Normally I don't post this kind of thing on the boards. I'm just not a fan of political arguments. However I thought this one was interesting because of who had written it.


Elisabeth
PS Let me know if I'm getting people in trouble by posting it in it's entirety. I wasn't sure how to do a link at the host site.


Commentary: Protecting Marriage to Protect Children
by David Blankenhorn

Note: This column first appeared in the Los Angeles Times on Sept. 19,
2008.

I'm a liberal Democrat. And I do not favor same-sex marriage. Do those
positions sound contradictory? To me, they fit together.

Many seem to believe that marriage is simply a private love
relationship between two people. They accept this view, in part,
because Americans have increasingly emphasized and come to value the
intimate, emotional side of marriage, and in part because almost all
opinion leaders today, from journalists to judges, strongly embrace
this position. That's certainly the idea that underpinned the
California Supreme Court's legalization of same-sex marriage.

But I spent a year studying the history and anthropology of marriage,
and I've come to a different conclusion.

Marriage as a human institution is constantly evolving, and many of its
features vary across groups and cultures. But there is one constant. In
all societies, marriage shapes the rights and obligations of
parenthood. Among us humans, the scholars report, marriage is not
primarily a license to have sex. Nor is it primarily a license to
receive benefits or social recognition. It is primarily a license to
have children.

In this sense, marriage is a gift that society bestows on its next
generation. Marriage (and only marriage) unites the three core
dimensions of parenthood — biological, social and legal — into one
pro-child form: the married couple. Marriage says to a child: The man
and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love
and raise you. Marriage says to society as a whole: For every child
born, there is a recognized mother and a father, accountable to the
child and to each other.

These days, because of the gay marriage debate, one can be sent to bed
without supper for saying such things. But until very recently, almost
no one denied this core fact about marriage. Summing up the
cross-cultural evidence, the anthropologist Helen Fisher in 1992 put it
simply: "People wed primarily to reproduce." The philosopher
and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell, certainly no friend of
conventional sexual morality, was only repeating the obvious a few
decades earlier when he concluded that "it is through children
alone that sexual relations become important to society, and worthy to
be taken cognizance of by a legal institution."

Marriage is society's most pro-child institution. In 2002 — just
moments before it became highly unfashionable to say so — a team of
researchers from Child Trends, a nonpartisan research center, reported
that "family structure clearly matters for children, and the
family structure that helps children the most is a family headed by two
biological parents in a low-conflict marriage."

All our scholarly instruments seem to agree: For healthy development,
what a child needs more than anything else is the mother and father who
together made the child, who love the child and love each other.

For these reasons, children have the right, insofar as society can make
it possible, to know and to be cared for by the two parents who brought
them into this world. The foundational human rights document in the
world today regarding children, the 1989 U.N. Convention on the Rights
of the Child, specifically guarantees children this right. The last
time I checked, liberals like me were supposed to be in favor of
internationally recognized human rights, particularly concerning
children, who are typically society's most voiceless and vulnerable
group. Or have I now said something I shouldn't?

Every child being raised by gay or lesbian couples will be denied his
birthright to both parents who made him. Every single one. Moreover,
losing that right will not be a consequence of something that at least
most of us view as tragic, such as a marriage that didn't last, or an
unexpected pregnancy where the father-to-be has no intention of
sticking around. On the contrary, in the case of same-sex marriage and
the children of those unions, it will be explained to everyone,
including the children, that something wonderful has happened!

For me, what we are encouraged or permitted to say, or not say, to one
another about what our society owes its children is crucially important
in the debate over initiatives like California's Proposition 8, which
would reinstate marriage's customary man-woman form. Do you think that
every child deserves his mother and father, with adoption available for
those children whose natural parents cannot care for them? Do you
suspect that fathers and mothers are different from one another? Do you
imagine that biological ties matter to children? How many parents per
child is best? Do you think that "two" is a better answer
than one, three, four or whatever? If you do, be careful. In making the
case for same-sex marriage, more than a few grown-ups will be quite
willing to question your integrity and goodwill. Children, of course,
are rarely consulted.

The liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously argued that, in many
cases, the real conflict we face is not good versus bad but good versus
good. Reducing homophobia is good. Protecting the birthright of the
child is good. How should we reason together as a society when these
two good things conflict?

Here is my reasoning. I reject homophobia and believe in the equal
dignity of gay and lesbian love. Because I also believe with all my
heart in the right of the child to the mother and father who made her,
I believe that we as a society should seek to maintain and to
strengthen the only human institution — marriage — that is
specifically intended to safeguard that right and make it real for our
children.

Legalized same-sex marriage almost certainly benefits those same-sex
couples who choose to marry, as well as the children being raised in
those homes. But changing the meaning of marriage to accommodate
homosexual orientation further and perhaps definitively undermines for
all of us the very thing — the gift, the birthright — that is
marriage's most distinctive contribution to human society. That's a
change that, in the final analysis, I cannot support.

David Blankenhorn is president of the New York-based Institute for
American Values and the author of The Future of Marriage.