Gay marriage does not link a child to a mother and father
Image via WikipediaChanging the definition of marriage would thus be a blow to parenthood generally, with the State withdrawing its interest in promoting the stability of parenthood.
It is interesting that when Victoria legislated to permit surrogacy, through the Assisted Reproductive Technology Act 2008 it introduced the concept of "substitute parenthood" and the first casualty was fatherhood.
There are no fathers in the legislation, just mothers and parents. Everything turns on the woman who gives birth and her relationships and those whom she appoints to be the substitute parents.
The significance of being a father to a child has been completely lost in the new law. Those who are most harmed by that are the children who no longer have a right to both a father and a mother, and their biological connectedness to a father no longer has any status in the law.
By declaring a legal equivalence between same sex relationships and marriage, the revisionist approach would further bury the rights of children, because they would cease to be the focus of marriage. Marriage would be about adults only and, in that sense, self-serving for them.
The significance of the current legal concept of marriage is about securing the relationship of the child to both a mother and a father. Marriage involves the couple committing to be parents together through their love for each other. If you take that out of the meaning of marriage it becomes just like any other relationship, of meaning to the couple, but of no direct relevance to anyone else.
In redefining marriage, the law would teach that marriage is fundamentally about adults’ emotional unions, not complementary bodily union or children, with which marital norms are tightly intertwined.
Since emotions can be variable, viewing marriage essentially as an emotional union would tend to increase marital instability. It would also blur the distinction between marriage and friendship. Ordinary friendships are not always permanent and exclusive.
Emotional unions need not be either, and so the expectation of marriages to be permanent and exclusive will make less and less sense.Less able to understand the rationale for these marital norms, people would feel less bound to live by them.
And less able to understand the value of marriage itself as a certain kind of union, even apart from the value of its emotional satisfactions, people would increasingly fail to see the intrinsic reasons they have for marrying or staying with a spouse when one’s feelings for the other change.
In other words, a mistaken marriage policy would distort people’s understanding of the kind of relationship that spouses are to form and sustain. And that is likely to erode people’s adherence to marital norms of
permanence and exclusivity that are essential to the common good because children need them.
The State records marriage to ensure it is not taken lightly. State involvement tests a couple’s mutual consent to each other and to the purposes of their marriage. But this State involvement can only make sense if one of the purposes inherent in marriage is children.
Through the State, society discourages marrying people from failing their obligations to each other, and hence to their children. Likewise, the State records the births of children, the deaths of their natural parents, and marital dissolution, all in the best interests of children.
Similarly, the State now tracks the complexities of assisted reproductive technology – the use of donors and surrogates – again for the sake of children. (However, we think these technological practices fragment parenting. When a child gains a committee of parents, her origin and identity lose definition. She is put at risk by practices that dissipate the security of relationship to her natural mother and father.)
Revising marriage at home and at school
Marriage has been placed under strain through other social and legal developments. Easy divorce for example has already worn down the ties that bind spouses to something beyond themselves and thus more securely to
each other. Endorsing same-sex marriage would mean cutting some remaining but most important threads.
The attraction of the marital norms is the deep (if implicit) connection in peoples’ minds between marriage, bodily union, and children. Enshrining the revisionist view would not just wear down but tear out this foundation, and with it any basis for reversing other recent trends and restoring the many social benefits of a
healthy marriage culture.
Those benefits redound to children and spouses/parents alike. Because children fare best on most indicators of health and wellbeing when reared by their wedded biological parents, the further erosion of marital norms would adversely affect children, forcing the State to play a larger role in their health, education, and formation more generally.
As for adults, those in the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of society would be hit the hardest by the weakening of marriage. Protecting and supporting marriage is an economic advantage in the rearing of children. Supporting marriage as a relationship between parents or potential parents is in the interests of the State.
A factor to be considered is that if the concept of marriage is revised in the law so that it is no longer about relationships that may produce children, then our schools will be obliged to teach that revisionist concept. It is one thing to say that the law has nothing to do with what two men or two women do in their private life, it is quite another to change the law to promote those relationships.
If marriage is redefined, then that is what we are going to have to teach and affirm to our children and in our schools. Why should a minority lifestyle so influence curriculum? Why should teachers be prevented from teaching that marriage is primarily about children?
