GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

GaysDefendMarriage.com reader Mark reacted sharply to my comment in the “Will Marriage Change?” post that marriage in California will soon “no longer automatically contain the ideal configuration for raising a child.”

His response was to point to all the data supporting gay and lesbian parenting, which SSM advocates usually do when I make the point that children need both a mother and a father. So I thought I’d deal with this controversy head-on. I have said, repeatedly and loudly, that gay men can be great fathers and lesbians can be great mothers. My life experience, my instincts, and nearly all the research point to that being true.

But there is no research I know of that shows lesbians can be good fathers, or gay men can be good mothers. I believe there are things we learn both from our same-sex and our opposite-sex parent about masculinity and femininity, and how to relate to both men and women, that cannot be learned from two mothers or two fathers.

Upwards of 95% percent of the human population throughout history has believed that children need both mothers and fathers. Lesbian couples need to understand when they demand equality in parenting (instead of simply demanding not to be rejected out of hand, like they unfortunately are in Florida), they are saying they think a child does not need a father. That is a radical statement. Many people believe that fatherless families are to blame for many of the nation’s ills. Of course those lesbians have the right to argue that fathers don’t matter, but they must make a much more solid case than they have and they should be sensitive to the fact they are trying undermine deeply held beliefs, instead of shrilly carping about “equal rights.”

There’s a certain kind of feminism that insists that women can do everything men can do, and vice versa. But women can’t do everything men can do. Women can’t be sperm donors, and they can’t be fathers (I first learned the last point in a song from Free to Be You and Me when I was in first grade.) Saying that women can’t be fathers isn’t sexist; it’s a fact of nature and biology. I understand that many LGBT people believe that fathers don’t matter; I just wish they would say that, rather than focusing on “equality” rhetoric that kind of misses the point.