GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

Periodically marriage defenders’ insistence on marriage matching the traditional family model is met with the objection that infertile couples and seniors past reproductive ages are allowed to marry. Michael Johns, a GDM reader, put it this way:

Procreation is not a valid argument for marriage, because it excludes other groups as well such as individuals with disabilities that won’t allow them to procreate (should they not be allowed to get married either).

But for me, at least, the ability to reproduce is not at the center of my (secular) argument against same-sex marriage. It’s that opposite-sex couples form the kind of family format that I believe is best-suited for the welfare of children. (In case you’re new, I’m not saying gays can’t be good parents; they can. I’m saying whenever possible a child should have both a mother and a father.)

Some infertile and post-reproductive age couples adopt; others plan to never have children but find that a relative dies and they are raising a child to their surprise. The point is that any opposite-sex couple is going to be a part of that ideal format. (Again, if you’re new, I’m not saying all opposite-sex couples are better than all same-sex couples; they’re not. We’re dealing with the ideal here.)

Some research, including that of Judith Stacey, has shown that while children of gay parents are no more likely to be gay, they are more likely to engage in same-sex experimentation. This research is preliminary and controversial, so I’m not asserting that it’s true. I just want to ask: what if it’s true? Do we care?

As someone who is tolerant of same-sex lifestyles but believes gay sex is immoral, I would be particularly disturbed by that finding. I can accept that, gosh, some, most, or nearly all gay people are going to have gay sex. But I certainly don’t want to encourage straight teens to “try out” gay sex in part because that’s what their mothers or fathers do. So if it’s true, I’d see it as another reason to prefer opposite-sex parenting over same-sex.

Finally, what’s the deal with everyone’s non-critical acceptance of the widely claimed “fact” that children of gays are no more likely to be gay? That just seems stupid to me. Of course they’re more likely to be (openly) gay. Some children of heterosexuals never come out or at least not while their parents are alive because of their parents’ homophobia. That’s obviously not a problem with children of gays. Could there be a countervailing force? Or is it possible, just possible, that the researchers find what they want to find, since they are overwhelmingly supportive of gay parenting in the first place?

You’ll notice the site has a new quote on the front screen from our president-elect:

I believe that American society can choose to carve out a special place for the union of a man and a woman as the unit of child rearing most common to every culture. (Dreams from my Father)

To me, Obama’s quote encapsulates my #1 (secular) reason for believing that marriage must be between a man and a woman - that it involves society “carving out a special place” for the best unit of child rearing. (I’ll have more to say on why in a future post.)

I didn’t vote for him, and I’m not a member of his party, but I’m impressed with Obama’s understanding and thoughtfulness when it comes to matters of religion and state. I wrote an essay about this situation for the New York Daily News last October. Here’s an excerpt:

Did you hear about the religious gathering two years ago at which John McCain’s future running mate, Sarah Palin, declared to the conference that “our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition?” Palin also told the faithful gathered that “my Bible tells me” a particular lesson and that “secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square.”

Further, at a televised forum as recently as August, Palin said she opposes same-sex marriage in part because “for me as a Christian, it’s also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.” She has also written two books that describe her Christian faith and its direct influence on her political views.

Pretty scary, huh?

But Palin didn’t say or do any of those things. Barack Obama did.

It has hardly been noticed, but Obama is the most articulate, most passionate defender of the right - perhaps the obligation - of religious voters, candidates and elected officials to mix their faiths, including those informed by the Bible, into their political lives….

Many of the most important causes in this nation’s history - from the abolition of slavery to African-American civil rights to conscientious objection during the Vietnam War - were motivated by the Bible and religious belief. Heck, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted the Book of Isaiah during his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Obama’s stance is firmly within the American tradition, and especially African-American history going back to Frederick Douglass and beyond.

Of course, religious arguments also have supported bad things like slavery, segregation, denying women the vote and other ills. But the question is not whether Obama’s political views are correct. It’s whether people of faith are out of order to express these views as voters, candidates and elected officials. I think there is no question that a healthy democracy should respect people who select and promote positions based on anything from history books to family traditions to favorite opinion columnists and talk radio hosts to - yes - the Bible.

When people call the use of religious motivations for choosing a political stance “a violation of the separation of church and state,” they are factually incorrect. Church-state issues grow out of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” Letting the Bible or any other religious text or belief influence a political actor’s stance has nothing to do with Congress passing laws about the establishment of religion. Pretending it does unfairly disenfranchises people who are more religious than oneself.

Fannie of Fannie’s Room wrote: 

Aside from making a contribution of sperm to procreation, no one has thus far been able to adequately explain what it is that a male father can do that a woman cannot do when it comes to parenthood. David has claimed that while a lesbian can be a good mother to a child, she cannot be a good “father”?

Why? I’m not talking about procreation here, I’m talking about actually raising a child. What is it that it’s inherent in “fatherhood” that makes it impossible for a woman to fulfill this role? Like, what are the actual specific characteristics?

The answer, to me (in part) is that sperm-and-egg are not the only biological functions that relate to parenting. In other words, some of the reasons men and women make different contributions to their children are related to sex, rather than gender (I may deal with gender examples in a future post.)

So, for example:

• Mothers and daughters often (usually?) have an important bonding moment before or during the daughter’s first period. They discuss what menstruation is, why it happens, and what it means. They may buy the daughter’s first tampons together. By contrast, what are two Dads going to do - print out an article from Wikipedia, sit their daughter down, and say “It says here that the, um, fallopian tubes…” Premenstrual syndrome is another experience that fathers simply cannot understand the way mothers can.

• When a son hits puberty, a father does/should talk to the boy about nocturnal emissions and perhaps masturbation. These subjects are awkward and uncomfortable and sometimes filled with shame for most pubescent boys anyway - it’s a conversation that would be much more so with a boy’s mother or mothers.

• Pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding are moments in a young woman’s lifecycle in which her mother usually plays a special role. A father just can’t understand what his daughter is going through.

• Shaving (I’m not kidding) is an important ritual for young men. Lots of men remember fondly learning to shave from their Dads, and it’s not the same to learn it from a mother who only knows how to shave her armpits and legs (if even those - we are talking about lesbians after all).

Fannie has been arguing that gender is constructed. (Makes me wonder if she agrees, a la “Phantom Past” above, that sexual orientation is constructed.) Well, fine. But nobody thinks shaving or pre-menstrual syndrome or nocturnal emissions or breastfeeding are constructed.

There’s more evidence that children need both a mother and a father whenever possible in an unexpected source: gay parenting manuals. These are the experts at gays and lesbians raising children, and several of them acknowledge that when children have two Moms or two Dads, they miss having a parent of the other sex. Some examples:

• The Lesbian and Gay Parenting Handbook says some children accept their lesbian or gay parents, but “some children do express an intense longing for the other biological parent, talking about it frequently and emotionally…. Adolescents take particular interest in both their heredity and in gender-specific role models.” 

• The Lesbian Parenting Book says “It is very normal for children to long about and ask for a father…. It is natural to feel defensive when your child longs for a father. We encourage you to remain patient while she asks questions, sorts out information and comes to terms without knowing her father’s identity, or not having her biological father in her life. She needs to do it…. [Artificially Inseminated] children of lesbian parents may grieve never knowing their biological father.”

• A majority of the Dads in the study described in Gay Men Choosing Parenthood acknowledged “that their children sometimes verbalized a desire for a mother at one time or another.” 

• In For Lesbian Parents: Your Guide to Helping your Family Grow Up Happy, Healthy, and Proud, lesbian Moms are encouraged to ask their daughters “if it’s hard sometimes not having a father. Let her know that you understand that sometimes it is hard.”

• In Gay Dads: A Celebration of Fatherhood, a child, Tyler, whose two Dads no longer live together. When he asks if his mother can come live with him, he is told “She would be welcome, but as a friend.”

There are many other examples. It is stunning to me (just like gay enthusiasm for Mamma Mia! (pdf) and Dreams from my Father) that nobody notices the elephant in the room - gay people acknowledge that children need and/or want a parent of each sex, which should mean that whenever possible we should provide that. However, gay EqualityMania™ sets in and nothing could possibly, ever stand in the way of total equality, no matter who it hurts, including children.

1. You obviously feel that gender matters, or else lesbians could be attracted to men and gay men could be attracted to women; both genders have hands and faces and hearts and can kiss and hug and be aroused and love. If gender didn’t matter, we’d all be bisexual, right? So if gender matters in selecting a partner, shouldn’t it matter in parenting, too?

2. If a child’s parents died, all else being equal, would you rather she was raised by an aunt and an uncle or two aunts (sisters)? Would it matter? Why or why not?

In all these studies of gay parenting, it seems that nobody has asked the children what kind of family structure they want. I would be interested in a survey of orphans asking them if they want a mother and a father, two moms, two dads, a single mom, a single dad, or it doesn’t matter. My hunch is most orphans want both a mother and a father.

Do we really think they don’t know what they’re talking about, and we will “re-educate” them to accept the two Dads they’re getting even if they really want a mother’s touch?

I’d like to ask the children what they want, at try to respect that in placing them in homes.

(This post obviously does not refer to infant adoption.)

Fannie of Fannie’s Room posted some good questions about my statement that lesbians can be good mothers, but not good fathers. Her incisive attempt at creating greater clarity on this important issue is impressive. I thought I’d respond to her here:

I’ve heard this argument before,

Damn, I thought I coined that phrase myself. Oh, well.

but in my humble opinion it’s never been explained adequately. Maybe you can do better than others who’ve tried. First off, where is your scientific evidence demonstrating this?

Well, here is the first part of our crossed-wires problem. I mean my statement primarily ideologically, and so I don’t need to prove it with research and studies. My statement reflects deep moral and social beliefs that don’t need to be defended with studies anymore than my belief that democracy is the best political system. On the other hand, when an LGBT person says “Lesbians can be as good parents as heterosexual couples,” they are perhaps making an ideological statement about their beliefs, but in my experience they often point to the research, which means they are making an academic/scientific point as well. So for your side to “prove your point” you may have to defend your science and your ideology, whereas I (believe that I) only have to defend my ideology.

Specifically, I’m wondering what are the specific characteristics of “fatherhood” that a woman could not possibly perform? And, what are the specific characteristics of “motherhood” that a man could not perform?

Great question, and one that isn’t easy to answer. I believe there ineffable aspects of malehood and femalehood that we learn best from our mothers and our fathers. For example, a father is often best placed to teach his daughter about men, particularly as she begins to date. Sure, a father could teach his daughter about her period, but that conversation is often a unique bonding moment between mother and daughter that I believe is just not replicated by an eleven-year-old girl sitting down with her two Dads and a diagram. Those are just two examples.

Your claim seems to rest upon very rigid and inflexible notions of gender roles that, in my experience, do not exist. Rather, there is great overlap between male/female and scientists have as of yet been hardpressed to identify strictly male or strictly female characteristics.

Again, your comments tend toward clarity on both sides, and I appreciate that. I believe in traditional, but not inflexible, gender roles. Your comments suggest that if scientists find something is “natural” for one sex, then that is a “male” or “female” characteristic - and since science aren’t finding such characteristic, everybody should express only those behaviors that they happen to like. I don’t agree. I think it’s good for parents to encourage their boys to be strong and their girls to be nurturing, for example, all the while being generally accepting of children who also express traits usually associated with the other sex. I hope you can see that I’m not just being ignorant, I’m expressing my values when I choose to raise my kids (if any) with traditional sex roles, and when I hope society rewards families that have what I consider to be the ideal arrangement for raising children with the kinds of roles our society has valued (with some variations) for centuries.

I am well aware that your religion teaches that men and women have certain roles, but I see those roles as creations of your religion, rather than as an accurate observation of reality.

What about the roles of children and adults? Are those a creation of our society or an accurate observation of reality? A post-pubescent 15-year-old “naturally” should have all the rights of an adult, yet our society, and our families, restrict him or her in various ways. You might argue, but those restrictions aren’t arbitrary. I would argue that gender roles aren’t arbitrary either, especially when it comes to childbearing, which only a woman can do.

I am willing to concede that we don’t know whether a woman could be “as good a father” as a man could be.  Taking your statement to its logical conclusion, are you willing to concede that, given the lack of info, a woman could actually be “as good a father” as a man could be? 

Yes. If I saw a fair, impartial, replicated study (perhaps one that both liberals and conservatives helped design) that showed that on gender-related identity and role issues (especially) women parents do (not could) perform just as effectively as fathers do, for both boys and girls, I would have to admit I am wrong on this issue, and I would have to find a different reason to base my (secular) opposition to same-sex marriage. I doubt that would happen, but yes, I would drop this argument in that case.

A June 10 report in the Health section of the New York Times headlined “Gay Unions Shed Light on Gender in Marriage” has led proponents of same-sex marriage to trumpet the news that same-sex marriage may actually be good for marriage as a whole. Comments about the article at the Web sites and print editions of the Human Rights Campaign blog, Marriage Equality News, the Washington Blade, the Volokh Conspiracy, the Huffington Post, Seattle’s The Stranger, and the comments section of this very blog have treated the article as the smoking gun that proves gay marriage is good for America after all.

It’s clear that the alleged differences pointed to in the article, that same-sex couples are “far more egalitarian” and “have more relationship satisfaction” are intended to show that admitting gay couples to the institution of marriage will help marriage altogether. Other very real differences that while perhaps beneficial, would clearly have no influence on straight couples, like the fact that lesbian couples often find their menstrual cycles in sync, or that gay couples frequently share an entire wardrobe of clothes, were not mentioned.

Now, if the experts cited in the New York Times article are reliable on ways same-sex couples are different that make gays look good, surely they are reliable on the ways same-sex couples are different that make gays look, well, less good. All three of the experts directly quoted in the article, Dr. Sondra Solomon, Dr. Esther Rothblum, and Dr. Robert W. Levenson have written other studies that the “marriage equality” movement would surely prefer nobody find out about.

For example, Solomon and Rothblum did a 2005 study together examining the attitudes toward sexual fidelity of couples that entered civil unions in Vermont - a status that provides all state benefits of marriage. More than 50 percent of the male-male relationships reported having arrangements with their partner that allowed for sexual activity outside the relationship. Do “marriage equality” advocates believe that Solomon and Rothblum’s findings about egalitarianism will spill over to the entire society but that their findings about sexual infidelity will not?

In addition, Levenson participated in a 2003 study that stated that compared to married male-female couples, both gay and lesbian couples reported more autonomy and more frequent relationship dissolution. I guess it’s possible that California same-sex relationhips have become more stable and interdependent now that the exact same rights and benefits the state grants are called “marriage” instead of “domestic partnership,” but I doubt it.

Now, it’s possible that some people want marriage to be more egalitarian as well as less monogamous and less stable. Personally, I want none of those things. As an Orthodox Jew, I expect any marriage I enter into to have a fairly traditional division of roles. But surely the expectation of the “marriage equality” activists in publicizing the article citing these experts is that undecided voters who want marriage to become more egalitarian should support same-sex marriage. My response is that their expectation is fine, as long as those voters also want marriage to be more sexually open and more likely to dissolve.

The other options are for gay-marriage activists to withdraw their argument based on the Times article, or to come up with some explanation why these academics are trustworthy in some of their research, but fraudulent in other parts of their research.

I’d like to close by citing Rothblum one more time. She said two years ago that these days the difference when a state grants marriage or a marriage-like status to same-sex couples is “largely symbolic,” which supports my question why the gay movement is spending millions of dollars on a symbolic issue in California when there are many, many actual and painful problems facing LGBT people, especially in states much less friendly than California, that we could be addressing. I have yet to hear a good answer to that question.

I believe that before our society makes a big decision like whether to expand marriage to include same-sex couples, we need to consult every relevant discipline - psychology, history, biology, philosophy, sociology, and more. In my wide-ranging reading about same-sex marriage, I have never read an article that applies the skills of linguists to the issue, and that’s a shame - because linguistics has a lot to offer.

It is widely accepted that the way a language describes a phenomenon reveals the values and experiences of the culture that speaks it. For example, Estonian uses the same word, mägi, to mean both hills and mountains. I’m told that if I ever saw the landscape in Estonia, I’d understand why.

I’m fluent in Hebrew, a language that does not differentiate between liking and loving. Both are ahavah. That probably relates to the relatively low priority Judaism places on romantic love as compared to other cultures.

Serbian has only one word for church, but Polish has two - one meaning “Catholic or any other church” and one meaning “Orthodox church.” The difference may reflect attitudes toward minority Christian religions by the dominant groups in each society.

Finally, we all know that English has only one word for you, but the Japanese language, which is spoken in a nation obsessed with politeness, has thirty words for you.

So it is directly relevant to the issue we’ve been debating that it appears that every language in world history has had a different word for mother and for father. If a group speaking a particular language saw no particular distinction between parents of both sexes, it very well could have used a single word to mean “parent.” That appears to have never happened.

Dr. Jay Jasanoff, the chairman of the linguistics department at Harvard (yes, I said chairman, and yes, I said Harvard), told me he’s never encountered any language without a specific word for mother and a separate word for father. In fact, he said, he “would frankly be surprised if such a language existed.” Confirming his perspective is his colleague Dr. Patrice Speeter Beddor, who chairs the linguistics department at the University of Michigan. She said “All languages with which I am familiar, including languages from many different language families, have words for both mother and father.”

In addition, a professor at UC-Berkeley who asked to remain anonymous so he doesn’t offend his gay friends, said “I have never seen a language that does not have distinct terms for male parent and female parent…. This is the kind of thing that would make the rounds on the linguistic urban myth mill. ‘Say, I’m working in a language that doesn’t have a word for mother.’ I’ve never, in several decades in the field, heard anyone say such a thing.”

So?

Well the first thing we can conclude is that the notion that mothers and fathers provide nothing different for children, is a radical, even revolutionary notion in the context of world history. If not, at least a few of the more than 6,000 languages spoken would have only one word for parent. In my mind, that is sufficient reason to keep marriage between a man and a woman. But let’s say I’m wrong and there are other factors worthy of overriding the linguistic evidence that all cultures have always believed children get different things from their mothers and their fathers.

Nonetheless, do we really have enough evidence to declare that the old way, really the only way of every single culture in history through the very end of the 20th century, had a bigoted and offensive - rather than merely different - idea about children and parenting? Because that is the official policy of the first gay-marriage state, Massachusetts. If you want to run a Boston adoption agency, and to give just a slight preference - not an absolute one, but a tie-breaker preference - to families that provide both a mother and father, you cannot do so without being shut down by the government.

Even if the gay marriage movement has the preponderance of the evidence and is campaigning for the right thing to do, have they really proven their case so overwhelmingly that law enforcement should shut down the businesses of people who agree with with every single society in history until eight years ago?

There’s a word for folks like the gay and lesbian community, among whom I’m one of very few voices to have ever condemned the Massachusetts policy. It’s called arrogance. California voters will be able to decide in November whether to take the gay-marriage movement down a notch.