This is the gist of what I said in annapolis on Wednesday:
The gay lobby and their sex radical friends want you to believe that the only issue in the same sex marriage debate is equality. That is all they talk about. That is all they want you to think about. All the shouting, and the heated-up rhetoric is designed to keep you from thinking, from asking any questions, indeed, from even forming any questions in your mind.
But there are other issues. Same sex marriage undermines 4 key principles:
1. Biology is the ordinary basis for parenthood.
2. Mothers and fathers are not interchangeable.
3. Children need and deserve a relationship with both of their parents.
4. The government records but does not determine parentage.
If we aren’t even allowed to discuss anything but equality, the sex radicals are asking us to assume a lot of things that we ought to be discussing and debating. Here are some of the things we are being asked to take for granted. Every one of these assumptions has empirical claims and moral presuppositions built into them.
Biology is unimportant for parenthood.
• Kids don’t care.
• The excluded biological parent doesn’t care.
• The mother’s sex partner, who is not a parent by either birth or adoption, is equivalent to a parent by either birth or adoption.
• A mother has no problem sharing the parenting of their children with another woman.
Mothers and fathers are interchangeable as parents.
• Two women can add up to a substitute for a father.
• Two men can add up to a substitute for a mother.
• A father is nothing more than a list of behaviors that fathers do. As long as those jobs get done, it doesn’t matter who does them.
• We are no more than lists of traits. We are not integrated, whole beings, with our gender as a central fact of who we are. It is perfectly ok to decompose ourselves into a bundle of traits, and never put ourselves back together again in an integrated whole.
Children don’t need or deserve a relationship with both their parents.
• All the evidence that seems to show that children benefit from growing up with their own married parents doesn’t really prove anything significant. Those studies confuse marriage, with the number of parents, with the gender of parents, with the biological relationship of the adults to the children.
• Adults get to have what they want and do what they want. Children have to take whatever we give them.
• Having a child is an entitlement. Artificial reproductive technology, including the use of other people’s eggs and sperm, should be available as market commodities. Anyone who can pay is entitled to do anything they want to reproduce.
• Children have no relational rights that adults need respect. As long as they get fed and not beat up too bad, they should be glad to be alive.
Having the state assign parentage, rather than just record the natural reality of parenthood, is no big deal.
• Giving parental rights to the lesbian partner of a mother is no different from giving parental rights to the child’s father.
• Investigating whether a lesbian partner participated in enough child care to count as a parent is not a particularly intrusive infringement of privacy.
• Creating legal criteria, other than biology or adoption, to determine parenthood is not an expansion of the state’s power over the family.
• Assigning parental rights to people who are not related to a child either by birth or adoption is no big deal and will have no impact at all on heterosexual families.
It takes a lot of faith to believe all that.
