You might recall the awful option faced by the title character in “Sophie’s Choice:” Pick one child or the other. It’s not a choice any mother wants to make. No matter what she chooses, her loss is unutterable.
Nor would any child want to make the same choice in reverse: “Mommy or Daddy, Sally. Pick one.”
But that is the ugly position into which same-sex marriage presses children, except that the children themselves do not get to choose. Someone else chooses for them.
No matter what you might think about same-sex marriage, we know this: Any child raised under a same-sex union faces a tremendous loss -- either no Mommy or no Daddy. In a union where two men or two women are involved, that’s always the outcome.
When Mommy picks a woman or Daddy picks a man as a life partner, the children always lose something enormously valuable and irreplaceable: a mother or a father.
That loss often has tragic consequences for a child. If, for example, you are raised in a home with no father around, the odds that you will drop out of school, that you will take or sell drugs, that you will go to prison, that you will be very poor, and that your children will suffer the same fate you did all skyrocket. That same cycle of hopelessness and crime follows upon the absence of a mother.
You can’t get around this enormous loss by invoking the fatuous lie captured in the title of a recent, famous children’s book, Heather has Two Mommies, simply because she does not. Heather has but one. The other lady is not her mommy; she is the lady Mommy has sex with. Having sex with Mommy doesn’t make you a Mommy any more than drinking milk makes you a calf. And if having sex with Mommy makes you a mommy, then what would Daddy be?
The point here is not remotely homophobic. The point here is not that Mommy and her lover, or Daddy and his, are to be shunned. The point here is that mothers and fathers are fundamentally important in the normal development of children, and therefore in the future of the nation, which depends upon the development and maturation of the next generation. That works best when children have both a father and a mother.
Wise governments and wise citizens do well always to remember that basic fact of life, and to avoid making laws that undermine the traditional family and traditional family roles.
2 comments:
Your conclusions confuse me. There have been numerous studies that show the children of same-sex couples are capable of growing up just as happy and healthy as the children of a conventional couple. Your argument about fatherlessness is in truth related more to socio-economic patterns than to the gender of the children's parents. In fact most of the reasons why they have difficulties growing up is because people don't understand their families and discriminate against them. http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/dev/44/1/127/
Not exactly. Statistically speaking, when a father is missing, bad things happen at a far greater rate. Same goes for a missing mother. It's not simply a matter of money but of upbringing. The presence (or absence) of a role model matters enormously.
Nevertheless, thank you for your helpful and important comment.
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