Remember the the New York Times piece about young people and social conservatism that Matthew Schmitz wrote about here yesterday? On The Corner, Michael J. New weighs in and mentions the (seeming) paradox that young people are less supportive of abortion but more supportive of gay marriage than their elders. He puts his finger on what I think explains the approval gap: “Unlike same-sex marriage, there is a clear, suffering victim in abortion.”
But it’s a little more complex than this. Pro-choice groups agree that there’s a clear, suffering victim in abortion: the woman. They mention not the women who are married and could afford to bear and raise a child, but the women who are young, poor, single, unhealthy, or raped. (And obviously these women do suffer — I’m not denying the difficulty and pain of their situations.) If they mention the unborn baby at all, it is to dismiss its status as a human being deserving of protection. So abortion is a situation involving a victim; however, the victim is never the child, only the mother. The pro-life movement has gained public approval in part by drawing attention to the baby as another human being who (along with the mother!) deserves our protection and concern. The mother may be a victim, but so is the child.
With same-sex marriage, on the other hand, most of the victims (from society’s perspective) are theoretical. Who are they? First, the people who would be harmed if changing the institution of marriage turns out to undermine it. As the libertarian blogger Megan McArdle once pointed out, that possibility is more likely than it sounds: With the advent of no-fault divorce and the extension of welfare benefits to unmarried mothers, the late twentieth century demonstrated that marriage is both more important and more fragile than reformers had thought. The other (mostly theoretical) victims are the children, adopted or otherwise, of gay and lesbian couples, who may face the less than ideal situation of lacking parents of both sexes. Since these theoretical victims, if they’re remembered at all, are counterbalanced in young people’s minds by the real victims of historic anti-gay violence and by today’s gays and lesbians who would like to get married, same-sex marriage seems to be a no-brainer.
August 10th, 2012 | 4:02 pm
Let me just add that the pro-life argument is that there are two victims of abortion, the aborted baby and the mother, who suffers from having the abortion. (And, according to a recent post, often the father who decides, with his wife or girlfriend, to have his baby aborted.)
August 10th, 2012 | 4:03 pm
Megan McArdle pointed out that no-fault divorce encouraged divorce, and extension of welfare benefits to unmarried mothers brought more unmarried mothers.
But I never got the chance to ask her how expanding marriage rights would lead to a decrease in marriages.
August 10th, 2012 | 4:15 pm
Ray, did you read Megan McArdle’s whole post? Here’s her imagined back-and-forth on exactly that question (of how same-sex marriage could possibly lead to a decrease in marriages):
August 10th, 2012 | 4:48 pm
By changing the explicitly gendered nature of marriage we might be accidentally cutting away something that turns out to be a crucial underpinning.
The irony, it seems to me, is that advocates of same-sex marriage are pushing for marriage in an age when marriage itself seems to be waning. They are, in effect, making a vote of confidence in marriage. They buy into the concept, very heavily promoted by our culture (but strangely, with less and less success), that marriage is “the thing to do.” It’s now gay people and the better educated, more affluent who seem to value marriage. I think it is true for gay people who want same-sex marriage that they have a belief in marriage that is waning among many others. Gays today grew up in a culture where, at the end of the story, the prince marries the pretty girl and they live happily ever after. The prince and the girl don’t cohabit or don’t form a civil union, or the prince doesn’t add the girl to his harem. They marry, because that is what people do who want to live happily ever after together. And this is seen by many as a threat to marriage.
To which, again, the other side replies “That’s ridiculous! I would never change my willingness to get married based on whether or not gay people were getting married!”
It strikes me that this should be rather convincing to those who believe in the naturalness of heterosexual marriage. Should we really expect people to say, “True, for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. But ewww! Now that gay men and lesbians can get married, that just doesn’t apply any more!” How integral to the heterosexual human psyche is conjugal marriage if the sight of same-sex couples becoming legally married can spoil it all?
August 10th, 2012 | 5:16 pm
Since these theoretical victims, if they’re remembered at all, are counterbalanced in young people’s minds by the real victims of historic anti-gay violence and by today’s gays and lesbians who would like to get married, same-sex marriage seems to be a no-brainer.
They actually necessary viewpoint – so that people look at the situation only through the feelings, needs, and desires of the gay person.
All other stakeholders are dealt with using various tricks.
The complaints against family are dealt with by demonizing anyone who cares about “family”. (“Everyone knows” that the only reason anyone would object to broken families is because they’re a fundamentalist Christian, which is code for “Puritanical sadist” – someone who wants you to not have any fun just because they themselves are frigid.)
And of course they pour huge resources into maintaining the idea that the “kids are all right”. They began doing this long before there was any evidence suggesting the kids might be all right; we have a generation of kids raised with the understanding that it is their filial duty to obey and defend this narrative, which was chosen for them in advance.
The good news for gay rights activists is that it’s been very successful.
The bad news is that it relies on the idea that one side is all good and nice and the other side is evil, and it relies on mischaracterization and misrepresentations to sustain that myth – thus creating the sort of illusion that (a) can shatter and (b) has the potential for backlash. People don’t like to be manipulated, especially with deceit, and I’ve met more than one person (not counting myself) who feels “used” by the way gay rights advocates “played” them.
August 10th, 2012 | 5:18 pm
The real civil rights movement is just starting to come into focus.
Children born via IVF and other children of the sexual revolution are starting to say, out loud, various sentiments that contradict the narrative.
The sexual revolution did indeed have victims, and still does.
August 10th, 2012 | 5:28 pm
Anna – You miss my point. Every single example McArdle pointed out involved loosening a restriction or reducing a disincentive on something (income tax, divorce, and unwed motherhood). And the result of those was… more of whatever had been discouraged.
Then she tries to apply that to the case of same-sex marriage. But she never explains how “some high school dropout in Tuscaloosa” will be disincentivized by allowing same-sex marriage. Again, the claim is that extending marriage rights to more people will encourage less marriage, but I don’t see an explanation – or even a hypothesis – as to mechanism.
The closest she comes is to claiming that allowing gays to marry will reduce the gender roles in straight marriages. Exactly how would it do that? (Especially, how would it do that to any greater extent than existing social forces are already doing that?)
Remove a restraint on income tax, get more income tax. OK, I see that. Allow divorce, get more divorce. That follows. Expand welfare benefits for unwed motherhood, get more unwed mothers. I can see how those proceed. Increase wage taxes, discourage people from working more hours. Sure, there’s a connection there – the work is less economically rewarding now.
Extend marriage to new groups, make existing groups less likely to marry? Sorry, not following that. Can you help me out?
August 11th, 2012 | 12:04 am
By expanding the concept of marriage to include gay marriage you necessarily have to downplay biological pairing. In fact you have to make biological pairing a nonessential aspect of the concept of marriage. This of course cuts off the biological nexus to children in the current depleted concept of marriage. How can that not result in suffering of children, especially in the long run, suffering far more extensive than the recognition of difference afflicts on gays. As we know from the Cinderella effect, abuse of children is much more likely under nonbiological care-giving. Why should we ignore this and blindly apply a sacralized principle of equality to things which are not equal? To write gays into marriage you have to write children out of the heart of marriage. Sterile couples do not mitigate this because they are the exception and not the rule and marriage would not exist as a social institution of much importance without children.
August 11th, 2012 | 7:56 am
Ray,
Unusual for you, you seem to miss your assumption, that “gay marriage” is indeed marriage. That question is the crux of the whole disagreement, so it doesn’t make for a good assumption. Try this: if marriage can mean whatever anyone wants it to mean, then it doesn’t really mean anything. Note the if and see the other side of your assumption.
August 11th, 2012 | 8:59 am
Same-sex marriage only makes sense in an age when marriage itself no longer makes sense. Same-sex marriage only makes sense to those for whom a life-long committment that is open to children is an alien or undesirable goal. This is why you see the odd phenomenon of gays wanting to marry, but hetersexuals not wanting to marry. As a wag somewhere remarked, the only people in Europe these days who are marrying are rich people, Muslims and gays.
August 11th, 2012 | 11:12 am
The other (mostly theoretical) victims are the children, adopted or otherwise, of gay and lesbian couples, who may face the less than ideal situation of lacking parents of both sexes.
I am trying to think of any other instances in which people of good will would attempt to prevent people of certain classes from marrying because of the “theoretical victimhood” of the children that they might have or adopt.
For example, [b]lack husband/white wife marriages are twice as likely to divorce as white/white marriages, and Asian husband/white wife marriages are about 60% more likely to divorce as white/white marriages. Also, [w]hen it comes to engaging in risky and anti- social adolescent behavior, however, mixed race adolescents are stark outliers compared to both blacks and whites. It seems to me one might make a very good case, free of racial prejudice, that for the good of the potential children (“potential victims”) black men and white women should not be permitted to marry. I think a compassionate person would acknowledge that if a black man and a white woman fell in love and wanted to get married, and if they had no intention of having or adopting children, it would be sad that they could not get married. But it would be unreasonable and intrusive to rule that they could not marry as long as they did not have or adopt children, and consequently, it simply made sense to prohibit all black men and white women from marrying each other. Of course, there would be nothing in the law to prevent black men and white women from cohabiting and having children. But still, why should the state officially sanction the marriage of black men and white women when their children would be at risk? This would be “discrimination” of a sort, but we were reminded by a recent On the Square post that we must oppose only unjust discrimination, not all discrimination.
Also, it is the case that people who had been in mixed-religion marriages were three times more likely to be divorced or separated than those who were in same-religion marriages. We all agree that divorce is devastating to children. Should there be some cutoff point where the statistically predictable likelihood of an interfaith couple divorcing is so high that their children (if any) will be “potential victims”?
It should be noted that while some oppose same-sex marriage for the good of potential children, when it comes to marriages where there actually are children, no one suggests that divorce should be prohibited on the grounds that intact marriages are in the best interests of the children. True, the courts may determine such issues as custody based on the best interests of the children, but in the case of a couple with children who want to divorce, what becomes of the right of the children to live in an intact family? No-fault divorce spread across the fifty states while study after study continued to show the negative effects of divorce on children.
Of course, there are many reasons one might oppose same-sex marriage. But those who oppose it on the grounds that a same-sex couple who marries might have one or two or more children, and those children might be found by a sociological study somewhere down the road to score less well than average on various outcomes, seem to be applying a standard in the case of same-sex marriage that is applied nowhere else. And this is true even though we have solid data about many other marital situations that do put potential children at a disadvantage, while it is acknowledged that the Regnerus study does not provide sufficient information to predict a negative outcome for children of intact same-sex marriages.
August 11th, 2012 | 5:32 pm
Try this: if marriage can mean whatever anyone wants it to mean, then it doesn’t really mean anything.
Mike Melendez,
But no one is claiming marriage can mean whatever anyone wants it to mean. This is by now a familiar point, but I’ll make it again anyway. Robert George’s What Is Marriage defines marriage as follows:
But (legal) marriage isn’t permanent in the United States or any other country in the world save two. I think you say, “If it’s not indissoluble, it’s not marriage,” just as easily as you can say, “If it’s not an opposite-sex couple, it’s not marriage.” (As an aside, I don’t see how it can be denied that polygamous marriage is true marriage.) And yet nobody seems to say that those who approve divorce are making marriage mean anything they want it to mean.
It seems to me that the Catholic Church, although it has resisted divorce laws, has never claimed that changes to civil marriage laws can “redefine marriage.” From a Catholic (I would extend that to Christian) point of view, marriage can’t be redefined. The task is not to prevent the redefinition of marriage. It is, apparently, to make civil marriage laws conform as closely as possible to the Christian idea of marriage, which they already don’t.
August 11th, 2012 | 6:08 pm
Ray (and David Nickol, since this applies to part of your second comment above) – As David points out, marriage is less and less universal, and more and more a luxury item for the upper classes. It’s not the default option anymore. If less-educated men (already the least likely to get married) — like Megan McArdle’s hypothetical guy in Tuscaloosa — conclude that marriage is something only pursued by rich people, educated people, and gays/lesbians, they may be even less inclined to pursue it themselves, which would be bad for their kids and for society. Obviously that conclusion would not be entirely rational, and many other factors have undermined marriage already, but I assume that’s roughly the mechanism that Megan McArdle meant to describe.
David Nickol- First, regarding your third comment on this thread: fair point about the double standard. Still, gay marriage/adoption guarantees a less-than-ideal situation for the child (ideal= being raised by both biological parents, less-than-ideal= lacking a parent of one sex or another, when studies show that mothers and fathers parent differently) in a way that interracial/interreligious marriages do not (because many interracial/interreligious marriages succeed). Yes, single parenthood is less than ideal, too. I’m not saying we should ban all less-than-ideal situations. I’m saying that we shouldn’t promote them or pretend that they’re equivalent to the ideal.
Regarding your second comment (Aug. 10, 4:48pm) and “those who believe in the naturalness of heterosexual marriage”: Lifelong, monogamous marriage could hardly be called “natural.” Polygamy seems to be a lot more natural. Yet just about everyone, from Slate to the Witherspoon Institute, agrees that it’s not desirable. Conservatives worry about heterosexual marriage because it’s fragile, and they don’t want to undermine it further than divorce and other factors already have.
August 11th, 2012 | 8:38 pm
David Nickol seems to take the main argument against gay marriage being that there may be negative outcomes for some children raised by gay parents compared to those raised by straight parents but that is not what I for one have primarily in mind in my opposition, though that is worth considering. I think David makes a good argument regarding how some statistics such as those for mixed race marriages are not compassionately applied as a reason for specific couples not to get married and that is worth considering. However, what I have in mind seems to me a deeper consideration and that is the very concept and understanding of marriage as it will come to be taken by the general populace as a whole, which has far more pervasive effects than the effects of gay parentage, good or bad. Already marriage to many seems to have become conceptually merely a contract for sterile sexual recreation, not a covenant of lifelong, faithful love between a man and woman opened to the fruit of the womb. If this is further entrenched, which it seems to me it is bound to be by an adjustment of the concept and working definition of marriage which eliminates biological reference [a very gnostic move] marriage will cease to be conceptually essentially open to children. This is not a consideration for which the hardships of cultural adjustment between mixed race couples is equivalent because this cuts off the far more precious biological nexus to children for the sake of a gnostic belief in limitlessness freedom. Already conceptually the relation of men to their children has been changed significantly for many by with the normalization of abortion and contraception and the notion that it is entirely the woman’s choice because it is her body. The take away for a lot of men it seems is that the if it is her choice, it is her responsibility. The blithe adoption of these gnostic, undisciplined freedoms has resulted in an epidemic of fatherlessness. The unloosening of marriage from its biological roots for the sake of sacralized democratic process over content is inevitably, it seems to me, the furthest dissolution of the institution of marriage yet, and it is most especially grievous because of the children, but not for the reasons Nickol mentioned.
August 11th, 2012 | 11:08 pm
Whenever I have discussed “gay marriage” with young people, I am first struck how little they think of it at all. Despite the media hype, it is not a priority (for or against) for them. The “live and let live” philosophy many of them espouse in response to the issue, seems to be linked to low expectations they have toward marriage itself. These are the children of divorce – another issue of justice surrendered in my youth. It should be remembered that divorce was the great cause of the late 1960s and how horribly tyrannical were the Religions who opposed its easy acceptance. People needed to be free, we were told. Now these victims of divorce want to know why they should see a marriage as sacred when parents in great numbers have left them – to pursue whatever desires move them. If personal desires trump everything, they reason, what’s the problem with “gay” desires resulting in “marriage”. Homosexual “marriage” is acceptable to the young mind due to the horrible mess we heterosexuals have made of it.
August 11th, 2012 | 11:38 pm
Hello David,
“The irony, it seems to me, is that advocates of same-sex marriage are pushing for marriage in an age when marriage itself seems to be waning. They are, in effect, making a vote of confidence in marriage. ”
Given the paucity of numbers involved – at least of gay men – both in U.S. jurisdictions which permit same-sex marriage and in European ones, allow me to suggest that many (not all, but many) gay activists are simply voting for social affirmation for their affirmation, rather than an institution they actually plan to take advantage of.
August 12th, 2012 | 7:32 am
David Alexander wrote, “By expanding the concept of marriage to include gay marriage you necessarily have to downplay biological pairing. In fact you have to make biological pairing a nonessential aspect of the concept of marriage.”
I would go further: one is, in principle, eliminating male and female as juridical categories altogether. No doubt, in the same way, the intention is to eliminate father and mother as juridical categories, to be replaced with parent.
I fancy, however, that biology will prove stubbornly resistant. In both Belgium and the Netherlands, the presumption of the husband’s paternity applies only to opposite-sex marriages. This concession to sanity is very revealing and has led to some waspish French jurists to claim that those enlightened jurisdictions, with much fanfare, have conceded the name of marriage, but not the reality to same-sex couples.
August 12th, 2012 | 9:20 am
But who here thinks that ‘gay marriage’ could ever be anything but an ‘exception’ too?
I mean, it’s generally agreed – especially here – that the oft-quoted ’10%’ figure is much too high an estimate of the proportion of homosexuals in the population. I’ve seen, say, Blake confidently propose figures of less than 2%. And then others who claim that few gays would want to get married even if it were available.
How could gay marriage be anything but a rare exception, then?
August 12th, 2012 | 9:50 am
“As a wag somewhere remarked, the only people in Europe these days who are marrying are rich people, Muslims and gays.”
This certainly does not apply to people with a homosexual problem. The numbers in Europe for SSM are very low in countries where it has been legalized. For most countries, no more than 1-3% of the population with a homosexual problem gets married. The rest shuns marriage completely.
The most fundamental problem with homosexual marriage is that it normalizes homosexuality (a psycho-social dysfunction). Another consequence is that people with a homosexuality agenda have stepped up their attacks on anyone who disagrees with their agenda.
What had first developed into an intense smear campaign of social conservatives (the bigot/hater/hate-monger rhetoric) has now began to move into the territory of committing crimes against social conservatives in the name of their “civil rights” quest. The Chick-fil-A flap that blew up in the faces of these corrupt homosexuality agenda politicians and activists is the latest best example.
Pushing for a homosexuality agenda is incompatible with democratic rule and many other of our fundamental freedoms. Pushing for homosexual marriage is but one aspect of this harmful agenda.
August 12th, 2012 | 10:11 am
“Gay marriage” will hurt marriage because it is yet another debasement of the marriage. The other “innovations” introduced, supposedly out of compassion for troubled married couples (birth control, no-fault divorce, etc.) have largely made the concept of marriage optional at best and meaningless at worst. If people can marry and divorce as often as they want, and marriage brings perks (everything to big, fun parties to cheaper health insurance benefits) then it does seem unfair not to let men/men and women/women couples marry. But if marriage really MEANT something, no one would even think of asking for this.
The “gay marriage” phenomenon is a symptom of how broken Western society is. Something universally considered a vice (at best) for all of time is now supposed to be enshrined as a normal kind of “love” and a vital part of a person’s very identity. And marriage, an institution older than all societies and all governments, as old as humanity itself, is now no more than a nice option for two people “in love,” one that they can get out of as easily as they got into it.
When people say, “how would that hurt MY marriage?” they are being deliberately obtuse. It would hurt YOUR marriage by being another step in making all marriage meaningless and requiring couples to have an almost superhuman commitment to something that no one else will consider important. Ask anyone whose spouse has left how much help he/she gets from government, neighbors, and family in making that spouse keep his/her commitment. “You can’t make someone love you” is all anyone is bound to hear.
August 12th, 2012 | 11:05 am
David Nickol seems to take the main argument against gay marriage being that there may be negative outcomes for some children raised by gay parents compared to those raised by straight parents but that is not what I for one have primarily in mind in my opposition, though that is worth considering.
David Alexander,
Actually, I am trying to keep a tight focus here on the issues raised by Anna Williams and also Alana Newman’s On the Square piece Gay Marriage and the Test-Tube Tidal Wave. (See the last paragraph of my message of August 11th, 2012 | 11:12 am above.) I am discussing only the use of sociological studies as a basis for rejecting same-sex marriage. First, I would point out that even Regnerus himself acknowledges that currently it is practically impossible to do a study of same-sex parenting, since the phenomenon of same-sex couples marrying and raising children together is new and comparatively rare. Second—and this is my main point—there is a double standard in that those who oppose same-sex marriage on the grounds that the outcomes in sociological studies for children of same-sex couples will be less desirable than for children of opposite-sex couples are not willing to put restrictions on what opposite-sex couples (and unmarried individuals) may do even in cases where the sociological data is quite strong.
We have clear evidence that being raised by single parents is “less than ideal,” and yet the Catholic adoption agencies that shut down rather than consider same-sex couples as adoptive parents placed children with single parents.
August 12th, 2012 | 11:22 am
Given the paucity of numbers involved – at least of gay men – both in U.S. jurisdictions which permit same-sex marriage and in European ones, allow me to suggest that many (not all, but many) gay activists are simply voting for social affirmation for their affirmation, rather than an institution they actually plan to take advantage of.
Richard M.,
I have no doubt that you are correct. But on the other hand, many people who would vote against same-sex marriage do not have in mind some well reasoned theory of how same-sex marriage will undermine opposite-sex marriage or deprive potential children of their rights to opposite-sex parents. They would basically be voting against homosexuality rather than same-sex marriage.
August 12th, 2012 | 3:06 pm
Still, gay marriage/adoption guarantees a less-than-ideal situation for the child (ideal= being raised by both biological parents, less-than-ideal= lacking a parent of one sex or another, when studies show that mothers and fathers parent differently) in a way that interracial/interreligious marriages do not (because many interracial/interreligious marriages succeed).
Anna Williams,
It’s important to remember that sociological studies yield statistical results. They don’t tell us which situations for raising children are “ideal.” Sociological studies don’t even tell us that individual children raised in intact marriages have better outcomes on various measurables than children who aren’t. They tell us that, on average, children raised in intact families tend to have better outcomes on certain measurables than children who are not. A given child raised by a married man and woman may turn out to be a serial killer, while another child who is not may turn out to be president of the United States.
The question, it seems to me, is how willing one is to do social engineering based on sociological studies or even religious ideas of what constitutes an “ideal” environment for raising children. (I am using social engineering to mean “management of human beings with respect to their place and function in society : applied social science,” rather than it’s newer meaning involving Internet security.) In some ways, similar questions are raised by Michael Sandel about genetic engineering in The Case Against Perfection.
While, all things being equal, one might be able to generalize and say the average adult child is better off on a collection of possible outcomes having been raised by a heterosexual married couple who remained together at least until the child reached adulthood, all things are never equal, and there are many things a sociological study can’t measure. We have largely rejected eugenics, even in many of its more benign and voluntary forms because we don’t feel we have the competence to know better than “nature.” An interesting question would be whether society as a whole would be better off if we could somehow have prevented all the out-of-wedlock births, all the divorces, all the extramarital affairs (both gay and straight) and done away with all the negative influences sociologists tell us create problems for growing children.
We in the United States (and in the West in general) have found it wiser to take a hands-of approach when it comes to making restrictions on human reproduction. Partly this is due to our tradition of personal freedom, and partly it is due, I think, to the idea that when it comes to begetting and raising children, society should not attempt to play God. So I do find it untenable to take a stand against same-sex marriage based upon the extremely limited evidence we have on same-sex couples rearing children, especially when we have much better evidence that could “justify” other groups being barred from marriage.
And in any case, as I have said before, I think opponents of same-sex marriage will seize on sociological studies that support their opposition to same-sex marriage and reject even the best of studies (should there be any) that show positive outcomes for children raised by same-sex couples. For most opponents of same-sex marriage, it is almost certainly going to be the case that a religious belief that God intended for children to be raised by their married, biological parents, and sociological studies that might tend to conflict with that idea are mere “science,” which ultimately distinguish good and evil, right and wrong.
As I said elsewhere, opponents of same-sex marriage appeal to sociological studies on a “heads I win, tails you lose” basis. A study that supports their side is good ammunition against same-sex marriage, but a study that supports the other side will always be found deficient, no matter how scientifically rigorous it is.
August 12th, 2012 | 3:09 pm
There is an excellent short piece on the Scientific American blog by Ilana Yurkiewicz titled Why Mark Regnerus’ study shouldn’t matter, even if it were the most scientifically robust study in the world: Yurkiewicz says:
August 12th, 2012 | 3:42 pm
David,
Yes, and I think I recall Regnerus demurring from applying the sociological findings in his study to the question of whether to permit gay marriage.
You wrote: “It seems to me that the Catholic Church, although it has resisted divorce laws, has never claimed that changes to civil marriage laws can ‘redefine marriage.’ From a Catholic (I would extend that to Christian) point of view, marriage can’t be redefined. The task is not to prevent the redefinition of marriage. It is, apparently, to make civil marriage laws conform as closely as possible to the Christian idea of marriage, which they already don’t.” Though not a Catholic, I think that Catholics would be concerned with the enshrinement of a definition of marriage that denies natural law realities and which suppresses the rights of children to their biological parents. False definitions of marriage can prevail to the harm of the people among which one lives. It is true though that Catholics and Christians do not regard the State as all powerful such that it could rewrite reality and define marriage according to democratic process or any other process. There is God’s thoughts and then there is man’s.
Anna writes:
“I’m not saying we should ban all less-than-ideal situations. I’m saying that we shouldn’t promote them or pretend that they’re equivalent to the ideal.”
I think Anna makes a good point here. Love can overcome dire straits but it is narcissism, not love, which institutes dire straits. Donor insemination is decadent and cruel because it is the decision of an adult to bereave a child of one of her biological parents by the very nature of her conception. The institution of donor insemination is a flagrant trodding on children’s rights to the biological mother and father and in my opinion it should be outlawed. I think that would perhaps be a way of moving back toward a broader acknowledgment of and protection of children’s rights to their biological parents. It is an instituting of dire straits for children. That we have such institutions and that they are generally unquestioned seems to me to show how unprotective and umcherishing of children we have become.
I sometimes hear people express the sentiment that its preposterous to think that allowing gays to marry will effect their own marriages, as if that were what is at stake. It is surprising to me how little it is recognized that it is perhaps most deeply about gay adults’ rights versus children’s rights, but that may be because we have a habit of ignoring children’s rights as part of the anything goes attitude of the sexual revolution. Mary Eberstadt has a great essay which is part of her book Home Alone America in which she analyzes a lot of the popular youth music, asking not only is it harmful but why does it resonates with youth. She found a shift in the music to a preponderant theme of angst and anger at parental abandonment. A society that can’t get caregiving of children tolerably right is truly sunk.
August 12th, 2012 | 6:10 pm
In the 1970s when no-fault divorce and abortion on demand were proposed, the resulting social problems were largely theoretical and young people were strongly in favour. Now that several generations had to live with the fallout, young people are much more ambivalent than their parents were, and often strongly opposed.
Today, the fallout from “gay marriage” is mostly theoretical. Very few young people have actually grown up with “two mummies” or “two daddies”, and most young people are in favour.
August 12th, 2012 | 6:20 pm
David Nickol seems to take the main argument against gay marriage being that there may be negative outcomes for some children raised by gay parents compared to those raised by straight parents but that is not what I for one have primarily in mind in my opposition
That may be a refashioning of my debate that argues that granting gays the right to be recognized as equal to procreative couples creates an inevitable and insoluble conflict between the “rights” of the parent vs. the rights of the child.
Obviously the gay rights advocates can’t rebut the idea of the “rights” of the child, so they always reframe it as a question of whether the child is “harmed”.
But all children have the right to have a relationship with, and be supported by, both biological parents. Under existing law, this right (or these rights) are only supposed to be severed when doing so is in the child’s best interest, and only by a judge who is supposed to be ensuring that the child’s interests are not trampled.
Gay marriage necessarily changes that, changing the basic kin relationship from one that is primarily about biological relationship (that is, family = biologically related people) to one where biological relationship is only one option among many possibilities, where parents can and do swap babies not just in limited cases associated with crisis and urgency but whenever they want, and for any reason – good or trivial. The child loses protections (whether this loss of protection would extend to the children of heterosexual parents also, or whether the children of gays would be stuck with a lower standard of legal protection – second class citizenship – cannot yet be guessed, but either outcome is bad for the children), the family loses its ability to protect its integrity, and ultimately it is government recognition – not biology – that determines what is and is not a “family”, which both is (directly) and implies (future/ramifications) a huge transfer of power away from family units and toward government.
August 13th, 2012 | 12:43 am
That may be a refashioning of my debate that argues that granting gays the right to be recognized as equal to procreative couples creates an inevitable and insoluble conflict between the “rights” of the parent vs. the rights of the child.
Blake,
Are you saying that the potential children of same-sex couples have a right not to exist?
August 13th, 2012 | 1:11 am
The other (mostly theoretical) victims are the children, adopted or otherwise, of gay and lesbian couples, who may face the less than ideal situation of lacking parents of both sexes.
Anna Williams,
In what sense is a child born into a “less than ideal” situation a victim? Forty percent of all children in the United States are born out of wedlock. I think we all agree that is less than ideal. Ask any adult who was born into a less than ideal situation if he or she feels it would be better if he or she had not been conceived at all. I think most of them would prefer existence to nonexistence.
Trying to think of the rights of nonexistent children to remain nonexistent is beginning to make my head hurt. There is something fundamentally wrong about formulating the issue this way. Children, before they are conceived, don’t exist. How can they have rights? How can it be said that a child has a right not to be brought into the world in a less than ideal situation when honoring that right means the child will never exist at all? Is nonexistence ever preferable to existence?
If we could somehow guarantee the rights of children not to be born out of wedlock, 53% of the Hispanic population and 72% of the black population would not exist. If they exist as “victims,” would they be better off not existing at all?
August 13th, 2012 | 6:37 am
While there may be few or no reliable sociological surveys on the children of same-sex couples, there is over a century of psychoanalytic theory, corroborated by clinical case-studies on the nature of childhood development.
This is how the Pécresse Commission in 2006 described the evidence of a noted psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
Pierre Lévy-Soussan is of the same opinion: “It is in the child’s best interests to join a nuclear family that is already socially accepted so that he or she does not have to take on the additional task, following a history of abandonment, of adapting to a family that is, for whatever reason, ‘non-standard’.” He believes that in order to be successful, adoption must lead to a psychological filiation that “allows for a nexus of the three elements that are basic to any society: the biological, the social and the subjective dimensions specific to human beings.
The psychological strength of this construction exceeds the purely biological connection of filiation and provides it with security. The security and ‘truth’ of this filiation are based on childbirth, on a potential or actual procreative relationship between a man and a woman, allowing the fictional filiation through the encounter with the other sex, alive and of the same generation. The fictional filiation can then be experienced as true, consistent and reasonable.”
The difference in sex between the two members of the parental couple thus seems to him indispensable if the adoption “graft” is to take.
August 13th, 2012 | 8:18 am
Gail Finke, Blake, Peter, David Alexander – Tell ya what.
How about you mobilize against divorce? Against IVF, sperm donation, and surrogacy? In favor of more restrictive adoption laws?
If those issues were sorted out to your satisfaction, then even if ‘gay marriage’ were legal, it wouldn’t really be an issue. (At least, not for the reasons you’re stating.)
It puts me in mind of a boxer who’s lost several big fights, and now is just looking to pick a fight with an opponent – any opponent – they think they can beat.
August 13th, 2012 | 9:14 am
In reply to me, David writes, “But no one is claiming marriage can mean whatever anyone wants it to mean.”
You miss the point again, David. One wonders if you do so intentionally.
It doesn’t matter what people claim for themselves, once the impression is there. Indeed there has been a lot of redefining of marriage over the decades, though it has been limited to around the edges. And as others have noted, to bad effect. Same Sex Marriage chooses to ignore procreation and children directly, to the majority the very heart of the idea. How does one stop others from concluding that if procreation doesn’t matter, marriage can be anything…or nothing. Proclaiming, “We didn’t mean that,” gets lost in the winds of change.
I suggest you make different arguments than that SSM is no worse than single parenting or bad divorce laws. When you do, you persuade the opposite of what you intend.
August 13th, 2012 | 9:47 am
You miss the point again, David. One wonders if you do so intentionally.
Mike Melendez,
One wonders if you realize what an insult it is to accuse someone of missing the point intentionally. I am beginning to lose patience with people here who interject personal slanders into their messages. If you want to accuse me of being a fraud, at least be man enough to say I wonder instead of one wonders.
I recommend a post by Rick Garnett over on Mirror of Justice lamenting the way we argue issues like this. Here’s his second item:
August 13th, 2012 | 10:20 am
People assume that those who disagree with them are, at least in part, motivated by something undisclosed, or by ideological precommitments that overdetermine the content of their claims, while they themselves are candid and transparent, and able to transcend ideology in order to identify what the right answer really is.
What other conclusion can one honestly come to, when people continually preference “talking points” – and “argumentum ad infinitum” debate strategies – over honest engagement with the substance of the debate?
The problem is, we live in a world where people can, straight-faced, argue double standards.
Where people can and do prefer to argue tactically and/or strategically over honestly engaging with the substance of a debate.
Consider: it has been only about 3 months since I last saw the insinuation, still in circulation, that Gabrielle Giffords was shot because Republicans used military metaphor and thus – no doubt deliberately – incited the shooting. That is, “we need more civility” really means “Republicans are uncivil and are singlehandedly causing the culture to become so toxic that they’re literally killing people”. This is the reality of the atmosphere we now live in.
And it works. Consider how the “gay marriage” debate has gone. Clearly it would not be going nearly so well if gay rights activists weren’t openly aggressive toward any dissent, and if they didn’t actively use any means at their disposal (fair or foul) to silence those in possession of facts that foul their narrative.
August 13th, 2012 | 10:43 am
David, just to briefly address your 1:11am comment:
I’m not saying it’s better for any individual not to exist than to exist; I’m sorry if my use of the word “victim” seemed to imply that. I do not conceive of these issues in terms of “the rights of nonexistent children to remain nonexistent.” Obviously many individuals will face great suffering and adversity during their lives, but we do not therefore gain the right to end their existence in the womb or try to prevent their existence before they’re conceived. I do not advocate policies that would somehow “guarantee the rights of children not to be born out of wedlock” because that would require inhumane totalitarianism, as you recognize. I do, however, continue to believe that we should support traditional marriage and try to ensure to the extent possible that children can spend their lives in the care of both biological parents.
August 13th, 2012 | 10:55 am
How about you mobilize against divorce? Against IVF, sperm donation, and surrogacy? In favor of more restrictive adoption laws?
First of all, how do you know we don’t?
And second of all, as I have already pointed out, the problem with gay marriage is that it legitimizes everything that is wrong with IVF, sperm donation, and every other parasitic form of reproduction. But it also does something else – something worse. It creates new forms of dysfunction.
For one thing – and most offensive to me, personally – it forces the populace into a position where they are required by law to participate in lies and taboo. The really dysfunctional sort of lies.
Gay marriage is built out of lies. The government does not have the right to force anyone to lie.
It isn’t true that marriage isn’t procreative, or that a gay couple is in all respects “equal to” a hetero couple. The truth is that marriage is about both life partnership and procreative issues, that gays have a claim on the life partnership half – but they have no legitimate claim on the procreative half.
And it offends me further that they deal with this clearly-demonstrable fact by playing peek-a-boo, where out of one half of their mouth they argue that marriage isn’t procreative, while out of the other half of their mouth they’re arguing that (because clearly marriage is procreative) it’s somehow discriminatory to not recognize gay couples as procreative.
It isn’t true that men and women are the same to the point of interchangeability.
It isn’t true that what gays are doing does not harm children. The harm becomes clear and obvious once we let go of the false framing that says children are pets, and those who own them may do whatever they like as long as the pets aren’t demonstrably harmed. Once we recognize that children are people – same as other people – and thus have legal rights, and have an interest in the things that people have reason to value – just like everyone else – then it’s easy to see that these children are being deprived of things that are clearly and obviously quite valuable.
It is simply not true that “having two mommies” is just as good as having your own real intact biological family.
It’s also not true that being adopted is just as good, but in a legitimate adoption, harm to the child is minimized to the maximum extent possible. That is how the myth of gays-as-equally-procreative differs from legitimate adoption (that is, adoptions that gain their legitimacy through the “child’s best interest” standard): gays can only pass themselves off as procreative if their rights as consumers are the primary priority.
That is, all gay couples differ from legitimate adoptive families in at least one very crucial regard: they placed their own “rights” – as people wishing equal access to the baby-buying market – above and over the child’s best interest standard. And so they “love this child so much” – but not enough to do what is right for the child. They love the child in the way that children love pets, not in the way that mature people love children.
No child should have to look around society and see a ‘wall of silence’. Adoptive parents are now being advised on how to help their adopted children through the grief issues that come with adoption; gay marriage is committed to the idea that no such loss exists – and that taboo is a dysfunction that is inherent to gay marriage, because the only way to get rid of that denial is for gays to acknowledge that they have the right to be recognized as life partners, but not as a procreative couple – because recognizing them as equal to a procreative couple necessarily means forcing a child into both accepting a loss and being expected to pretend the loss didn’t really happen.
It’s also worth noting that gay marriage is also (unique in?) threatening religious liberty – again, because it requires the entire populace of the nation to be forced by law into embracing lies as truth, or face civil and/or criminal penalties; it requires that citizens abandon (or be punished for) holding healthy, reality-based beliefs about marriage, sexuality, and family, and requires that they embrace – and teach their children – toxic, dysfunctional, dishonest beliefs as equal and valid. Under penalty of law.
August 13th, 2012 | 2:16 pm
Blake –
First off, I don’t see anything like the numbers of articles on those issues here at First Things as I do re: ‘gay marriage’. Secondly, the comment threads on those articles are far shorter than the ones on ‘gay marriage’.
Thirdly, I don’t see any effort whatsoever to put amendments into state Constitutions banning, say, IVF or divorce. I don’t even see grassroots efforts trying to petition for that.
So, yeah. ‘By their priorities shall ye know them.’
August 13th, 2012 | 2:24 pm
Blake –
Not that you’ve ever established. You make that claim repeatedly, but when asked you never point to anything concrete that you would be forced to do or say, or refrain from doing or saying.
You just repeat your claim that you would be ‘forced’ to ‘go along with’ something. But what? What would you be prevented from doing or saying, seeing as Westboro ‘Baptist’ troglodytes are legally allowed to yell ‘God hates fags’ at funerals?
August 13th, 2012 | 2:27 pm
Blake –
By that logic, you must support civil unions. Do you actually do so? (Anybody else here support ‘em? Note that many of the ‘defense of marriage’ amendments ban not only ‘gay marriage’ but civil unions, too. Why is that?)
August 13th, 2012 | 8:01 pm
Michael,
Studies in peer reviewed journals have raised serious concerns regarding the psychological health of children raised with one or more parents with same sex attractions. None of these studies examines intact same-sex unions compared with heterosexual marriages. Thus, the findings are suggestive and not definitive at this point.
In a well designed study of 174 primary school children in Australia with 58 children in married families, 58 in heterosexual cohabitating and 58 in homosexual unions, married couples offer the best environment for a child’s social and education environment, followed by cohabiting couples and finally by homosexual couples.(1.)
In a study published in 2007 of 36 adults raised by LGB parents 15 of them (42%) described challenges relating to their ability to trust other people.(2.)
In a study of 68 women with gay or bisexual fathers and 68 women with heterosexual fathers, there was a statistically significant difference between the two groups. The women (average age of 29 in both groups) with gay or bisexual fathers had difficulty with adult attachment issues in three areas: 1) They were less comfortable with closeness and intimacy, 2) less able to trust and depend on others, and 3) experienced more anxiety in relationships compared to the women raised by heterosexual fathers (and mothers).(3.)
A study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that “children in same-sex parent families scored lower than their peers in married, 2-biological parent households” on two academic outcomes, and that these differences can be attributed to higher levels of family instability in same-sex families, compared to intact, biological married families. This study was also based on a large, nationally representative, and random survey of school-age children; moreover, the same-sex parents in this study lived together.(4.)
1. Sarantakos, S. (1996) Children in three contexts. Children Australia, 21(3), 23-31.
2. Goldberg, A.E. (2007) (How) Does it make a difference?: Perspectives of adults with lesbian, gay, and bisexual parents. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 77: 550-562.
3. Sirota, T, (2009) Adult Attachment Style Dimensions in women with Gay or Bisexual Fathers. Arch. Psych Nursing, 23: 289-297.
4. Potter, D. 2012. “Same-Sex Parent Families and Children’s Academic Achievement.” Journal of Marriage and Family 74: 556-571.
Report
August 14th, 2012 | 10:05 am
A study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that “children in same-sex parent families scored lower than their peers in married, 2-biological parent households” on two academic outcomes, and that these differences can be attributed to higher levels of family instability in same-sex families, compared to intact, biological married families.
Dr. Rick Fitzgibbons,
Once again, this is a comparison between husband-wife intact families and disrupted same-sex families. “Any differences between nuclear families and same-sex families on mathematical achievement of children are down to family structure transitions and not the fact that the alternative family is gay.”
August 14th, 2012 | 3:28 pm
Once again, this is a comparison between husband-wife intact families and disrupted same-sex families
But being disrupted is part of what same-sex families are all about.
It is the inevitable consequence of granting unto yourself the right to cherry-pick which obligations you feel like honoring.
Being the sort of person who recognizes that you don’t have the right to deprive your child of his other parent (mother or father) is exactly that quality that makes intact families superior to families that starve their children to feed their crotch.
August 14th, 2012 | 3:32 pm
By that logic, you must support civil unions.
I am okay with gay unions – I don’t care what you call it, and I don’t care if you yourself want to call it marriage.
My concerns are twofold:
First, I want gay couples to be held to the same standards as stepparents when it comes to respect, recognition, and resources. If marriage ‘isn’t procreative’ this shouldn’t be a big deal.
The second concern I have is the recognition that some religions believe a marriage isn’t a marriage unless it is procreative. They are within their rights to recognize this. It is a violation of their right to religious belief to force them to recognize a gay union as equal to a procreative one.
To me these two concerns are simply a matter of respect – respect for the children, the family, and the child’s other parent, and respect for differences in religious belief.
August 14th, 2012 | 3:58 pm
First, I want gay couples to be held to the same standards as stepparents when it comes to respect, recognition, and resources. If marriage ‘isn’t procreative’ this shouldn’t be a big deal.
I should be more specific in what I mean.
I am referring to the recognition that some claims are inalienable; an individual does not have the option of distributing those claims any way he or she wishes.
The person you make (made) a family with has certain claims that automatically belong to that person, even when that person is not your spouse, because the basis of the claims is procreative – both in terms of having a claim on your resources (in that you are expected to support your child’s other parent) and in terms of having the right to split with you the subsidies and benefits society offers to enable the flourishing of procreative units.
The person you make a child together with is the one who has the right to make procreative claims, regardless of your feelings toward this person – whether you love or hate or feel indifferent toward him or her – because the two of you are linked through the child you created together.
(Denying or breaking that bond is not something that is harmless. It is something that should be done only at need.)
There are certain benefits of marriage which are not linked to procreation (for instance, the right to visit in a hospital or share bank accounts). But some of the benefits of marriage are expressly procreative.
But there are also some rights that a person does not have the option of distributing any way he or she sees fit. The procreative benefits, claims, and rights of marriage rightfully belong to the child(ren) and to their mother (father). A second spouse has to accept a reduced status, legally; the first spouse – the other parent of the children – has the legal claim to all the support and benefits which are procreative in nature.
Gays need to look at this and recognize, honestly, that if they genuinely believe marriage is “not procreative”, then they should not be agitating for the right to raise a “child with two mommies”, they should rather be agitating for the right to have their lover recognized as their partner and their child’s mother or father recognized as their child’s co-parent.
August 14th, 2012 | 5:38 pm
Ray Ingles,
I am against IVF, sperm donation, and surrogacy, and you are right in a sense that the big battle against divorce has been lost. What’s wrong with us that we have adds appearing on CNN glamorizing surrogacy! Gay rights probably wouldn’t even be a battle if not for the prior weakening of marriage. Demands for gay rights are based on a weak marriage model. Does that mean intact biological parent marriages are not worth fighting for? You could similarly have asked the Greeks at Thermopylae if it was worth fighting against the hordes of Persians for freedom.
August 14th, 2012 | 6:01 pm
David Nickol brings up an interesting point about whether nonexistent persons have rights. I don’t think you can simply say that a person is exonerated from conscientious consideration of what will happen to a person due to one’s prior arranging before that person exists. That could be used to justify hybrids, having children when you have AIDs, and an endless plethora of other exotic configurations, with the justification that it is better to exist than not to exist. Genetic orphaning is also not the same as potential parents in a troubled group embracing life. It is a presetting of conditions which intentionally and knowingly deprives a potential life of what is obviously a good for children in order to pursue what is thought to one’s superior good. A stressed minority couple does not will the bad for their potential child but a self-indulgent single mother wills a situation which is not good for her future donor insemination child even if she is rich by her false downplaying of the organic, stable good for any child.
August 14th, 2012 | 8:03 pm
But being disrupted is part of what same-sex families are all about.
Blake,
I am not sure what the definition of “same-sex family is.” But in any case, you seem to forget that the typical “opposite-sex” family is broken. Only 45 percent of children live in an intact family from birth to age 18:
We tend to think of the intact family as the norm, but of course it isn’t.
August 14th, 2012 | 8:52 pm
David Nickol brings up an interesting point about whether nonexistent persons have rights.
Laws already exist establising a person is not exempt from liability if one deliberately damages a future (as opposed to present) person.
Deliberate intent to damage someone doesn’t get any less damaging if damage is arranged for future as opposed to present.
It’s deliberateness of intent, making deliberate suffering and damage done.
So as long as nobody is born and nobody suffers damage, no problem. But as soon as someone is affected, it’s a different story.
August 14th, 2012 | 8:56 pm
a self-indulgent single mother wills a situation which is not good for her future donor insemination child even if she is rich by her false downplaying of the organic, stable good for any child.
Real question is, will we stigmatize people for doing bad stuff, or will we pretend it is none of our business?
Is deliberate suffering as serious as swallowing a Big Gulp?
Ultimately, it is up to us to determine rules.
August 14th, 2012 | 10:42 pm
For those who are truly interested in the nuance of the answer to the Question:
“how same-sex marriage will lead to a decrease in marriages?”
I highly recomend this paper.
GENDERLESS MARRIAGE AND INSTITUTIONAL THEORY – Monte Neil Stewart
http://www.marriagelawfoundation.org/publications/ISFL.pdf
August 14th, 2012 | 10:49 pm
Also important & centered on that question is this article from the same author.
http://www.marriagelawfoundation.org/publications/Facts.pdf
Both these and more can be found at
http://www.marriagelawfoundation.org/index.html
August 15th, 2012 | 8:47 am
David Alexander –
Careful of your phrasing. Do you specifically mean “gay rights to marriage“? Or ‘gay rights’ generally – like, say, to association or employment or housing? I’ll assume you mean the former for now.
So strengthen marriage. Fight against IVF and surrogacy and divorce. If you’re right, you’ll do far more good there than fighting against just ‘gay marriage’ ever could. As I’ve pointed out, any progress you make on those fronts will automatically mitigate the negative impacts you see from ‘gay marriage’.
And since ‘gay marriage’ is always going to be dwarfed by the heterosexual kind, comparisons about splinters and beams come to mind.
In the fight against abortion, activists don’t like to be called ‘anti-abortion’. They prefer ‘pro-life’, and strive to present a better model. Present a better model for marriage, make it attractive, and – by your own words above – you solve the ‘gay marriage’ ‘problem’.
Um… you might want to be more careful of your metaphors, too. The Spartans at Thermopylae weren’t fighting for freedom. Certainly not for the helots that formed the vast majority of their society. (Like the two thousand luggage-bearing slaves they put on the front-line – unarmored and barely armed – as sword-fodder.)
I don’t think those guys are the ones you want to emulate or invoke.
August 15th, 2012 | 9:32 am
Blake –
Which would be a big step up from where it stands now in places like Michigan and Virginia.
Now, what if the other biological parent voluntarily relinquishes parental rights? (Note that this happens pretty frequently with girls giving up children for adoption.) Would you ban that generally, or just in the case of gay unions?
Oh, well, that’s easy, then. Hasn’t happened to Westboro Baptist, so it won’t happen to you. You’ve got nothing to worry about. You can still tell a random gay couple in the park, or even your own child, that they aren’t “really married”.
Glad we’ve got that behind us!
August 15th, 2012 | 2:07 pm
Ray Ingles
Read the papers that I link to above and learn the problems of your catagory error’s.
Then and only then will you be able to see clearly enough…
August 15th, 2012 | 4:57 pm
David,
Instability is part of what “same-sex relationships” mean. Disrupted homosexual relationships are the norm in the lifestyle. Let’s look at some scientific research that demonstrates this.
One of the largest studies of same-sex couple revealed that only seven of the 156 couples had a totally exclusive sexual relationship. The majority of relationships lasted less than five years. Couples with a relationship lasting more than five years incorporated some provision for outside sexual activity in their relationship. The researchers stated, “The single most important factor that keeps couples together past the 10-year mark is the lack of possessiveness. . . . Many couples learn very early in their relationship that ownership of each other sexually can be the greatest internal threat to their staying together.”[i]
Partner instability is also present in lesbian relationships. In a 2010, in a peer-reviewed journal, that shows lesbian relationships to be statistically less stable than heterosexual relationships.[ii]
In a 2010 report, the US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, 40 percent of the couples who had conceived a child by artificial insemination had broken up.[iii] Lisa Diamond reported in her book, Sexual Fluidity, that “more than two-thirds of the women in my sample had changed their identity labels at least once after the first interview. The women who kept the same identity for the whole ten years proved to be the smallest and most atypical group.”
Babies need to be protected from such unstable relationships that cause serious psychological harm by deliberately depriving them either of a mother or a father.
[i] McWhirter, D. and Mattison, A. 1985. The Male Couple: How Relationships Develop. Prentice Hall.
[ii] Schumm, W. (2010) Comparative Relationship Stability of
Lesbian Mother and Heterosexual Mother Families: A Review of Evidence Marriage and Family Review, 46: 499-509.
[iii] Gartrell, N. & Bos, H. (2010) US national Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Psychological Adjustment of 17-year-old Adolescents, Pediatrics, Volume 126, Number 1, July 2010, 28-36.
August 16th, 2012 | 9:25 am
Fitzgerald – I’m really not following the argument in there. Even the examples given are problematic.
The author uses money as an example of a socially-created institution. “If everybody
stops believing it is money, it ceases to function as money, and eventually ceases
to be money…” Marriage is likewise constituted (one of the reasons weddings are public is because it makes sure the community knows that the couple is married) socially.
But the fundamental understanding of money has changed without changing the function of it in any material way. Originally money was valuable in itself, gold or silver or something like that. It would be traded for goods and services. Then we got paper money, which was functionally an IOU – you could trade it for something tangible like gold. It was just more convenient to carry around.
And then we went off the gold standard, and ‘money’ is now a much more fluid concept, mostly defined in terms of its (fluctuating) relative value to goods and other currencies.
And yet… if you took someone from the ‘gold standard’ days in a time machine up to today, and showed them people paying cash for things, they wouldn’t be shocked or confused. It’d look quite familiar to them. They’d probably even get used to the notion of debit cards in short order, too.
So, while the author can assert that changing (expanding?) the underlying definition of marriage must change the practice thereof… his main illustrative example doesn’t support that contention.
For example, he states that “Man/woman marriage is the only institution that can
confer the status of husband and wife, that can transform a male into a husband (a social identity quite different from “partner”), and thus that can transform males into husband/fathers”.
But he doesn’t go on to explain why allowing marriage between ‘persons’ would in any way impact the terminology or social understanding in the case where males and females marry.
Sure, going off the gold standard changed several government monetary policies. But… it didn’t change the main use-case for money, spending it. So I think I need a more detailed cause-and-effect relation as to how the negative effects Stewart anticipates will actually come about.
August 16th, 2012 | 8:13 pm
Ray Ingles,
I’ll assume your assumption is genuine. I do oppose surrogacy, IVF, etc. , like I said. A redefining of marriage to include homosexual marriage necessarily cuts off the biological nexus to children. This is a reaching beyond a generous, godly tolerance toward homosexual neighbors to an ungenerous abandonment of children, so it is not essentially generous. This redefinition would effectively separate the concept of marriage and child rearing formally and no doubt socially and would begin to make scenarios like those in Plato’s Republic or in Brave New World more eminent, more possible.
You earlier accused me of being desperate for a fight by turning to little battles but here you would like to confound my plain, simple statements with pettifogging distinctions. But if we must, it was not only the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae but also 700 Thespians, 400 Thebans and possibly several hundred others, and the Spartans were part of a larger coalition of Greeks and the other Greeks identified with the Spartans as their own in certain ways, at least when it came to standing against the Persians. While the Spartans had an atrocious slave culture, it is no less true it seems to me to say that they took a stand for freedom than to say that the founding fathers of America took a stand for freedom. But if you like, I could liken the counsel to be overcome by perceived power rather than truth to counseling the helots not to resist Spartan oppression because the Spartan upperclass were an irresistible whelming current against which a larger lower class could not stand.
August 17th, 2012 | 11:44 am
David Alexander –
By ‘not liking it’, or by taking concrete political action, though?
See, it’s the priorities I don’t understand. If you are correct, then surrogacy and IVF are already causing harm, and more than gay marriage ever could by itself. Why waste effort on it when you could be attacking a more important problem, that also affects ‘gay marriage’ the way you’d like?
I mean, if you manage to convince people of the evils of IVF and surrogacy and sperm donation, you do a lot of good by your lights. Not only do you block any prospective gay marriages from availing themselves of those techniques, but far more important (or at least numerous) you block innumerable straight marriages from sinning. And spreading your viewpoint on those issues would, allegedly, also fight gay marriage by cementing public opinion on the goods and nature of marriage.
I mean, seriously – this seems like basic, even obvious strategy to me. I have a very difficult time grasping why churches aren’t lobbying for legislation and constitutional amendments on these grounds, if they actually believe what they say they believe.
The Spartan comparison is a side issue – I was trying to point out that, if you want to claim a metaphoric parallel, you’d best pick one more wholly worth emulating – e.g. the Athenians, who not only fought a desperate, brave, battle – but won, too.
August 17th, 2012 | 5:03 pm
Ray,
You seem to present it as an either/or decision but I just don’t see that and usually I don’t first seek the advice of someone taking an opposing position about how to defeat the position they adopt. The Spartans were in coalition with the Athenians and contributed to the defeat of the Persians. I am thinking of their unity, not their division.
August 18th, 2012 | 10:22 am
David Alexander –
But that’s precisely my point. You do seem to see it as “either/or”. Either you can have chicken sandwich appreciation days and constitutional amendments regarding IVF, or you can do it against gay marriage… but not both.
At least, as I said, I see no evidence whatsoever that anyone’s actually doing both. Can you point to even one? Everyone seems to treat it as “either/or”… why?
If you’re right, then it’s a good thing if you win. If I’m right, I can trust the reasoning and arguments that convinced me of that to convince others. It’s a win-win for me.
And most primarily, I’m not trying to give you advice on how to win. I’m trying to understand an element of your ‘strategy’ that makes no Earthly (or especially supernatural) sense. Maybe if you could explain the logic of it, I’d be convinced of your position.
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