Opinion:    “Gay marriage threatens social survival by severing procreation from marriage. It undermines public interest in favoring relationships required to perpetuate the race.

"

Fact:  It is doubtful that there is any official public interest in perpetuating “the race”. The “species” is probably what’s meant here, but government doesn’t generally have an interest in maximizing the number of babies born. Again, North Carolina’s marriage licensing laws have no presumption of favoring procreation of any kind, and procreation was popularized first by early humans interested in perpetuating the species long before the concept of marriage occurred to anyone.

Scientifically, the best way to perpetuate the species is to maximize the number of offspring cared for in advantageous social units who procreate and start the cycle again. And yes, those advantageous social units involve careful controls against excessive destructive forces like intolerance, rejection, exclusion, and discrimination. The destructive forces of human enslavement, the sale of children, and the condemnation of children for inherent sexual-orientations are all regrettable examples for us of how not to create advantageous social units.

Legal marriage is the formalization of various rights and responsibilities of two people, whether they are parenting children or not. There may be efforts by species-perpetuation proponents to make all out-of-wedlock procreation illegal, but nothing in North Carolina marriage law favors procreation.

The United States House of Representatives is currently spending 2 million dollars to defend the Defense of Marriage Act by arguing, in part, that DOMA is necessary to “promote responsible procreation”. The attorneys say that current research on outcomes for children of same-sex couples is flawed and limited. Even if these attorneys were not intentionally ignoring the studies which answer their concerns, like the Rosenfeld study, they are ignoring the official statements of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the National Association of Social Workers, the Child Welfare League of America, and the North American Council on Adoptable Children: gay parents raise children just as well as straight parents do. The outcomes from same-sex parents can actually be better than for straight parents, if looking just at the two groups as a whole, because same-sex couples tend to have higher education levels and incomes.

--

http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/DOMAfiling.pdf

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/20/doma-defense-lawsuit-house-representatives-gay-power_n_1021009.html