FAMILY'S VALUE: WHY GAY MARRIAGE BENEFITS STRAIGHT KIDS: Jonathan Rauch

[OK, I meant to highlight this quite some time ago, but it got lost in the flurry, so I'm glad IGF is reprinting it. Elizabeth Marquardt replied to part of it here. --Eve]

...Advocates who say that gay marriage is just a matter of civil rights are wrong. It certainly is a civil rights issue, just as it is a moral issue; but it is not only a civil rights or moral issue. It is also a family policy issue--the most important family policy issue now facing the country. Gay marriage is not a civil right worth having if it will wreck straight marriage or leave millions of children bereft. But it won't. In fact, gay marriage's denial, not its recognition, poses the greater risk to American kids.

The 2000 census counted about 160,000 same-sex-couple households with one or more children. Those children, of course, would be directly affected if their parents got married, and there seems to be little dispute that the effects would be positive. Marriage would, to begin with, give their families the additional legal security that marriage provides. The children would have, as Evan Wolfson notes in his book Why Marriage Matters, "automatic and undisputed access to the resources, benefits, and entitlements of both parents."

Marriage law is rich with provisions ensuring that if one spouse meets with death or disability, the other can carry on--for the good of the kids. Moreover, marriage itself makes couples better off. Marriages are more durable than co-habitations. Many gay couples who have wed in San Francisco and Massachusetts have attested that the act and fact of marriage has deepened and strengthened their bond--sometimes to no one's surprise more than their own.

lots more--read the whole thing
posted by Eve at 10:35 AM | Link |

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