IS MARRIAGE A RIGHT?: Mike Pignatello replies to David Benkof
David seems to believe that families and kids can still turn out okay even if one of the parents is gay and the other straight, as he shows with the example of Gene Robinson. And yet we are also told by other SSM opponents that gendered role models are important in the home. So, to throw the question out at the group, would anyone support the notion that, for example, an efffeminate gay man married to a woman could still be an adequate gender role model for the children? Does that the sort of family adhere sufficiently to the norms of society? Does that sort of family still make straight men feel needed and wanted? I am having an impossible time reconciling all the "requirements" that SSM opponents seem to keep heaping onto the idea of "family."
I find it fascinating that, with all the emphasis on gender and marriage and mother and father, no one seems to pay any attention to how gay men and women do not fit neatly into these prescribed gender roles that we keep reading about. Declaring things like "Everyone in the country, gay and straight, has the right to marry" really ignores these gender realities. Gay people often can't and/or won't live up to society's ideals of gender. To presume then that gay parents would provide the best environment for kids if they simply marry the opposite sex seems to ignore how different the idea of "gender" is for different people. So now the anti-SSM camp seems to be saying, "That's okay, you can be who you are, you can be a gay daddy, as long as your child has his/her biological parents in the home." But no one has stopped to ask the question: is a family with an "out" gay parent and straight parent (both biological) really the best environment for a child? Does THAT relationship provide a good example for the child of what real marriage is supposed to be?
These are just a few of the questions that I think challenge the notion that "opposite sex parents + biological parents in the home = the best family for children, always." I think it's folly to presume that gay/straight marriages would automatically result in the ideal relationship for raising children, simply because the parents are (1) of opposites sexes and (2) both related to the child. It's one thing to promote strong families for children, but it's another thing entirely to suggest that gay/straight men and women should build marital relationships that are fundamentally contrary to their nature.
posted by Eve at
6:45 PM | link
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