Gay Couples Don’t Need Marriage Because They Never Have Children By Accident

America’s Right-Wing’s Ridiculous Anti-Marriage Equality Arguments

I’ve been working to try to understand the recent arguments America’s Right Wing has been trying to make against marriage equality. If you have been following the reports from Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the federal trial that will determine the constitutionality of Proposition 8, or have read, “Gay People Cannot Be Allowed To Marry Because Straight People Cannot Be Trusted?,” my piece detailing the, dare I say, “ridiculous” arguments America’s Right Wing is using against same-sex marriage, you’ll know what I’m talking about. But even well before Prop 8, America’s conservatives have been actively involved in maintaining second-class citizenship for gay and lesbian Americans.

Whether you have or you haven’t been following along, let me share with you (even more of) the reasons why I say America’s Right Wing’s anti-marriage equality arguments are, indeed, ridiculous.

Gay Couples Don’t Need Marriage Because They Never Have Children By Accident is part three in our week-long series, America’s Right-Wing’s Ridiculous Anti-Marriage Equality Arguments. Come back tomorrow for part four.

Part Three: Gay Couples Don’t Need Marriage Because They Never Have Children By Accident

America’s Right Wing has proven it is inherently and even biologically opposed to any idea that wasn’t conceived hundreds of years ago. And they have proven that any gain made by any person or group must result, to their way of thinking, in a loss to someone else, namely, them. In short, as we’ve made clear in this series, to America’s Right Wing, life is a zero-sum game.

For example, let’s look at the newest brand in America’s Right Wing. The “Tea Party,” (also thought of as the militant arm of the GOP,) we have learned, is primarily a bunch of middle-aged, middle class, employed white men afraid of losing their standing and status. They hate that the world is changing, and they see the idea of Christianist, Caucasian males becoming a minority as too much for them to accept. America is, according to them, a “Christian nation.” Again, as they see their “stock” going down, and they see the rise of a more liberal/progressive America, one already with a black president, they are out of control, consumed with fear and anger.

So, the concept of “homosexuals” having the same status and rights as themselves, given all they think they have “lost,” is beyond comprehension — or acceptability.

To America’s Right Wing, the idea that a same-sex couple could be allowed to marry and raise children goes just too far. That two parents are available to love and bring up a child, especially an adopted child, is not a rational concept for them. The needs and benefits to the child are unimportant. They would rather make up science to try to come up with a reason against it.

But real science exists that shows that same-sex parents are just as good as (in fact, some say, better, but we can at least accept diversity is a good thing, no?) than their opposite-sex parenting peers.

As I mentioned yesterday in, ““Values” vs. Science: America’s Right-Wing’s Ridiculous Anti-Marriage Equality Arguments,”

“[T]wo long-term studies recently published found just the opposite. In fact, one of them, a twenty-five year-long and vigorously peer-reviewed study published in the journal Pediatrics, found that adopted children raised by lesbian parents are better-adjusted and do better in school than their opposite-parented peers.”

Add to this the fact that we now have, “a study of gay dads that finds they are more likely than straight ones to focus on parenting over career, at least when their children are young.”

Additionally, as Dana Rudolph (above) also writes,

“During closing arguments for the Prop 8 trial in California, defense attorney Charles Cooper said:

“I really think the state’s main concern or certainly among the state’s main concerns in regulating marriage, in seeking to channel naturally procreative sexual conduct into stable and enduring unions is to minimize what I would call irresponsible procreation. It’s not a good term, but I can’t think of a more serviceable one.

“And that is procreation that is—that isn’t bound by the kinds of obligations and social norms that the marital relationship is, and that often leads to children being raised by one parent or the other or sometimes neither parent. That is a phenomenon that is uniquely centered on naturally procreative sexual relationships between men and women. It is not a phenomenon that the state has to be concerned about with respect to same-sex couples. For a same sex couple to procreate it by definition has to be responsible. It can’t be by accident. That’s the key point.”

“Same-sex parents are by definition responsible. Straight from the mouth of a Prop 8 defender. Wonder if that tidbit will come up in any of the cases challenging bans on adoption by gay men, lesbians, or “unmarried couples” (and for “unmarried couples,” read “gay men and lesbians but we have to phrase it this way or it might be seen as discriminatory”).”

Besides, who ever said that if “gay marriage” is not legalized, we will stop adopting children? Of course we’re going to continue to adopt — or conceive –  children. Many of us want to create families, just as our straight counterparts do. So the idea that arguments against same-sex marriage should have anything to do with raising children is absurd. They are two separate issues.

As I wrote in “Gay People Cannot Be Allowed To Marry Because Straight People Cannot Be Trusted?,”

“The anti-marriage equality folks seem to be saying that if gay people are allowed to marry, children will no longer be raised by their biological parents. As if, somehow, once married, we were going to steal them.”

I promise you, we’re not. Straight couples will continue to, as Charles Cooper, the Prop 8 attorney arguing against same-sex marriage, warned in his closing arguments, “procreate irresponsibly.” And they will continue to give up these children for adoption. And same-sex and opposite-sex couples will continue to offer these children loving homes. Legalizing same-sex marriage will stop none of this, but it will, possibly, lower the rate of divorce.

But most importantly, this “zero-sum” argument, that we can choose families headed by same-sex couples, or not, is beyond the hypothetical — and the absurd. It assumes that if same-sex marriage is not legalized, that there will be no families headed by same-sex parents. Conversely, it assumes that if same-sex marriage is legalized, opposite-sex couples will stop getting married and stop having children. It’s a ridiculously fallacious argument, and it’s the typical argument that conservatives always seem to make, because they see the world as a zero-sum game.

The bottom line is that many same-sex couples will continue to live as married couples, with or without legal recognition. And many of us will continue to form and raise loving families, with or without the “blessing” of the state, or the church.

(image: kevindooley)