SAME-SEX PARENTING: Michael Brazier replies to Mark Miller

Miller writes: "Justice Scalia was correct. If you begin to accept homosexuals as people who have the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexuals, then the slippery slope does lead to the right to have your relationship acknowledges the same way heterosexuals do."

To point out the obvious: marriage is not, and never was, reducible to having "your relationship acknowledged." The civil rights argument for SSM works only if marriage can be so reduced.

Miller: "Does [David Bianco] feel that a child with one parent who dies should be taken away and given to a two-parent (opposite-sex, of course) home. Or should the remaining parent be allowed to keep his/her child?"

Elizabeth Marquardt gave the answer to that rhetorical question: "children need and yearn for the mother and father who *created* them." Obviously it's wrong, if a child's father has died, to rob him of his mother also. But it's also wrong to ensure that children never know their father; wrong, even if their mother is the one who ensured it.

Every child has by nature a mother and a father; the point of the state's recognizing marriage is to encourage each child's natural father and mother to discharge their duties to the person they brought into the world. Adoption is a backup, meant for children whose natural father and mother will not or cannot do their duty. When the natural parents fail, any decent citizen may choose to
substitute for them (hence we allow single people to adopt.) But reasoning from adoption policies to marriage is judging the normal by the exceptional.
posted by Eve at 8:49 AM | link

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