Opinion:   “Having a parent of two different races is just not the same as being deprived of your mother or your father.



Fact:  Since legal marriage - gay or straight - brings no requirements to parent a child, and children are being legally raised in all manner of settings, this argument is invalid. It is disingenuous to deny two gay men marriage because any potential children “would be deprived of a mother”, while simultaneously saying two straight people can be legally married with no proof that they plan to have or adopt children, are fertile, intend to love their children, plan to even live in the same household, or plan to stay married after the birth announcements are mailed. Until parenting is made a requirement of marriage, it’s not rational to argue that same-sex marriage leads, inherently, to this deprivation.

In the event, though, that same-sex households do include children (as they increasingly do), the argument still fails. Based on current science, every child has had a biological mother and father, so this argument appears to refer to the absence of non-biological mothers and fathers. The argument goes: same-sex couple parenting should be illegal because every child must have a parenting father and mother. Since there’s no similar denunciation of single-parent adoptions or continuing as a single parent after a spouse dies, the argument is that if there are two parents involved, one must be biologically male and the other female. In other words, we’re told, it’s terrible for a child to have two mothers, but the law and our culture have no complaint when a child has one mother and no father. This relies on the postulate that two loving parents are worse than one loving parent, which in turn relies on the full suspension of reason.

I’ve just read a recent news story about a young woman in California who, on learning that her life would likely end in 3 months, set about preparing for the only thing she wanted: a wedding. The entire community rallied, and money was raised to make sure it happened. No children were likely, and there were probably extenuating reasons, but essentially, she just very much wanted to be married. Our culture responds to that desire.

All these lines of argument also ignore the multifaceted aspects of parenting we see, and support, every day. There are many sources of “mothering” and “fathering” in a child’s life. Each family constructs its own matrix according to its needs, and if it’s decided that traditional mothering and fathering are important, it would be counter-evidential to rely only on female and male parents, respectively, for those roles.