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TechnoratiBeyond same sex marriage
Civil unions, same sex marriage, then what? The final stop on this train ride is the complete de-gendering of society.
The “I’m against same sex marriage but favor civil unions” position is the major unheralded casualty of the California Supreme Court decision redefining marriage. Politicians from across the political spectrum have taken refuge in this dodge, believing it allows them to navigate the treacherous shoals of powerful but divided public opinion about same sex marriage. The court’s ruling has shown beyond any shadow of a doubt that civil unions are not a stable political or social compromise, however rational and reasonable that position may appear to be. Here is why.
California has had registered domestic partnerships since 1999. In the years since, the state legislature has steadily increased the rights for which registered domestic partners automatically qualify. Hospital visitation was granted that very first year. In 2000, the legislature granted domestic partners the right to make medical decisions for each other, the right to use stepparent adoption procedures to adopt a partner’s child, and the right to sue for a partner’s wrongful death.
In 2002, the legislature gave domestic partners the rights to receive copies of each others’ birth and death certificates. The legislature also changed the inheritance rules for domestic partners who die without a will, mandating that their property be distributed between the surviving partner and any blood relatives on the same terms as married couples. Legislation passed in 2003 required domestic partners to pay alimony and child support.
Thus, registered domestic partnerships have been available in California since 1999, and their status has been continually upgraded. The benefits of domestic partnerships now mirror the benefits of marriage very closely. Yet, that has never been enough. The pressure for the complete redefinition of marriage has continued without missing a beat.
Can we be confident that even same sex marriage is the ultimate goal? I think the honest answer is no. The freight train of same sex marriage will not stop at the station called simple “equality.” The legal equivalence of same sex couples with opposite sex couples means that marriage will no longer be society’s most reliable method of attaching mothers and fathers to their children and to each other. Marriage will become a gender-neutral creation of the state, which actively detaches children from at least one of their parents. Parentage will not flow automatically from the marital union, but will have to be assigned by the state. The final stop on this train is the complete de-gendering of society, along with the continual incursion of the state into civil society.
The state must hold that mothers and fathers are completely interchangeable. Biological parents married to each other become officially equivalent to one parent plus their lover. The state will be indifferent as to whether children have any connection with their biological parents.
The experiences of other countries with same sex marriage illustrate that this is no mere expansion of an existing institution. In Spain, the words “mother” and “father” were removed from birth certificates in favor of “Progenitor A” and “Progenitor B”. Courts in Canada have assigned parental rights to three adults. Similar experiences from Massachusetts and the UK leave no doubt that the state will have to continually intervene to prop up same sex marriage, and the gender-oblivious society that comes along with it. Sexual orientation will be viewed as immutable, with sex itself as a mere social construct.
As Douglas Farrow, a Canadian academic asks in his book, A Nation of Bastards, is this really what we intended to do?
Gays and lesbians have as much political power in California as in any state in America. If civil unions could have ever been a viable political compromise position, it would have been here. Any candidate who favors civil unions, is really saying that he favors the continual progress of this train toward the destination of same sex marriage, and perhaps even beyond to the ultimate radical goal of a completely non-gendered society.
This ruling gives the electorate the chance to gain genuine clarity from the candidates. The “I oppose same sex marriage, but favor civil unions,” position is the equivalent of “I’m personally opposed to abortion but support your right to have one.” It is a cowardly subterfuge that should no longer fool anyone.
Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. is the author of Love and Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a Village, newly reissued in paperback.
Phil:
“So, could the intimate relationship between a homosexual couple be compared to the intimate relationship of a heterosexual couple who choose only to engage in oral sex? “
There is no way an intimate relationship between a homosexual couple can be compared to the intimate relationship of a heterosexual couple. And to be clear about all this thread, there is no way in which the bonding of a man and a women, and I use the word “bond” to signify a union in the most intimate possible way, obviously involved in sexual activity, for the purpose of forming a family can be compared to anything involving a gay couple. The only other thing that can be compared to what I just described is the bonding of another man to another woman for the same purpose.
David:
“Phil, I hear kids everywhere saying, ‘forget the love and caring. We want complement’.”
To begin with it wasn’t Phil who said this, it was me. And you totally missed my point. I am not saying that gay unions are wrong, you can do whatever you want, I am simply saying that I would never place a child in a gay household, because children have the right to be placed in a healthy normal environment, one that provides a full and complete perspective of what we human beings are. I am not talking about gay rights, I am talking about children rights.
And I am sorry to say this, but most of your answers appeal to the “you people hate us” empty argument and to sarcasm, as said above in your “we want complement” comment.
Jim, I’ve checked out a couple of your ‘studies’. Some seem to prove my point; that a two parent family is better than a one parent family. Another is a Mormon opinion piece. You know, Jim, that the only honest study is one that compares two-parent straight families with two-parent gay parents. Those studies support my position.
Phil said: “There is no way a gay-parent’s household will ever compare to a straight-parent’s one, simply because the gay household lacks the complement that comes from having male and a female parents. There might be love and caring, but no complement.”
Phil, I hear kids everywhere saying, ‘forget the love and caring. We want complement’.
Jim said: “Where you see an anti-gay rant and prejudice and ones being blinded by hatred I rather think this is your response to anyone who is critical of your ideology.”
I didn’t know I had an ideology. I thought I was just standing by my friends. Actually I don’t understand your motivation. Who do you know that’s threatened by gay rights? I believe you once said you didn’t have a dog in this fight. I do. I will fight tooth and nail to protect the gay people I love. Where does your intensity come from? Do you think your protecting God? You can’t win this. You’ll have your shameful victories but in the end you will lose. As Victor Hugo said; ‘There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come’. After Millennia of brutalizing gay people their time has come.
Pablo Vera,
“The intimate relationship between two people of the same sex goes against human nature. “
So, could the intimate relationship between a homosexual couple be compared to the intimate relationship of a heterosexual couple who choose only to engage in oral sex?
Phil said:
“It sounds like you are saying here, Pablo, that gay parents should have exactly the same rights as single parents; would that be accurate?”
No, it is not accurate, gay parents lack, as I said, complement. In this sense it “would seem” they are similar to single parents, but they are not, not even close, because gay parents not only lack complement, but they add a distorted view of what a family is, and this is the main reason I am against them adopting.
In the normal family I described in my comment above, there is a dad and a mum. When one of them is missing, by death or separation, the single parent is not pretending to be someone he/she is not. What we have here is a broken family, but still a family. Single parents do not go against human nature, they are simply a fact of life.
I wouldn’t even compare lesbian parents to the case of two single aunts adopting their brother’s child (let’s suppose the brother and his wife died), because this aunts are not pretending to be mummy 1 and mummy 2, no, they are simply the aunts. They do not live in an intimate relationship, they are sisters, they are part of a normal family.
The intimate relationship between two people of the same sex goes against human nature. How can this be right ?, and I don’t mean right as in good and evil, but right as in functional and dysfunctional.
David wrote:
“All you’ve written here is an anti-gay rant that serves only to highlight your prejudices. ... None of the things you quoted above have any meaning to anyone who’s eyes are not blinded by hatred.”
I want to thank you for writing this the way you did. It made me think about why I spend the time to comment. After all, you’ve accused me of “an anti-gay rant” and “prejudices” and being “blinded by hatred” (by the way there is a double negative in that sentence) ... is it fair to say you were frustrated perhaps? This I can well understand. What drew me to first comment was what I took as a flippant statement that there is “plenty of information to show that children raised by same sex couples do at least as well as children raised by heterosexual couples.” This lead to the ever increasing supposed numbers of children in same sex households. In my mind the changing numbers damage the argument’s credibility. Then there are the quotes taken from the Princeton website, and the ones that I responded with, also from the same website. Perhaps you took offense to my critique of the quotes? Where you see an anti-gay rant and prejudice and ones being blinded by hatred I rather think this is your response to anyone who is critical of your ideology. In other words you can dish it out, but you can’t take the same.
So, I asked myself, why do I take the time? I place a high value in the bond, or vow, or mystical union called marriage. In the context of marriage, thus understood, comes children and the responsibility of raising them. One can perhaps rightly criticize bad or failed marriages at will, but to substitute something else which I see as far worse ... well, that’s why I take the time. You or others can call it anti-gay or prejudice or hatred or utopianism and yet what I see is an ideology for the demeaning of the dignity of men, women and children.
There is no way a gay-parent’s household will ever compare to a straight-parent’s one, simply because the gay household lacks the complement that comes from having male and a female parents. There might be love and caring, but no complement.
It sounds like you are saying here, Pablo, that gay parents should have exactly the same rights as single parents; would that be accurate?
David wrote:
“Where are the studies that contradict me?” ... Jim where are the studies you promised? Do I have to type it 50 times? Where are the studies that prove me wrong? Where are they?” Can I consider myself sufficiently scolded now?
First, go back and read again what I wrote on Friday May 30 where I agreed that the studies you are asking for don’t exist. What I did say was “However, there are studies which clearly show that children are best served when raised by their mother and father.”
To wit: please see the list below. I could go on at much greater length, but we have space limitations, etc.
Pitirim Sorokin, Society, Culture, and Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1947), pp. 246-247; The American Sex Revolution (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1956), p. 5.
Deborah Dawson, “Family Structure and Children’s Health and Well-Being: Data from the 1988 National Health Interview Survey on Child Health,” J. of Marriage and the Family 53 (1991): 573-584.
L. Remez, “Children Who Don’t Live with Both Parents Face Behavioral Problems,” Family Planning Perspectives, January/February 1992.
Nicholas Zill, Donna Morrison, and Mary Jo Coiro, “Long-Term Effects of Parental Divorce on Parent-Child Relationships, Adjustment, and Achievement in Young Adulthood,” J. of Family Psych., 7 (1993):91-103.
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, The Relationship Between Family Structure and Adolescent Substance Use, Rockville, MD: National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information, 1996.
Michael Stiffman, et al., “Household Composition and Risk of Fatal Child Maltreatment,” Pediatrics, 109 (2002), 615-621.
Kristin Anderson Moore, et al., “Marriage From a Child’s Perspective: How Does Family Structure Affect Children, and What Can We Do about It?” Child Trends Res. Brief, June 2002, p. 1.
Mary Parke, “Are Married Parents Really Better for Children?” Center for Law and Social Policy Policy Brief, May 2003, p. 1.
David:
Forget about the quote, that was just me being scandalized by something so absurd that I simply had to say something. Instead read my comment following the one with the quote.
My point, and I totally agree with Donna, is that we define “normal” in very different ways. People in favour of gay relationships, compare them to straight relationships as if they were the same, but they couldn’t be more different. “Normal” is NOT what society says it is, or the majority of people say. In order to define “normal” in terms of human relationships, we must study humans from an anthropological perspective. We must go deep into the essence of man (as a species).
Pablo:
The assumption behind the whole thing is that homosexual relationships are fine. Therefore they would look at your results and say, “See ? These kids are being raised in an environment with less homophobia. Therefore they don’t avoid having gay friends and are more likely to consider a gay relationship. “ What you, (and I), see as a negative outcome they see as a positive one.
To Pablo Vera; the quote you used refers to studies that also say that children of same sex parents are no more and no less likely to be gay than the general population. Your grasping at straws.
I am no expert on all the “studies” mentioned here, but I do know about statistics and market research, so I can tell you this: If I wanted to, I could prove right either argument using “studies”, but in reality that is not proof, I would be presenting “cases” in which gay-parents or straight-parents would be doing great or terrible jobs as parents.
The real issue goes deeper and we must separate the two problems presented in all this arguments: first, we must protect the rights of children to live in a stable and harmonious environment. This has nothing to do with gay versus straight parenting If a straight-parent’s household is unstable, then I bet they are denied the possibility of adopting a child. But if a gay-parent’s household is stable, should they be allowed to adopt ?
And we come to the second problem: we must protect the rights of children to live in a household that allows them to develop in a manner consistent with their (our) own humanity. We humans are a paired species, male and female, we complement each other, both physically and emotionally. This duality serves a set of really well defined purposes, being the first one: reproduction.
“The whole is more than the sum of its parts” applies wonderfully in this case. A straight family is more than just two parents and kids, it is also the interaction between man and woman, dad and mum, this “something” that emanates from the union of man and woman enriches the family and makes it a whole.
There is no way a gay-parent’s household will ever compare to a straight-parent’s one, simply because the gay household lacks the complement that comes from having male and a female parents. There might be love and caring, but no complement.
And to stress one point: I know that there are lots of straight parents that are terrible parents, but this has nothing to do with the gay versus straight discussion. It has to do with the complexity of human relationships and humans in general.
Quote >>>---
Some studies report that children, particularly daughters, of lesbian parents adopt more accepting and open attitudes toward various sexual identities and are more willing to question their own sexuality. Others report that young women raised in lesbian-headed families are more likely to have homosexual friends and to disclose that they have had or would consider having same-sex sexual relationships
---<<< end quote.
If this is not enough proof that placing children in same-sex households is bad for those children, and that their rights are being violated, then I don’t know what it is. If a person questions his/her own sexuality, then something is really wrong with that person. It is equivalent to questioning our own humanity. Maybe we weren’t meant to be human ...
Jim, where are the studies you mentioned that contradict me? You said there were lots of them. All you’ve written here is an anti-gay rant that serves only to highlight your prejudices. There is no information to support your positions. A fair study would compare just two-parent gay families with just two-parent straight families. The people who take your position are loathe to do that because it doesn’t give them the numbers they want. None of the things you quoted above have any meaning to anyone who’s eyes are not blinded by hatred.
You used this quote to make some point against gay parenting that escapes reason; “To make the same point a little differently, those who say the evidence shows that many same-sex parents do an excellent job of parenting are right. Those who say the evidence falls short of showing that same-sex parenting is equivalent to opposite-sex parenting (or BETTER, or WORSE) are also right. “ The capitalization is mine. Jim where are the studies you promised? Do I have to type it 50 times? Where are the studies you talked about that prove me wrong? Where are they?
more from the site at Princeton ...
“To make the same point a little differently, those who say the evidence shows that many same-sex parents do an excellent job of parenting are right. Those who say the evidence falls short of showing that same-sex parenting is equivalent to opposite-sex parenting (or better, or worse) are also right. “
We might agree that the authors are a bit conflicted here except to say that anything goes. Right?
“On the other hand, social acceptance of same-sex marriages as “real” marriages—- marriages viewed as authentic by family, friends, and such institutions as churches and neighborhood groups-—cannot be forced. “
No, but we do our darnedest in places like California don’t we?
Last but not least ...
page 9
“Both authors of this paper are openly gay and advocates of same-sex marriage, a fact that readers should weigh as they see fit. “
“as they see fit” David, it’s papers like this that give new meaning to bias. Also, this does not bode well for the credibility of the authors interpretation of the data.
David, all of the studies you put forth come from the bibliography of this article. I can guess what I’ll find there. Unless you can provide something more credible ... I’m done.
David wrote:
I would recommend people to the same site, especially to this link; http://www.futureofchildren.org/information2827/information_show.htm?doc_id=290849
Thank You David for referring to the site I pulled numbers from. Let me quote more than numbers ...
pg 7
“ Where differences are found, they sometimes favor same-sex parents. For instance, although one study finds that heterosexual fathers had greater emotional involvement with their children than did lesbian co-mothers, others find either no difference or that lesbian co-mothers seem to be more involved in the lives of their children than are heterosexual fathers. “
Read this a few times and tell me how credible this is for fathers? It’s ludicrous and laughable.
“Second, .... Some studies report that children, particularly daughters, of lesbian parents adopt more accepting and open attitudes toward various sexual identities and are more willing to question their own sexuality. Others report that young women raised in lesbian-headed families are more likely to have homosexual friends and to disclose that they have had or would consider having same-sex sexual relationships. (Just how to view such differences in behavior and attitude is a matter of disagreement. Where conservatives may see lax or immoral sexual standards, liberals may see commendably open-minded attitudes.) “
What do you think about this? “… liberals may see commendably open-minded attitudes.” Once again I find it harmful that anyone would place children in an environment where they “are more willing to question their own sexuality” What sort of person would do this?
continued in next post ....
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