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Ideal Family Argument Against Same-Sex Marriage

by Dr. Scot O'Grair @ isocrat.org

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2008-06-20
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Keywords:: Ideal Family, Marriage, Same-Sex Marriage, Gay Marriage, Law, Gay and Lesbian Parents

The argument against legal marriage for same-sex couples to be discussed on this page could reasonably be considered the strongest argument anti-gay rights activists have. It is often posed as being completely secular, thus applicable and effective in courts of law, and, given the premises, one can get a fair distance in debate before its flaws become apparent.

Though there may be some variation, the argument generally is stated as follows:

In the ideal family situation, children are created and raised by their biological parents. The state’s interest in marriages is in promoting the creation of children in that ideal.


It should be first noted, while often it is not specifically stated, it is insinuated in this argument that this interest is the only interest the state has in marriage, as though marriage is not useful for other ends. Often it is also implied or directly stated that using marriage to help societies in other areas somehow makes it less useful for this one purpose.

This page will follow the argument as it typically progresses, based on our experience.

Contents:

1. Infertile Couples
There are more infertile couples in the world than same sex couples. In fact most heterosexual marriages are not currently raising any children (1). If the state's interest in marriage is promoting children in some ideal family, why is there no sign of that interest in the law, or from mainstream anti-gay rights activists? A couple answers have been given from various activists.

I- Necessary Error: The law can’t weed these people out, for any number of reasons (listed below). These infertile heterosexual couples are taking this legal designation but it’s not meant for them. Some may even think the knowingly infertile couple should be socially shunned and marriages annulled for their theft of the legal classification. Nevertheless, the counter argument is that the law can’t weed them out. Why?

a) Privacy. They argue there is a right to privacy that can’t be breached here. You can’t ask about a person’s fertility; it is much too personal. This excuse has a number of failings, and much evidence to show this is not why the state does what it does (and the "ideal" is seemingly not, by their lack of concern for change, what the opponent is after).

i) Data that may rule infertile people out is already taken as part of the marriage licensing process; it is not private. You give your date of birth and, by that, a woman’s fertility may be absolutely known (a 90 year old is not going to be having babies, and, if she somehow did, this would not be anyone's ideal and the state would be burdened).

ii) Medical tests are already a requirement for marriage in some jurisdictions; some have to obtain blood tests, which may reveal STD's, clearly a privacy issues. If the opponent then goes to arguing that the to be spouse has a right to know about STD's, the same is true for fertility.

iii) There is a very easy work around that is often ignored. Currently not even the majority of heterosexual marriages are raising children; only 46% are (2). We know this because the existence of children is a public fact. If these rights are only made for those with children and the reason there is testing is truly concern for privacy, marriage could take place as usual to still encourage child production, but state involvement may only activate when children come into the family, and it may leave if the children leave. Why ignore this solution?

iv) If you know many transgender people you would find a person’s biological sex can be a highly private matter as well, and yet that information is the information they will be asked to give, and it will be used to discriminate between couples. Why is their concern for privacy on this question not as salient? Biologically intersexed people must be mentioned here as well. Supernatural theories about sex aside, some people are genetically and anatomically between male and female (or neither). Yet their sex is given privacy, forced into an artificial classification, or allowed to be fluid M or F in marriage law, depending upon their sexual orientation. How is the double standard justified?

v) Lastly, tests for fertility are already in place, and required for marriage in some cases; privacy is no barrier to such requirements. As outlined in a related article, some couples must prove they are infertile, not fertile, before they can be married. This should be counted as evidence as to what the state’s motivations actually are in marriage. Why would the state, if the ideal family argument is true, only test for fertility to assure couples are infertile before they may legally marry?

b) Simplicity: They argue it is too complicated to write laws that addresses all the variations of infertility. Best to just leave it at a man and a woman and hope most of them caught in the imperfect net are going to have biological children. This has failings similar to the privacy argument:

i) First off, no one is asking for all infertile couples to be caught. The opponent has already settled for imperfection with their sex requirement, and all can agree, if that is the state’s true goal, perfection is not possible. It may, though, easily be better approached, if they honestly want it. Why not?

ii) Next, why is this bit of complexity a concern? Legal code is complex, even regarding marriage. A line about the age of a woman is no noticeable difference in complexity, a drop in an ocean, and such a “complex” requirement for age is already in place in law as an age-minimum. Such would not even require any new forms. Even still, a one line question in the forms asking if the couple knows, under penalty of perjury, if they are biologically infertile is a simple addition to the other questions; no more complicated than monitoring, as most now do, the couple’s biological sex. You can, with simplicity, make the selection more “perfect”. The world will, though, quickly remember the benefits of recognizing marriages that don’t promote this “ideal”.

iii) For truly complicated measures, the law here is already complicated far beyond the point of what would be needed. Much of what was written above regarding privacy applies. For example, we already make exceptions for certain couples and test to be sure they are infertile (Related isocrat.org article), or free of STD's before they can marry; there is no significant added legal complexity to test for fertility. Furthermore, if you do not want to require extensive medical exams, you can weed out some couples with obvious reproductive inability, or, again, just ask; many people missing reproductive organs know it.

iv) If the concern was actually simplicity over achieving the stated goals in the primary argument, one could make the law simpler by ignoring gender too. If simplicity is so important they will undermine their goal in one instance, it's fair to ask why it is no longer important in this instance. An explanation should be given for the way they are balancing the two.

C. Necessary Error Summary: In all, these “oops” or “it’s too complicated” excuses are amongst the weakest in this ideal family argument. It is difficult, when they are used, to not think they are used to only conceal and distract from the actual intention. Below we will address the assumptions of the ideal family argument directly, but, still, these initial tactics are in need of address as they are prevalent.

2. Purposeful Inclusion of the Infertile: It might also be argued that the childless infertile straight couples are put into the legally marriageable category, for certain reasons that supposedly do not apply to gay couples, even those raising children. Among those reasons:

a) Infertile heterosexual couples may still adopt. Here, the first “ideal” of children being raised by their biological parents is actually put aside for a second “ideal”, due to circumstances. Here the children should be raised by married opposite sex couples, but not their biological parents (Though it can’t really be called an their “ideal” anymore, opposition will still often use the word here).

i) This exception gets in the way of the “ideal” in the same way it is argued gay marriage would. Purposeful recognition of infertile marriages makes favoring the ideal of the original argument similarly “impossible” by taking biological parents out of the equation. Nevertheless, most people do actually understand that the “ideal” for many children is far from their biological parents, in certain circumstances, and for the state to blindly follow biology would harm many people and its interests. Similarly, many children’s ideal parents are not their biological parents or parents with different sexual anatomy. The ideal parents are their parents--the people who love, take responsibility for, live with, and sacrifice for them--and no one else. If the state would be amiss for promoting its ideal in one instance as it ignores genetics, why is it not amiss in the other instance by ignoring anatomy for the children whose ideal parents are neither their biological parents nor some set of strangers who just happen to have different sexual anatomy?

ii) In adoption the point is to find the best solution available for the child, which does include avoiding protracted periods in temporary care (related isocrat.org article). Even if one concedes that same-sex parents are, on average, an inherently worse situations for children (a finding that is not in the reputable data), there will still always be same-sex couples who can do better than the average adoption-eligible straight couple. We can easily find other groups involving traits that show a clear, on average, deficiency in the children they raise in the data (see below). Some of these effects are more deleterious than what’s even claimed by anti-gay rights activists to be found in the children of same-sex parents, but no one in their right mind would bar everyone sharing that trait from marriage or adoption when judging individuals. They, when not distracted by the passions of gay politics, can see enough to know that would harm children in such instances. Adoptions must be done on a case-by-case basis, aiming only for the best interest of the child. Applying averages to individuals based on anatomy is a prejudice that threatens finding the best option for each child. For this reason, if the ideal is truly hoped to be promoted for these individual children, it will include same-sex couples.

iii) Again, if this honestly is the reason, there are very easy ways to rule out infertile couples who also cannot adopt, and who the state would certainly not want to promote for adoption. Can any evidence be presented to show this is the state’s interest in infertile marriages then? Most of the law supports the opposite. For instance, even a couple with a record of child sexual abuse is allowed to marry with no attempts to stop them. Incarcerated people even have this right (3). All that is public record that could be used in an application for a marriage license, but it does not even need to be anything scandalous. Again, age is checked as part of the process already, and no adoption agency will be handing a child over to a person celebrating their 70th birthday. Also again, medical tests are already involved. What about an infertile couple including a person dying of cancer in a matter of months? Such a situation would be far from this “ideal” for children, and yet no state or activist shows interest.

b) Fear of authoritarianism. To paraphrase: The state hopes to avoid being authoritarian, as authoritarian states tend to fail, but it also aims to promote its interests. The state thus chooses tools with the greatest influence and smallest footprint (the difference between influence and footprint?). In child rearing, “heterosexual marriage only” is one such tool to get what the state wants, children in this "ideal" family. Infertile couples, though they shouldn't be married, are included purposefully, out of fear, to keep the government from collapse.

i) The state has many other aims it satisfies with infertile marriages. How it is then decided that the state is acting out of fear in satisfying these aims? While aiding in child rearing may be arguably one of the largest concerns, it is one that still argues for marriage rights for same-sex couples in about a third of the same-sex headed homes in some of the most conservative states (1), and growing quickly (4) . On top of that, there are many others interests, and the evidence shows the state knows this. Marriage is not just a one purpose tool, useless for anything but one main purpose. We recognize marriages knowing they are both infertile (sometimes insisting on it) and that we’d not want the couple to raise any children either, because the accurate classification of couples benefits everyone. Isocrat.org maintains a list of these benefits to state interest (Related Article), but, plainly, the state saves resources and social conflict when it treats couples as couples. The public only pays more in a limited number of marriages, in cases that apply both to straight and gay couples (e.g. a 80-year-old who marries on his death bed to a wealthy 30-year-old limits the tax dollars the state would normally take).

ii) Some questions must be answered if this is the proposed and honestly held mechanism. For instance What makes a footprint too big in meeting the state’s goal, especially compared to the footprint already in place? Somehow, it is okay to step on families headed by same-sex couples, but not on others who do not meet the “ideal”, even those marriages that do far less in producing and raising healthy children than the average family headed by a same-sex couple. It is also important to ask an opponent, if this is the case, what reason is there to believe government stability would be threatened by, say, a constitutional amendment to keep convicted felons from marriage? Or even keeping old women from marriage?

iii) For some a “small footprint” may be a rehash of the simplicity argument repackages in different terms. That argument has been addressed above.

iv) Alternatively “footprint” could indicate the number of lives altered. Even here the number of infertile couples is just above the percentage of gays and lesbians in the population (5). The percentages of marriages occurring with a couple in their 70’s is quite small too, not to mention marriages with felons (or between cousins). The numbers affected by the sexual anatomy restriction is only going to grow (4), and that includes a host of non-gay grandparents, cousins, aunts, and so on, in the group negatively affected by the status quo as well. How is the opponent deciding the shoe size of a footprint is too big, without singling out gay couples with a different standard?

v) The current state of law here is already authoritative and dehumanizing, and unstable. This argument can be more of an argument to have an even smaller footprint and change the law rather than keep it as is. For one example, can you imagine making it constitutionally legal to boot families from their homes because of any other inborn trait? Can you imagine what it’s like to be a parent under threat from your state, and having your children also treated as second class citizens? There are many concerns and dehumanizing hurdles for the family headed by same-sex parents (Related isocrat.org article).

Some families are brought to using welfare and food stamps because their provider (or main provider) has been killed, sometimes even in military service, and their sex allows them and their children no claim to what a different sexed person would inarguably deserve. There are families who have half their children covered on their health insurance and the others uninsurable; they take state support, as they are technically the children of an unwed, jobless, stay-at-home parent. Can anyone say that is not dehumanizing treatment by the state? It is not authoritarian to keep these rights and responsibilities from families because the M or F on a birth document is not right? Those same families, if something tragic happens, can relatively easily have children removed from parent and siblings. When the claim is that such is no big deal, or that this is just about some feel good “me too” PC-ness, or the retort is a dressed up “stop hitting yourself”, there is not much more to say to such a hardened-heart. These are real people, finding stable relationships and building families, as was inevitable the first day a gay kid came out and his parents lovingly accepted him. They are following one of the most common, intrinsic, and important pursuits of pure and selfless human happiness they will ever have. To legally and constitutionally hobble them and their children for someone’s sex should be troubling; it should feel authoritarian. At least it should not be trivialized.

vi) Fear of authoritarianism summary. Simply, if we want people to care about society, give their family a stake in it and make the forceful extraction of funds from them fair. Arguing that equal rights is no big deal, when it has to do with a person’s sex should feel distasteful. It should seem socially dangerous. In a decade or so, when most people know a same-sex headed family, have gone to school with their children, have been their neighbors, and so on, things will not look so forgivable. The proposed compelling interest here won’t look so compelling, and the other compelling interests of marriage will be remembered. As the troubles that accumulate for not having such marriages recognized become noticed by more people in their personal lives and in the actual real-world price tag for the state, this restriction will begin to look more intolerably authoritarian to the average person, as it is.

c) Tying up fertile humans. Some opponents may go on to say infertile heterosexual couples are included in order to keep from spreading STD's or to keep the fertile half from impregnating an unmarried person. It is an easy angle to debase, one seemingly born out of misunderstanding of what it means to be gay, but it is often used.

i) The same argument applies to gay couples. Gay men may marry bisexual men, and STD's are spread by all sorts of sex.

ii) We may still test both members of the couple for fertility.

iii) This goes against part of the supposed goal, again, by encouraging fertile people to keep from producing children in "ideal" marriage. Here fertile heterosexuals are encouraged to divorce or produce children not to be raised by both biological parents, if they want to raise a biological child.

d) Economic ideal: Marriage law, as is, is argued to have been created to deal with straight couples only, regardless of fertility; it is ideally suited for them but not same-sex couples who would need a whole other set of economic rules. Differing economics is the reason infertile heterosexuals are included in the ideal group, but gays are not.

i) This argument primarily shows that the person using it is going off stereotypes regarding gays and lesbians. Nationally, over 60% of children are in day care (6), indicating most families now do not meet the original economic aims of marriage. Nevertheless, same-sex parents are about as likely to have a stay-at-home parent as heterosexual couples (7). In this way many same-sex headed families actually meet the traditional reasons behind the economics of marriage law (e.g. a claim to a breadwinner’s income, health benefits, social security, and so on) better than the majority of straight couples who have two income families and are less economically interdependent.

Poor Premises Given all the above, a lot of this argument about fertile and infertile couples is really not the point, though it will often be argued endlessly. Infertile and life-long childless couples are included in marriage because their inclusion meets the goals of marriage and the state, if not every goal, and using this tool for many ends in no way diminishes its usefulness. Marriage is more of a swiss army knife than a hammer, and using the scissors doesn't dull the knife's blade.

Furthermore, though everyone agrees, most of the time, the best parents for a child are going to be the biological parents, the problem is that, to follow the general rule for the exceptions, many people and their children will be harmed. In short, there are problems with the premises of the ideal family argument, not only in the explanation of the observations of what the law currently is and what most opponents of gay marriage actually promote outside of this issue.

1. Marriage as a Benefits Package: Often marriage law in the ideal argument is looked at and posed as some sort of government incentive, as if it were a wrapped present. This is greatly wrong, and it promotes an unrealistic view of matrimony. There are rights and responsibilities, and sometimes they are the same thing for different beholders.

Marriage law can be downright harsh and punitive. Many people, people with children, do not get married, because what a gay couple may see as a right when applied to the family they already love, appears to be a burden to these other couples. Giving their partner rights to their income, taking on responsibility for their debts, and being legally tied to them actually discourages many people from marriage. They are likely to not care much about the other fraction of the law either. If you don’t care enough to want to be financially responsible for and bound to another, hospital visitation and rights to make funeral arrangements are less likely to be high on your list of priorities. Finally, with most families being two income families these days, what were there as more direct benefits for such couples are now largely irrelevant.

This gets to the heart of the causality in the ideal argument. You have to be in love with a person to see the marriage law of this culture as something desirable, otherwise it would be a horrible burden. It is clear private marriages came first, it is a natural human state, and then legal marriage came in response to the way citizens live for their bonding. While it is true the law has been used to reflect the coercive powers of society in, for example, restricting legal marriage by race or status, once private marriages occurred, the law has inevitably stepped up and reformed.

Simply, the “benefits” do not cause people to marry; the private marriage makes the public marriage into a benefit, not the other way around. The law does not cause people to make these lifelong connections and family--as many same-sex couples can clearly attest, people do that selfless bonding anyway.

2. Marriage Law as a Means to Keep Families Together: The argument is made that the law is there to bring and keep families together. This may work in part, but, again, if the familial love is not there, then the law can easily become a motivation to break up an "ideal" family. If you are the breadwinner, it is true you will have to pay, and that may discourage you from cutting ties with a person you do not love or want in your home. Still, marriage law explicitly gives you that option to break the contract. On the other hand, if you are not the main breadwinner, divorce law, a part of marriage law, gives a great motivation to end a marriage. You can get a person you do not love out of your home and still receive support from them. Here we have an example of marriage law promoting split families, betraying the proposed reason the state has being involved with marriage in this argument.

3. The Mechanisms: The assumption is made that these laws encourage the ideal family. As outlined above, it is mainly and far more clearly the families, composed of individuals who go and vote and participate in government, that encourage these laws to accommodate their marriages. Still, assuming it is true, what is the proposed mechanism and is it really desirable? Perhaps there is a small bit of sway to get a man to marry who he would rather not because he could, say, get her on his health insurance, but is that really the mechanism we want in play for marriage? This is an area where coercion is dangerous to families; their decisions should be, as much as possible, their decisions regarding family, not insurance premiums.

Is the hope that marriage law, as is, encourages gay men to marry women for these benefits? Are those who aren't attracted to the opposite sex and only feel a natural coupling to their same-sex under the same ideal? Are intersexed people? Is the ideal family also one gay man and one woman? One would think or hope, even those gay men who have married women would judge such legal gains as poor reasons to choose a particular partner. Regardless, it is the most conservative anti-gay-marriage states that have the highest percentage of same-sex couples raising children (1) . That is either because the children are from heterosexual marriages entered into for coercion and then ended, or gay couples in these states are somehow more compelled to adopt or use fertility treatments. Either way, the imagined interest is not being served by such mechanisms of “encouragement”. The evidence shows the mechanism of this ideal family argument is a failure.

Furthermore, harm is proposed in allowing families headed by same-sex parents equal rights and responsibilities. What is that mechanism? Most often all that will be offered is vague claims that explain nothing, such as saying there is "something special" about man-woman marriage. No one debates each family is somehow "special", or where babies generally come from, but a mechanism of harm must be proposed in order to justify directly and demonstratively harming so many couples, parents, and children.

4. Evidence The premises for this argument are often based on erroneous gut feelings, and very little evidence is presented. In the research, there has been found no significant deleterious effect on the children of gay and lesbian parents (Related isocrat.org article). The negative effects even claimed by anti-marriage equality activists are, more often than not, less severe that those found in groups of people already allowed to marry and encouraged to do so by the same activists (discussed below). For most all children the ideal family is demonstratively with their parents, even their same-sex parents.

Furthermore, there is much evidence that the state finds interest in completely childless marriage, even in marriages it insists be infertile and raise no children (Related isocrat article). Often no counter evidence is given to show the claimed overriding state interest in this argument is not just a tool of debate to conceal other motives. There is also data that demonstrate no noticeable effect of legal gay unions on the jurisdictions where they have been implemented (Related isocrat.org article). In fact, if a claim can be made from the numbers, it would be that the health of heterosexual marriages improves after same-sex couples receive equal legal standing. There are also many bits of evidence showing the benefits legal marriage equality would give to society (Related isocrat article), as well as the inarguable benefit it would have for the percentage of the population of adults and children in same-sex headed households (Related isocrat article). Such often gets overlooked or brushed off, though marriage equality advocates are, without fail, told it’s their duty to produce it.

The burden of proof, though, is not decided by the greatest threat made by one side as to what would happen if the other wins. If I said, for example, we cannot give business licenses to redheads because, if we do, our economy will collapse. I can’t use the direness of that presumed threat to push the burden of argument away from myself and onto my red-headed friend. I’d have work to do as well.

The burden of proof is partly in both camps. Legally, in fact, to discriminate on a person’s anatomy, particularly in a way that clearly harms them, one must demonstrate a “compelling interest” for the state, and thus this argument exists. Same sex couples should not have to show the benefits, to themselves or others, though they easily can and do. They do not need to even explain why they’d be so foolish as to be legally chained to another; they just have to counter the other lawyer’s evidence of compelling interest.

5. Biology is Best: A bit of evidence deserving special attention is that regarding the premise that children always fair best with their biological parents. Most of the time that is the case, but this premise is demonstratably false in many instances. Not only is this not the case for children in need of adoption, it is not the case for those children born using fertility treatments to infertile couples. A great deal of research comparing children conceived naturally and raised by their biological parents to those who were conceived using donated genetic material and/or surrogacy has found that the non-biological parent couples perform better in measures of parenting than the average (8, 9, 10, 11, 12). Furthermore, these children raised by non-biological parents are not only shown to be just as emotionally healthy as any other; they are found to have fewer behavioral problems in school (13).

It is the intent, the sacrifice, the love, and the effort that make a parent; not a similarity in a sequence of nucleic acids.  To be clear, such research certainly does not show these things are lacking from biological parents; most of the time, the exact opposite is true. Nor does it show biological parents perform with lower parenting skills than infertile couples in this research because they are biological parents.  Those would be ridiculous conclusions.  It does show that there is no detectable parental love lost because of a lack of biological kinship, and children do just as well with biological or non-biological parents.  The effect that is shown is that, when people need to become parents in ways other than naturally, many of the less committed will be weeded out and found ineligible by the innate trials and tests of the process.

To illustrate how unreasonable the ideal family argument is, with the premise that biology is best being incorrect, the rest of the argument would insist that to incentivize children into ideal families we need to restrict marriage only to infertile couples. We want the ideal parents, after all, for the children. Fortunately, no one is suggesting that, and anti-gay rights activists are only ignoring why that is when it comes to same-sex couples and their children.

6. A Myriad of Compelling Interests: Again, no one state interest is the interest The state is interested in many aspects of law around marriage, and it is no accident infertile couples are allowed in. The state saves money, it arbitrates potentially costly disputes, it promoted the health benefits of fidelity, and it promotes self-reliance and bonds of family between two groups, and more, and even when no children can come of it. Merely the egalitarian act of giving equal rights regardless of anatomy has value to the state. Simply to call this ideal family the interest here is wrong, misleading.

7. The Heart of “Ideal”: It is argued the "ideal family" for “children” is their biological mother and father. This is obviously not true for many children. We are talking about individual people, not abstractions, mothers, fathers, and children. “Children”, the group, has no feelings thoughts or rights and to assume it does will harm children, the individuals. The more ideal situation for individuals is that they are raised by the people who they have bonded to and have bonded to them, the people who have taken responsibility for them, the people who love them, the people who parent them. For many, the ideal situation is not their biological parents, who again are individuals, some of them quite unfit or even abusive.

For children of same-sex parents, no other parents will do. As with most all families, neither parent is irrelevant or unimportant or able to be replaced. Even replacing one parents with the best parent in the world would be a detriment, as the stranger does not know what the parents know; they are not psychologically bound to the child and do not love them like parents do. Even by the cold perspective of the state, those raising and invested in a particular child are the ideal parents in which the state has a stake here.

But, again, let us pretend the data shows what it does not: a significant detriment to the children of same-sex couples, on average.

To be clear before we move on, it is our position that it would be wrong for another couple to be put under the same unfair scrutiny as same-sex couples. We do not support enforcing the so-called ideal family in the following cases.

For the research, even if half right, one could just as easily claim it is not “ideal” for children to be raised in families where one parent is gay and the other is not. This group of families has a higher than average incidence of cheating and divorce (14, 15, 16), and yet this is the ideal for gay citizens we are to promote? Nevertheless, most all gay men married to women are, unquestionably, the ideal parents for their children; there is absolutely no one else the state should encourage to be the parents.

There are simply many “non-ideal” groups. Fortunately we, most often, aren't bigots, and we do not judge people by the average of a group to which they belong. Easily, it may be shown in the research on average that there are measurable detriments for children of parents who: live in poverty (17), are under twenty years of age (18), had prior marriages (19), have general anxiety disorder or have been diagnosed with depression (20, 21, 22), are deaf (23, 24, 25), are mixed race couples (26), and we could go on and on. The question should be addressed: Is the person using the ideal family argument, or anyone they love and support being legally married in any such groups? It is too easy for people outside the GLBT community to throw the first stone at same-sex couples, even where evidence of similar deleterious effects on children does not exist.

Certainly, each individual in these other groups are most always, undeniably, the ideal parents for their children. The same goes for gay and lesbian parents. Even when their may be a substantial and well established possibility of psychological harm to children, no one is trying to limit marriage by constitutional amendment, for example: schizophrenic parents (27, 28, 29), incarcerated parents (3, 30), and proven deadbeat dads (31). Simply, no movement is aiming to keep them from marriage to somehow promote an imagined ideal family. Why the difference?

By the way you look at and the time at which you apply the word “ideal” (before or after conception or adoption), there are either zero ideal families in the world or many. No couple will be ideal parents. Only by using the first application of the word with same-sex couples, the definition of the Ideal Family no family meets, this argument has been effective in public debate. But, for the rest of the population, those far from the politics and religion surrounding orientation, it is clear none of us are perfect parents, even though most all of us give to our children in ways no one else on earth could.

8. The Attack on Marriage and Family. Perhaps most importantly, the ideal family argument erodes its own foundation. The state is interested in the successful rearing of children. Marriage law increases that success. Therefore we deny marriage law to couples with children?

Currently about a third of cohabitating same-sex couples are raising children, compared to 45.6% of married heterosexual partners (1). These children do already exist and in significant numbers. The children of gays and lesbians, regardless of how anyone feels about their parents, benefit just as much by having their parents bound by law. The state benefits just as much, by not having to catch parents and children with welfare upon a tragedy.

In many ways the borders of marriage moved to include gay couples long ago as much as gay couples changed to fit the new territory. Gays and lesbians changed; society changed. Now, to exclude gays and lesbians, it is really the anti-gay rights activists who are trying to redefine marriage. To ignore the commitment, dedication, love and obligation for a person’s anatomy is the real insult and threat to the institution of marriage. To downplay what matters in the everyday workings of an average marriage for anatomy, to make the dissolution of a person's home legally simple and free of consequence, to make the familial bonds legally invisible for couples who make these connections, couples with children every bit important as any other... That is a threat to the spirit of marriage. Simply, society undermines its own idea of family by turning a blind eye to its best aspects where they are found.

Summary: In the end, all this is somewhat reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s “the crowd is untruth.” It is deceptive to look at the state as an individual, or talk about what is ideal for “children” as what is ideal for one person's child is not ideal for yours. Similarly, individuals make these legal decisions for other individuals, and can not morally hide behind the state. When a citizen goes to the polls and votes to take from his neighbor’s family what his neighbor gives to him, he has betrayed the social contract, the golden rule, and to blame it on the state's imagined interest in some "ideal family" is a copout. It is this sort of sense of entitlement over neighbors, and ability to harm them behind such cover that can threaten a state’s survival, not a small percentage of additional and loving families with equal rights and responsibilities.

Return to the argument against marriage equality for same-sex couples.

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REFERENCES ::

1. Bennett, L.; Gates, G. J. The Cost of Marriage Inequality to Children and Their Same-Sex Parents. hrc.org, (2004).

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Created: 2005-01-01; Last Edited: 2008-06-10; (ID236)