The Supreme Court will decide soon whether our country can
and should recognize an institution called gay marriage. Nobody seems to asking what marriage actually
is, why there is such a thing in the first place, why it started and what is it
supposed to do. It’s all about who gets
to say what it should look like rather than merely what should it look like.
As argued before the high court, there are 5 issues
here. I say there is really only
one. All the others are legal wrangling
that will all depend on the skill of the lawyers arguing the case. I say there is only one issue, and how that
issue is answered should and will resolve the issue.
Does a child have a right to a father and a mother? We know that for any of a number of reasons,
children don’t have both parents growing up.
Children survive, even do well under those circumstances, though statistically
we know they have more problems than children who grow up with both parents. But nobody has said that it doesn’t matter or
that one is just as good as the other.
But with gay marriage, we will intentionally remove one
parent from the mix right from the start.
The child may still have two adults raising it, but it will not have
either its mother or its father. And not
only will we call this good, we will call this just as good as a two parent family. We will say they are equal. A child doesn’t need its mother; another
adult male is just as good. A child
doesn’t need a father; another adult woman is just as good.
The big problem here is that you will need to wait until
these children are grown before you are able to really answer the
question. These are not lab rats that
you watch over the course of a few years but human beings in a sort of lab experiment
that will take 25 years or so.
In the last few months, I have read a number of articles by
children who have grown up in these circumstances. They have uniformly said that they missed, wanted,
and needed both of their parents. Is
that proof that gay marriage is wrong or bad?
Actually, no, because we haven’t heard from all the children who grew up
like this.
But the real question is:
who has the right, or who gave anyone the right, to make the decision
for a child that it will grow up without one of its natural parents? It takes a man and a woman to create a
child. And we can decide that we don’t
need them after that; their role and responsibility is done? We have an equal alternative to their raising
of their children?
I think our society is rushing to make a decision on
something, because we have been led to think that anything that looks and
sounds like equality and fairness must be right in all circumstances. After all, we won’t see the results of our
work here for another 20 years. By then,
no one will care what these children think.
