MARRIAGE, STATE INTEREST, AND KINSHIP: Michael J. Bruno replies to Marty McKeever

[Michael J. Bruno is a graduate student in biochemistry and structural biology.]

Marty McKeever makes some very important points about biological kinship when he says,

"What is missing though, is the fact that in a traditional family, biological kinship also comes hand in hand with a legal kinship bond. This SHOULD make the bonds TWICE as strong as either one alone (and it has been implicitly interpreted that way in most custody cases)."

But what he describes is less a biological kinship than an emotional kinship formed by the essence of parenthood. If a married woman has an affair that results in pregnancy but her husband is unaware that the child is not genetically linked to him, he has no less a bond with that child had it been biologically his. He treats that child as his own and the bond, which Marty calls biological, is really the emotional bond that a father forms with his developing child as he prepares for his role as a parent. There is no "magic bond" because a parent shares half a genome with this child.

He concludes by saying, "It seems like a stretch, I know, but we remove the grave deference to biological kinship at our own peril. Same-sex marriage makes a legal precedent for doing just that." I would argue that it is more of a peril to equate a mere biological kinship with the extremely important emotional kinship formed by actual parenting. I would hope that Marty would be able to see the very real difference between the kinship a sperm donor has to any of his biological offspring and the one that a sterile husband has to the child his wife bore. The value of that man's parenthood would never be called into question because he did not have "biological kinship" to his child. But he would call into question the parenthood of the adoptive, non-biological parent in a lesbian relationship. It seems to me that making this argument in order to prevent two homosexuals from getting married is a specious one and should best be forgotten.

posted by Eve at 1:54 AM | link

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