Marriage is about rights of the children
Nicholas Tonti-Filippini
September 6, 2011

Opinion

Comments 236

Same-sex marriage ignores what a marriage means and who it serves.

In an extraordinary show of unity, more than 50 national leaders of Christian churches have endorsed a document on marriage as a legal institution that promotes and protects the identity of children and their internationally recognised right to know, to have access to and to be nurtured by both their mother and father.

This is not a debate about the worth to the community of same-sex unions. The social values such couples exhibit in their daily lives are indistinguishable from those of their neighbours. We should acknowledge loyalty, commitment and devotion, the contribution made to neighbourhoods and to making communities safer and better places to live, and the many other ways in which people living interdependent lives enrich the community through the stability of their unions.

Nor is this a debate about equality and non-discrimination. The federal law in Australia has already been changed to give same-sex partners the same legal rights as those who are married, and in most states the right to register their unions. The remaining issue, therefore, is the definition of marriage, and the question is why society has an interest in continuing to secure marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman.
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Revising the definition of marriage has been presented simply as a justice issue of non-inclusion. There has been little in the media about the fact that this would mean revising what marriage means, so that it would be about romance only and no longer focused on establishing a relationship in which children are nurtured by both their mother and father.

It is so hard to try to describe the absence or negation of something intangible.