Surely a parent’s right to be in a direct, custodial relationship with his/her offspring lies not within the realm of property law, as if the child were something owned. Rather, this right is a natural one that is universal and self-evident. The child’s right to be in a direct, nurturing relationship with his/her parents is its reciprocal. Children “belong” to their parents only to the extent that parents “belong” to their children.
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When marriage policy and cultural narrative deviates from the reality that one man plus one woman makes a baby, we end up with scenarios such as the one described by author Andrew Soloman:
When I met John, who is now my husband, he told me that he had had some friends, Tammy and Laura, for whom he had been a sperm donor, and that they had a son named Oliver, of whom he was the biological father. A few years later, they asked him to be a sperm donor again, and they produced a daughter, Lucy. A good friend of mine from college had gone through a divorce and said that she really longed to be a mother, and I said how much I would love to be the father of her child. And so we decided to produce a child through an IVF process. John and I then wanted to have a child who would live with us all the time, and we decided to use an egg donor, and Laura, the lesbian who had carried Oliver and Lucy, offered to be our surrogate as a way of thanking John for providing her with a family. So the shorthand is: five parents of four children in three states.
This is truly human trafficking. Manipulating children into existence to satisfy the desires of adults. In Andrew Solomon’s “post-nuclear” family, as he calls it, the four children living in three states were conceived with the intent to separate them from one of their biological parents. The desires of the five adults were satisfied. The rights of the four children- to be known and raised by their biological parents were not. The UN gets this one exactly right. Article 7 in their Convention on the Rights of the Child states, “The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.” The right to something that you cannot produce yourself is no right at all. As soon as a homosexual couple can produce a child without any assistance from others, then they absolutely have a right to have a child and the right to marry
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I am not so naïve as to say that gay marriage is the biggest or only threat to children having access to their mother and father. Pre-marital sex, cohabitation and divorce are statistically a greater risk to children. But please note that there are no wide-spread efforts to institutionalize, glamorize and legally incentivize those family arrangements. Frankly, if there were? I would oppose them too.
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I am not so naïve as to say that gay marriage is the biggest or only threat to children having access to their mother and father. Pre-marital sex, cohabitation and divorce are statistically a greater risk to children. But please note that there are no wide-spread efforts to institutionalize, glamorize and legally incentivize those family arrangements. Frankly, if there were? I would oppose them too.
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For much of my adult life I was content to keep my opinions on the subject of marriage to myself. I was (and still am) sickened by the accusation that I was bigoted and anti-gay for my belief in natural marriage. For many years those tactics kept me quiet. I didn’t seek a venue where I could share my views. But I have come to realize that my silence, and the silence of others, has allowed for the conversation to be dominated by those who claim that only animus, ignorance, or indoctrination could lead one to oppose “marriage equality.”
