking personality characteristics? The success of same-sex relationships clearly shows that some people are capable of finding “complementarity” within their own gender. Or is “complementarity” supposed to refer to the physically complementary aspects of men and women? If so, it appears unseemly to focus so much on the shape of male and female genitals. Since when did we judge people based on their body shapes?
To sum up: same-sex marriages do not require that intentionality be the sole criterion for parenthood, whether the parenthood results in biological children or adoptive children. Even if they did, there is no reason to assume that legal recognition of same-sex marriages affects how other people choose to have children. As for the illusion of “complementarity”, I must conclude that as applied in this context it is an imaginary concept. In short, I see no reason why being pro-life does not require one to support gay marriage as well as to oppose abortion.
February 9th, 2010 | 11:30 am
Those homosexuals with children from previous unions are parents without reference to their sexual orientation. If they concluded they were asexual and cut off all sexual relations, they would still be parents.
February 9th, 2010 | 12:09 pm
Patrick,
Complementarity goes far deeper than personality or physical characteristics. I understand complementarity to be deeply rooted in God’s intentional creation of His children as male and female. Before the fall, He created them male and female; since He certainly could have chosen any other number or type of configurations for creation, this intentionality of sexed creatures has theological significance. To deny or negate this significance, as supporters of gay marriage do, is to deny the purpose of God’s creation of humans as male and female. If a Christian cannot find a legitimate theological basis for one’s desires (whether to live a gay lifestyle or simply to be in support of it) — and we can be certain that there is none, as the Spirit leading of the Catholic Church has made abundantly clear — that person should consider the failure a clear red flag of warning that perhaps this desire is not Godly in origin. (See the book CREATION & COVENANT for the more complete history of Christian thought on the significance of sexual difference.)
Secondly, legal recognition of same-sex marriages absolutely affects heterosexual marriages in a variety of ways, the most important of which, as Joseph Bottum has written, is the risk to our freedom of conscience. It is a “world increasingly bent on compelling not merely our silence but ultimately our participation in its sins, crimes and follies” (First Things, December, 2009). To imagine that marriage does not have ramifications beyond its participants is simply naive wishful thinking.
Finally, as for the issue of intent and homosexual parenting, for Christians what does it matter if the intention in homosexual parents is present or not? The offense to God, the clear denial of God’s intentions for humankind, in the choice of lifestyle remains. I am not one to believe that my will is better than God’s, even if it is something that I strongly desire; therefore, I will submit to His command, following Christ’s lead. In this way, I can hope that at the time of the last things, God might be able to say to me, well done, my good and faithful servant, for speaking my truth about marriage, family and sexuality.
February 9th, 2010 | 12:53 pm
The deliberate severing of a child from one of its biological parents seems to me always an injustice, though to varying degrees. The inability to create new life with the person you love, whether hetero- or homo-sexual, must be a great loss. (I am much less sympathetic when it comes to “single mothers by choice.”) But the loss to the child conceived through IVF and gamete “donation” seems much more severe to me. Half of one’s heritage a blank; a lifetime of wondering about and longing for the missing parent (separated from you by the very people who raise you); and then, when one has children of one’s own, the inability to share that paternal or maternal lineage with the next generation. It is easy enough to justify assisted reproduction in terms of how dearly the child will be loved, but these seem to be very tragic implications even under the best of circumstances.
What always troubles me in these debates is that the adults presumably choose the ART route (rather than adoption) in large part because he or she profoundly craves at least partial biological connection with the child. But in applauding these new technologies that satisfy this desire, we too often ignore the fact that the craving for biological connection is no less profound for the child who is then denied it. Thus, to assert that every child deserves to know and be raised by his own biological parents doesn’t require religious belief or any feeling about homosexuality one way or the other. The fact that gay marriage would normalize and celebrate ART makes it troubling to me purely as a matter of public policy.
February 9th, 2010 | 3:59 pm
There’s an interesting irony here. The argument against gay marriage based on the social effects of single parenthood asserts the social importance of traditional marriage. But yet this very move shows even more clearly the underlying injustice of denying marriage to gays. As this piece very ably points out the real damage to traditional marriage has been wrought by the changing attitudes, beliefs and practices of heterosexuals. These changes are themselves what have made gay marriage seem so self-evidently harmless. But of course bans on gay marriage, particularly the parade of state constitutional amendments of recent years, don’t even begin to touch these underlying issues. This very argument shows conservatives to be focusing very much on the wrong thing at the expense of gays.
Continuing to disallow gay marriage will do nothing to address the problems of single parenthood, because it will do nothing to change the attitudes, beliefs and practices that have led to its proliferation. What then is left of the argument? Only the claim that allowing gay marriage will make things even worse, a claim that depends, it seems, on asserting that gay marriage would provide a de jure ‘stamp of approval’ to what is a de facto reality. That and the claim the biology supports a morally and legally interesting distinction between relationships that are essentially non-procreative and those that are merely contingently so. These are such thin reeds it’s hard not to see the conservative position collapsing into one in which gays are made to suffer for the bad behavior of heterosexuals in the name of an ineffective ‘last stand’.
February 16th, 2010 | 12:51 pm
This post is similar to one last week citing non-monogamy among married San Fran homosexuals as the latest threat to hetero-marriage.
Call it whatever you want, but people consenting and practicing an open marriage, is not the same as cheating on your spouse; a decietful behavior something which hetero marriage has truly claimed as it’s own. But, let’s not focus on problems within exsisting marriages same as shifting focus away from child rearing practices already in place in the hetero-world; single-mothers, absent fathers, children having children (hey at least they’re “complementary”, something a mature, financially stable, educated homosexual couple can’t even begin to overcome….)
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