ABC or Gay BC
Image via WikipediaHomosexual marriage should not be permitted by law. We as a nation must affirm and protect children’s rights and the primacy of those rights over adults’ aspirations.
Family structures have altered significantly, becoming more diverse and less institutionalized, but nonetheless that in the best interests of children homosexual marriage should remain prohibited. It is not possible to think about marriage separately from filiation: the two questions are closely connected, in that marriage is organized around the child.
Marriage is not merely the contractual recognition of the love between a couple; it is a framework that imposes rights and duties, and that is designed to provide for the care and harmonious development of the child. Foreign examples demonstrate this: countries that have made marriage available to same-sex couples have all, simultaneously or subsequently, authorized adoption by those couples and developed systems for assisted procreation or surrogate gestation, to enable those couples to have children.
By definition these relationships are sterile. It would in fact be incoherent, if couples were regarded as equal, to remove the prohibition on marriage and preserve it for filiation. Making marriage available to same-sex couples therefore presupposes that they will also be given the right to adopt and receive medical assistance for procreation, and even the right to use surrogate mothers, because such couples are not fertile.
The consequences for the child’s development and the construction of his or her identity can only be created by a fictitious filiation by law – two fathers, or two mothers – which is biologically neither real nor plausible.
Many Australians would cite the principle of caution and do not wish to question the fundamental principles of the law of filiation, which are based on the tripartite unit of ‘a father, a mother, a child’. For that reason, logically, we must deny access to marriage to same-sex couples. Andrew Wilkie is simply trying to profile himself.
