In the October issue of First Things, R.R. Reno examines our culture’s confusion about the purpose of the institution of marriage:
Proponents of same-sex marriage frame their cause in terms of civil rights. There are no significant moral or cultural differences between homosexual couples and heterosexual couples, they presume, and therefore limiting marriage to heterosexual couples amounts to discrimination. Fairness and justice require giving men the right to marry men and women the right to marry women. Q.E.D.
The recent success of the New York legislature in redefining marriage indicates that this way of thinking has traction. As Albert Mohler recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, we find ourselves in a “most awkward cultural moment.” Sex is now largely thought of as a matter of personal choice, and for the most part heterosexual couples couple as they see fit. Words like fornication seem musty and archaic. Established gender roles for men and women are held in suspicion. Almost everyone, even Catholics, regards contraception as a self-evident good. Children are an option, not the self-evident responsibility of adult life. These views make it difficult for many today, including folks in church pews, to see what earlier generations thought crystal clear: that marriage unites a man and a woman.
September 22nd, 2011 | 9:45 am
It is interesting that a significant number of those writing against same-sex marriage seem to me to be saying something like, “What else did you expect to follow, once heterosexual morality and heterosexual marriage had reached their current pitiable state?”
September 22nd, 2011 | 11:18 am
“There are no” legally “significant moral or cultural differences between homosexual couples and heterosexual couples” is the position I’ve seen taken, actually.
Not herded there by legal fences?
September 22nd, 2011 | 3:13 pm
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September 22nd, 2011 | 6:21 pm
Indeed, Mr. Nickol. But, then, we can’t say we weren’t warned:
“[T]he modern situation permits and demands a new sexual morality [because] the old taboos served some real purpose in helping to preserve the species, but contraceptives have modified this and we can now abandon many of the taboos. . . . [Sexual desire] being instinctive, is to be gratified whenever it does not conflict with the preservation of the species.”
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.
September 22nd, 2011 | 6:26 pm
Please describe what you think the appropriate role of women should be and support your argument with evidence.
September 22nd, 2011 | 6:44 pm
I grew up in the 70′s, so when I hear talk of the “golden days,” I can help but remember that, in practice, gender roles manifested in unjust attitudes and treatment. One minor (and comical) but illustrative example – Coffee Jerks: a series of 1950s/60s-era coffee commercials – http://redd.it/k2aeu
I’m quite skeptical that you can meld the best of both worlds (1950s conservative culture and modern civil libertarian culture). So for those who want to “repair” gender roles, I’d like to know what they want changed and how do they want it implemented?
September 22nd, 2011 | 7:57 pm
“There are no” legally “significant moral or cultural differences between homosexual couples and heterosexual couples” is the position I’ve seen taken, actually.
This is true, as long as homosexual couples understand that being homosexual does not give them any special privileges or rights.
Unfortunately, without special privileges or rights, their union is doomed to be childless.
Are you okay with that?
September 22nd, 2011 | 8:07 pm
So for those who want to “repair” gender roles, I’d like to know what they want changed and how do they want it implemented?
Marriage is a contract that protects both men and women – and above all protects the child – from the vulnerabilities unique to each role in the reproductive process.
Women, because they become vulnerable through the process of reproduction, are particularly at risk of being exploited, abandoned, left with a child but inadequate resources and support. Marriage protects women against the problems raised by this vulnerability by legally, socially, and emotionally tying the child to both the father and to the father’s family. In exchange for granting the father the rights and protections that a man (and his family) gains through marriage, the woman gains the right to expect a certain level of support.
Men also gain from the marriage contract. Outside of marriage, a man’s relationship with his child(ren) is completely vulnerable to the woman, who has a great deal of “soft power” (social, emotional, etc. – power over the child, power to influence community opinions, etc.)
A child born outside of wedlock always indicates a problem. It can’t be guaranteed that a child born in wedlock is born into a healthy family, but it can be reliably inferred that a child born out of wedlock is born into an unhealthy family – that is, a family with a dysfunction.
So it is rational for paternal family members to be cautious about the child (bastardy is shunned for very practical reasons – since the father not marrying the mother is a very reliable indicator that something is wrong with the relationship, and therefore the child cannot be counted as a loyal or reliable member of the family unit).
It’s also rational for the community to eye with suspicion the man who is claimed as father to a child out of wedlock.
We simply have no way of knowing which family member is untrustworthy and unreliable – or whether both of them are. We just know that there’s a problem.
But ultimately the biggest problem with lack of the marriage contract is that a child born out of wedlock is not only vulnerable, but is likely to be abandoned – whether abandoned by just one parent, and raised in a broken family, or abandoned by both parents, and given or sold to strangers as an unwanted child (a charity case, viewed by our culture as less legitimate and less entitled morally to what wanted children are entitled to), neither outcome is good for children.
The best possible outcome for children is to be born into an intact, solid, cohesive family – which is only possible when the child’s mother and father are legally bound to each other in a solid and legally binding marital contract.
September 22nd, 2011 | 8:48 pm
Blake,
Your concern to protect marriage is noted, but I fail to see how either of your comments addresses changing gender roles – specifically, in this remark by Joe Carter:
“We largely think of traditional gender roles as unjust and suspect, leading us to be anxious and ambivalent about the male–female difference . . . nearly all of us subordinate our private traditionalism to a powerful public ideology of gender equality in which maleness and femaleness are to have no social, cultural, or political significance.”
September 22nd, 2011 | 8:51 pm
R.R. Reno wrote: “The promises that so engage the imagination of one generation are quite often broken for the next, especially if they are promises humanity and human society cannot meet. The end of sexual repression was one of those false promises. The same holds for the androgyny implied in absolute gender equality and the sterile, futureless freedom that comes from a contraceptive mentality.”
Quite a fine conclusion to an equally fine summary of recent history; perhaps the promise was not false but exaggerated. Exaggerated to a point just short of arrogance as in, for instance, believing we can know the communication (or lack thereof) between men and women by watching scripted advertisements performed by actors and actresses. Of course, I may have just reached a point short of arrogance via interpretation of a sentence.
May those Park Avenue apartments and suburban homes be filled with mothers and children!
September 22nd, 2011 | 9:51 pm
Blake, you haven’t describe what you want changed about current gender roles? What do women get to do? What are we prohibited from doing?
September 23rd, 2011 | 3:55 am
Blake is right. Marriage unites the couple in an indivisible parental alliance.
It is no accident that two of the five traditional marriage vows relate to children explicity and, it could be argued, the other three do so implicitly.
September 23rd, 2011 | 9:01 am
Your concern to protect marriage is noted, but I fail to see how either of your comments addresses changing gender roles
Gender roles are what they are. They can’t be changed.
We tried. Everyone believed – and taught, and was taught – that gender is a “social construct”, and people acting in good faith forced themselves, their mates, and their children to play along with this giant social experiment.
I don’t know how old you are, but I’m old enough to remember those men carrying their purses in the 1970s. Men carrying purses.
And men were exhorted to be more “sensitive” (meaning feminine), but guess what? Men found that being “sensitive” (meaning feminine) didn’t even earn them the respect of the women who were nagging them to be more fem – err, sensitive.
Children were raised with deliberately ambiguous gender identity information. In fact, in schools, children and college students were both taught – as if it were fact – that gender is a “social construct”. And they were taught heartwarming (fictional) stories about the worlds of opportunity that would open up for the children who were raised without any gender role at all. “By the time it matters, we’ll be old enough to see for ourselves what s/he is”, ran the punch line on one such anecdote.
And women were told a whole LOT of things that turned out to be so very not true. (Socioeconomically, the poorer you are, the more ridiculous feminism looks; those with trust funds have more leeway to be “eccentric” – and you’ll notice all the big name feminists went to top notch colleges, paid for by daddy…women who live in the real world figured it out in time to vote for Reagan.)
I don’t know where you were, but I remember all of this, right down to that hilarious first airing of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” with that oh so “progressive” guy with the dress uniform – as in, dress with a skirt. WHOOPS! That didn’t go over quite the way it was expected to, now, did it?
The question isn’t whether gender roles will change. It’s been tried and tested, and it turns out that not only are men and women happier when they accept what they are, but they’re more effective at the things men and women do, too.
The question is just this: how long will we put up with the men and women behaving like children, before we get tired of their games and it’s time for them to grow up?
September 23rd, 2011 | 9:39 am
Blake –
Can a mother give up her child for adoption? Is that a morally permissible choice?
On another note…
Wait – “no way of knowing”? How do you figure out if someone’s trustworthy or not when courting? Or when starting a business? Or anything?
Even if we grant that ‘bastardy’ is associated with problems… it’s, er, far from determinative, and prone to plenty of “false positives” when it comes to assessing the trustworthiness of the children.
Wait… should all ‘bastards’ be forbidden from becoming police officers or being passengers on airplanes?
September 23rd, 2011 | 9:59 am
Blake, you haven’t describe what you want changed about current gender roles? What do women get to do? What are we prohibited from doing?
That depends on whether what you want to do requires me to (a) tolerate something I find intolerable, (b) go along with lies or bullying in the name of Political Correctness, (c) lose my own freedoms of belief, association, speech, etc., and/or (d) pay for it.
September 23rd, 2011 | 10:33 am
you can make all kinds of intellectual discussions about the direction of this culture, but to a believer it is about spirit, spirit of christ. homosexuals live the fullness of god’s love in their lives and marriages in the same way as do heterosexuals. this fact mandates, that homosexuals are absolutely equal to heterosexuals. therefore all energy that affirms this equality is a positive for this world.
those who would try to elevate physicalities over what is of spirit, only create cultural burdens.
September 23rd, 2011 | 10:37 am
Anyone interested, Gary Chartier has very good article defending SSM from Natural Law theory: “Natural Law, Same-Sex Marriage, and the Politics of Virtue”, UCLA Law Review 48.6 (Aug. 2001): 1593-1632.
September 23rd, 2011 | 10:54 am
Blake:
What does explaining your position on women gender roles in an internet forum require (a), (b) (c) and (d)?
September 23rd, 2011 | 10:55 am
I meant, How…explaining your position on women gender roles in an internet forum require (a), (b) (c) and (d)?
September 23rd, 2011 | 12:02 pm
” Fear of the presumed dangers of sexual repression”
historical cultural growth has not been about fear of repressions, but about finding life in living new freedoms and new understandings.
September 23rd, 2011 | 1:50 pm
I hesitate to say this on a site dedicated to a religious purpose, but eventually the mass of citizens will be persuaded by the science more than by religious conviction that it supports. An increasing body of scientific research reveals that men and women have differences in their hormonal make-up, the ways their brains are wired, that make it clear that society should support gender complementarity in child-rearing. For example, when women are pregnant, the progesterone and other hormones that give them special attitudes and capabilities for taking care of infants are increased many times over. (see Louann Brizendine on this and related subjects.)
September 23rd, 2011 | 1:53 pm
Blake,
Are you seriously suggesting that gender roles are a matter of carrying versus not carrying purses and wearing skirts and dresses versus wearing pants?
September 23rd, 2011 | 2:53 pm
Blake,
Lacking specifics, I can only guess what it is you envision — gender roles typical of the 1950′s: women stay at home to cook, clean, and raise children; they wear dresses and are subservient to their husbands; the few who are employed work as secretaries, teachers, and the like, for most positions for strictly for men.
Or did you have something else in mind?
September 23rd, 2011 | 3:34 pm
Unfortunately, without special privileges or rights, their union is doomed to be childless.
Can a mother give up her child for adoption? Is that a morally permissible choice?
The reason we allow mothers to give away their children is because there is evidence that it is better for the child to be raised by strangers than by a mother who is not willing and able to care for the child.
However, adoption’s legitimacy draws its power from it being a process that is in its essence about finding a home for children in need. When adoption stops being about that – when it stops being a procedure that is at its essence a procedure that is about compassion for the child, and doing what is best for the child – it stops being adoption and starts being something else.
So the woman who did not intend to get pregnant, and gives the baby up for adoption, is within her rights. But the woman who deliberately gets pregnant with the intention of making a child for money – that is, she intends to swap her “share” or “interest” in the child for money or for some other consideration – that woman should be arrested for trafficking, as should those who intend to buy the child, and those who facilitate the transaction.
September 23rd, 2011 | 3:37 pm
Blake,
Are you seriously suggesting that gender roles are a matter of carrying versus not carrying purses and wearing skirts and dresses versus wearing pants?
The people who are unhappy with gender roles today are people who do not want the responsibilities or obligations that go with who and what they are.
Feminism is particularly bad about wanting to pick and choose between various ‘benefits’ granted to men or women – without any of the responsibilities that go with either set of obligations.
September 23rd, 2011 | 3:41 pm
I meant, How…explaining your position on women gender roles in an internet forum require (a), (b) (c) and (d)?
I don’t have a “position” on women gender roles.
You’re free to do what you want until your freedom and your rights comes into contact with someone else’s freedom and rights.
At that point – when what you want comes into conflict with the reality that there are other people in this world, and they have rights too – whose rights should prevail should be determined according to the ordinary rules of ethics and law.
Ideally, genuine need will be preferred over mere desire, what is fundamental will be preferred over what is superficial, and what is important will be preferred over what is frivolous.
Today “identity politics” have skewed this basic relationship – so that people with special “identities” feel perfectly comfortable asking other people to give up things that are necessarily, fundamental, and important so that they can have what they desire, however superficial or frivolous.
I simply don’t recognize that being a {category name} entitles anyone to special treatment.
September 23rd, 2011 | 3:45 pm
homosexuals live the fullness of god’s love in their lives and marriages in the same way as do heterosexuals.
Marriage is about more than merely loving someone.
It is also about founding a family. And gays do not do that with God’s blessing, because God warns us not to covet what is our neighbor’s.
The bonds of family are gifts from God, not to be broken frivolously. Children have a God-given right to a relationship with both their parents, and every parent has an obligation to honor, respect, and care for their child’s other parent, whether they love and desire that parent or not.
Gays seeking genuine equality – as opposed to a mere blank check to use other people in dishonest fantasies – need to work around what is real and what is important. “Marriage” for gays ought to start with the fundamental recognition that any special benefits they are entitled to are based not on the belief that families can be rearranged at whim – they can’t; they are built of living people who suffer when you destroy the networks they are born into.
Therefore, what a gay person needs is not the right to do destructive things, but the right to recognition that the person they love – their life partner – and the person they make a child with – their coparent – cannot be the same person, and therefore the benefits, subsidies, and blessings need to be distributed appropriately rather than concentrated all in one person.
September 23rd, 2011 | 4:14 pm
“Today “identity politics” have skewed this basic relationship – so that people with special “identities” feel perfectly comfortable asking other people to give up things that are necessarily, fundamental, and important so that they can have what they desire, however superficial or frivolous.”
Can you give me examples of this (keeping in mind your own initial statement “You’re free to do what you want until your freedom and your rights comes into contact with someone else’s FREEDOM and RIGHTS”.)?
September 23rd, 2011 | 4:15 pm
Blake,
“I don’t have a “position” on women gender roles. You’re free to do what you want until your freedom and your rights comes into contact with someone else’s freedom and rights.”
You seem to match Joe Carter’s example, of which he is critical:
“nearly all of us subordinate our private traditionalism to a powerful public ideology of gender equality in which maleness and femaleness are to have no social, cultural, or political significance.”
So you would seem to be a part of the problem. You also state:
Gender roles are what they are. They can’t be changed … The people who are unhappy with gender roles today are people who do not want the responsibilities or obligations that go with who and what they are.
You certainly seem to think there are definitive roles for men that differ from women, but don’t seem capable of explaining what those roles are outside of pregnancy and adoption and how it relates to marriage.
For you, perhaps, that is the sum total of gender roles — nothing more, nothing less — but that’s a much more narrow definition then what is commonly meant by “gender roles”.
September 23rd, 2011 | 4:28 pm
Blake –
Now, before, you said, “Unfortunately, without special privileges or rights, [a same-sex] union is doomed to be childless.”
Just so I’m clear, you’re saying that the only way a same-sex couple could adopt a child is if they paid a woman to carry one? There’s zero chance of a woman simply deciding that that particular couple was the best available to raise her child?
September 23rd, 2011 | 6:01 pm
BTW it is an interesting thing to me, that we have no problem condemning the selfishness, laziness, and irresponsibility of pet owners who let their dogs run around unspayed – filling the shelters with animals that will end up put to sleep.
How come we do not hold people similarly to account when out of an even greater selfishness and irresponsibility, they create human babies they do not want and are not prepared to deal with?
No matter which solution a woman chooses to “fix” the problem she has created, there is no choice that actually “fixes” it.
Abortion involves literally taking the life of an innocent in payment for her own redemption. Adoption is often the best solution, but “good” is relative – it may be “better” than the alternative, but there’s ample evidence to challenge the myth that adoption is “just as good”. If the woman keeps the child herself, the child is probably going to grow up in not only a broken family, but in poverty as well.
There is no solution she can choose that offsets the harm she did in treating the creation of life so casually, as if one of life’s most sacred acts were no different from eating or excreting – the creation of a new life not viewed as miraculous but merely as an unwanted byproduct of a woman with appetites getting her fill.
September 24th, 2011 | 2:12 am
Just so I’m clear, you’re saying that the only way a same-sex couple could adopt a child is if they paid a woman to carry one?
No. The other option is if we changed the rules of adoption, so that the child’s well-being is a lower priority than the parents’ “rights”.
The problem with this is that when a child cannot be raised by its parents, the state and the judge responsible with deciding that child’s fate act in the role of the child’s guardian. And guardianship has obligations as well as privileges.
Imagine you got sick and couldn’t look after your affairs, and so had to have a guardian making decisions on your behalf. How would you feel about it if your guardians weren’t prioritizing your well-being in their decisions?
There is no way that gays can found a family that does not, one way or another, sacrifice at least the child’s well-being, since the entire premise of same sex marriage is predicated on pretending there is no loss involved when a child has to grow up without a mother or father – as if genders were interchangeable and the experience of having a “second father” were somehow the same as the experience of having a mother.
But they’re not. Having a mother relationship is different in kind – and asking a child to trade off the experience of having a mother so that gays can pretend there’s no difference between their family vs. a real family (when that is not actually true) is exactly the sort of thing I mean when I speak of Political Correctness making people feel very comfortable in demanding that some people (in this case children) give up important things (in this case one of life’s most precious and valued relationships, an essential part of one’s personal formation), in exchange for something trivial (gays do not have any real or sincere need to “pass” for procreative, so all they’re really gaining by the lie are a few cheap political perks).
Why is it that gays suppose that their “right to not live a lie” and their right to an “intact identity” and their right to “not be deprived of valuable relationships” and their right to “not be treated differently than other people in similar situations” – and all the other statements that cumulatively are the case in favor of gay marriage – should not also apply equally to their own children?
September 24th, 2011 | 11:50 am
This is the biblical pattern for a husband and wife:
September 24th, 2011 | 11:55 am
A wife who wishes to strive for the ideal should follow this model:
September 24th, 2011 | 11:57 am
This is what all men should desire in a family:
September 24th, 2011 | 12:01 pm
“And what was the one God seeking [from our marriages]? Godly offspring.”
September 25th, 2011 | 1:48 pm
John r
My copy of the Civil Code say that “Spouses owe each other respect, fidelity, support and assistance.” “Love” is neither a requirement, nor a duty.
The next article provides ” Spouses are responsible together for the material and moral guidance of the family. They shall provide for the education of the children and shall prepare their future,” which suggest marriage is orientated to the founding of a family.
These two are obviously linked to the rule that “The child conceived or born in marriage has the husband for its father,” resting, as it does on the obligation of fidelity between spouses and reflecting the commitment made by the husband during the celebration of marriage, to raise the couple’s children.
September 26th, 2011 | 8:42 am
Blake –
Blake, you’ve claimed that before – to paraphrase, ‘since studies show that a married (heterosexual) couple is optimal, it’s impossible to allow adoption to any others’. (Correct me if I got that wrong.)
But the actual difference in the real world doesn’t support that. On average, a married man and woman may well be better than a single parent, etc. – but averages aren’t the only part of the story. It’s entirely possible for a particular heterosexual couple to be significantly worse than even a particularly bad heterosexual couple.
I mean, if a couple gets divorced, we don’t take the children away from them and give them to a married foster couple. The bonds between parents and children outweigh the issue of divorce in the vast majority of cases.
Not only that, but the law gives parents enormous leeway in determining what’s best for their children. Unless something can be shown to pretty much guarantee harm, parents are presumptively allowed to do it. (And sometimes it goes beyond that – e.g. refusing vital medical treatment isn’t even necessarily a problem.)
September 26th, 2011 | 9:39 am
Ray Ingles
“Unless something can be shown to pretty much guarantee harm, parents are presumptively allowed to do it. (And sometimes it goes beyond that – e.g. refusing vital medical treatment isn’t even necessarily a problem.)”
In a medical emergency, it takes one telephone call from a paramedic or police officer to the Parquet to have the parental authority of a Jehovah’s Witness or a Christian Scientist parent suspended. In fact, I think that knowing this will happen fortifies the parents in what they know will be futile opposition to medical treatment for their children.
September 26th, 2011 | 11:48 am
“Unless something can be shown to pretty much guarantee harm, parents are presumptively allowed to do it. (And sometimes it goes beyond that – e.g. refusing vital medical treatment isn’t even necessarily a problem.)”
But gays can’t become parents without violating the “child’s best interest” standard in the first place.
When a child can’t be raised by his real parents, the law recognizes that children need and deserve for the state to act as guardian in assigning new guardians.
These aren’t commodities for sale, and every time a judge prioritizes the “rights” of a couple to “have” that child over the right of the child to be granted a good home, the child’s right to be free from exploitation is violated.
Really, gays would be better off if they just did right by their kids from the start. There’s no reason for why the kids need to be deprived of the chance to have a mother-relationship or father-relationship, and sooner or later that selfishness – that using the kid so blatantly, and for such petty justifications – is going to come back and bite them.
Twenty years from now, how are gay couples going to explain why they “had” to raise the kid with “two daddies” when SOME kids with gay parents get to have loving, good parents who worked out a co-parenting arrangement so that the child’s needs were first and foremost?
Perhaps more importantly: how can gays whine about people not respecting their basic rights, then take those exact same things of value from their own kids?
The double standard is breathtaking – gay rights advocates say “Well, the law must be changed, because this is intolerable, this is a crime” out of one side of their mouths, then justify doing unto their own children exactly what they find “intolerable” and “criminal” when it is done to them*, and that’s justifiable because a judge said I could be his parent, and the law says parents can do whatever they want to their kid.
I tell you what: I’ll accept your argument that it’s okay to deprive your kid of things that are classed as valuable and even irreplaceable for other kids, “until and unless solid proof of guaranteed harm” is produced – to your standard, and recognizing that your goal-posts will keep shifting every time more proof is produced, and recognizing that if I even attempt to prove the case, it will be taken as proof that I hate gay people –
IF
you will in turn agree to the same: you agree that it’s okay to deprive gays of things that are classed as valuable and even irreplaceable for other people, “until and unless solid proof of guaranteed harm” is produced – to my standard, and recognizing that I reserve the right to move the goal-posts every time more proof is produced, and recognizing that if you even attempt to prove the case, it will be taken as proof that you hate children.
And kick puppy dogs.
September 26th, 2011 | 11:53 am
On average, a married man and woman may well be better than a single parent, etc. – but averages aren’t the only part of the story.
Adoption is supposed to be about the needs of the child.
Since co-parenting is an option, there is no reason why anyone who wants a child should not be expected to provide the child with an intact family – a mother and a father.
Gays want us to pretend that mothers and fathers are interchangeable, but that’s a lie – a lie whose only motive is to justify robbing a child.
September 26th, 2011 | 12:02 pm
“Today “identity politics” have skewed this basic relationship – so that people with special “identities” feel perfectly comfortable asking other people to give up things that are necessarily, fundamental, and important so that they can have what they desire, however superficial or frivolous.”
Can you give me examples of this (keeping in mind your own initial statement “You’re free to do what you want until your freedom and your rights comes into contact with someone else’s FREEDOM and RIGHTS”.)?
Almost any controversy in the so-called “culture wars” – but in order to ‘see’ it, you have to stretch your mind real big and imagine that conservatives, Christians, babies and children, and other nonpersons are actually persons with rights equal to yours.
September 26th, 2011 | 2:32 pm
Blake –
So far, so good.
And here we go off the rails. There’s no chance that one or more of the biological parents might be unfit, or less fit than the couple in question? Every single gay couple must ipso facto not provide “a good home”?
Universally? In all cases?
September 26th, 2011 | 2:42 pm
Michael PS –
Um, I did say “Unless something can be shown to pretty much guarantee harm”, did I not?
Besides, the law in the U.S. is rather less settled: http://www.religioustolerance.org/medical1.htm
September 26th, 2011 | 3:11 pm
And here we go off the rails. There’s no chance that one or more of the biological parents might be unfit, or less fit than the couple in question? Every single gay couple must ipso facto not provide “a good home”?
The act of forcing a child to pretend that having a home with “two mommies” or “two daddies” in it is problematic because:
1. it is untrue – the parents are quite literally forcing the child to lie for them.
2. it prioritizes the needs of parents at the expense of the needs and well-being of the child.
3. it reverses the roles of who takes care of whom – the child is actually forced to take responsibility for the adult’s emotional needs, while the adult fails to take responsibility for the child’s emotional needs.
4. it can only succeed if the child is pressured into suppressing the sorts of feelings that motherless or fatherless children normally experience, which in turn requires heightened awareness of the parents’ emotional needs.
These factors taken cumulatively constitutes evidence of a known form of abuse/neglect called “parentification”.
Gays like to brag that there are studies demonstrating that the children of gays are “more mature” than their peers – if this is true, such studies would constitute powerful support for the argument that these children are significantly parentified.
Parentification got its name from the fact that, the more the parents act like children, the more the children are forced into premature maturity, or pseudo-adulthood.
Lost Childhoods: The Plight Of The Parentified Child
Burdened Children: Theory, Research, and Treatment of Parentification
http://www.amazon.com/Implications-Parent-Child-Dissolution-Developmental-Psychopathology/dp/078903090X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1317063362&sr=8-3
September 26th, 2011 | 3:13 pm
Whoops that last link came out wrong:
Implications of Parent-Child Boundary Dissolution for Developmental Psychopathology: Who Is the Parent And Who Is the Child?
Regarding studies – I think we need fewer studies comparing the grade point averages or social lives of children of gay parents (how on EARTH are some of these questions relevant to anything?), and more studies examining questions such as:
– whether these children feel shame or guilt with regards to their feelings about their absent parents
– whether they are exposed to pressure from their parents, the media, or the “gay community”
– how comfortable they feel in talking about feelings that might contradict their parents’ inappropriate expectations of them.
However, it can be demonstrated without such studies that these kids are put into a very awkward and uncomfortable position – and there are definite expectations about how they “would” or “ought to” feel and act.
That is itself problematic: it is not normal or natural to expect a child to be happy in a situation that involves a significant loss.
September 26th, 2011 | 6:17 pm
The act of forcing a child to pretend that having a home with “two mommies” or “two daddies” in it is problematic because:
found another typo: was supposed to read “the act of forcing a child to pretend that having a home with “two mommies or two daddies” is just as good as
It probably doesn’t make much sense without that part.
Because the whole point of the sentence is that it is pure fantasy – or maybe a better word would be “projection” – to assume that, from a child’s point of view, having gay fathers with an agenda and a heavy-duty set of expectations is just as good if not better than having a normal intact family.
September 26th, 2011 | 6:49 pm
a normal intact family
Blake,
I don’t believe an intact family is “normal.” Given that 41% of children are born out of wedlock, and 50% of marriages end in divorce, a mother and a father, legally married, who raise all their biological children from birth to age 18 is the exception, rather than the rule. This would be true even if there were no gay people. By the way, about a third of adoptions from foster care are by single individuals (usually single women). Listening to you, one would think that the only children who don’t have a live-in mother and father who are their biological parents are children adopted by same-sex couples. This is far from the truth.
September 27th, 2011 | 9:05 am
Blake –
That sentence not grammatical missing words. Please fill them in and we can evaluate the rest of your comment.
September 27th, 2011 | 3:38 pm
I don’t believe an intact family is “normal.” Given that 41% of children are born out of wedlock, and 50% of marriages end in divorce, a mother and a father, legally married, who raise all their biological children from birth to age 18 is the exception, rather than the rule
Consider that a snapshot of “post sexual revolution America”.
Now compare it to all cultures in the world, across all of history, and see if you notice any patterns re: the well-being or neglect of children.
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