GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

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.

Many California gays and lesbians have pledged to do anything necessary to overturn Proposition 8, particularly by putting another initiative on the ballot in 2010. This effort is unlikely to be successful, particularly because 2008 offered many advantages that 2010 will not. These include:

• With a Democratic president elected in 2008, 2010 is likely to be a better-than-average year for the Republicans.

• It is well-known that in California a few percent of the voters vote no on all the initiatives in order to reject any changes. That means the gay community had the advantage of those few points in 2008; it will have the disadvantage of them in 2010. (Hat tip: Dale Carpenter)

• In 2008, Barack Obama was running for president, a candidate who excited liberal voters and helped draw them to the polls, even though his endorsement of “No on 8″ was tepid at best. He will not be on the ballot in 2010.

• In 2008, Attorney Gen. Jerry Brown changed the ballot title in a way that gave the advantage to the “No” side by focusing on how the initiative took away rights. In 2010, Brown may be running for governor, and it is hard to predict what he will do.

There has never been a successful initiative campaign to implement gay marriage, and all but one of the 30-something initiatives on gay marriage have gone against the gay community’s position.

The gay community’s favorite kinds of arguments, about “civil rights” and “discrimination” and “equality” didn’t work in 2008. Will it repeat the same failed strategy? Other strategies, such as those that actually feature gay men and lesbians, may be even more risky.

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 EqualityManiaâ„¢ sets in and nothing could possibly, ever stand in the way of total equality, no matter who it hurts, including children.

The Newsweek cover story described itself as a “religious case” for gay marriage, but it certainly was not a Jewish case. The argument was almost wholly based on the Bible, and while some Protestants take the Bible literally word for word, 99.9 percent of Jews do not (see my Leviticus Traps). A Jewish case for gay marriage, if such a thing was thinkable, would have to deal not only with Biblical texts (they shall be as one flesh, anyone?) but the Talmud (which forbids same-sex civil and religious marriage to Jews and to gentiles), the codes of Jewish law, and modern responsa. There are a tiny number of Bible-only Jews, known as Karaites, and they number maybe 25,000 in the world, to be generous. The cover story was “A liberal Christian case for gay marriage” – which is hardly shocking, since liberal Christianity has been moving in that direction for a long time anyway! Harumph.

A comment on the Rick Warren controversy: the stunning thing in the whole conversation is that most everyone seems to forget that Warren has the same position on gay marriage as Barack Obama. (Hat tip: GayPatriotWest.) It seems a lot of gays and lesbians think Obama doesn’t mean it when he says he opposes gay marriage, and Democrats like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton probably don’t. But Obama has spoken eloquently about why he opposes same-sex marriage:

• “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.” (The Audacity of Hope, 2006)

• “I don’t think marriage is a civil right.” (10/26/2004)

• “I believe marriage is a union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God is in the mix.” (8/17/2008)

• “Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.” (6/28/06)

These are not the words of someone taking a position out of political expediency. Just because Obama opposed Proposition 8 (as I did, by the way) doesn’t mean he supports gay marriage. Call me naive, but I think Obama means it. I really think his position on marriage and my position on marriage are not that far off.

Now, if someday we find out that Obama has been a secret SSM supporter all along, he’s still got my respect for expressing what I think about marriage better than I ever could.

This piece appeared in the Jerusalem Post and the San Francisco Sentinel December 10 of last year. I thought I would post it (and in coming days, other things I wrote after July 13 when the blog went on hiatus) in case people would like to see what I was doing when not blogging.

Some excerpts:

Just as many Jews tend to gravitate to liberal positions on a variety of issues, the segment of the Jewish community favoring same-sex marriage has grown larger and louder in the past few years.

That’s unfortunate, because if any issue has a “Jewish view,” it’s this one, and that view opposes redefining marriage.

Some reasons:

• First and foremost, same-sex marriage is against Jewish law. “So what?” many have argued, “we don’t try to ban pork or outlaw spending money on Shabbat.” But unlike those two transgressions, the prohibition of same-sex marriages – both religious and civil – is a Noahide law, as explained in the Talmud (Masechet Hullin). That means the ban on same-sex marriage, like the bans on adultery and murder, also apply to non-Jews. We therefore have a strong interest in rejecting such nuptials, regardless of the religion of the participants.

Even the increasingly liberal Conservative movement is on the record favoring man-woman marriage. Every paper on homosexuality ever passed by that movement’s Law Committee has either rejected same-sex marriage or taken no stance on it. Every paper embracing same-sex marriage has been voted down.

Rather than accusing people who support the traditional definition of marriage of imposing Jewish law on people of other faiths, it’s more useful to understand that support as an attempt to get the US government to reflect our values, which people on every side of every issue try to do all the time.

Also:

• Same-sex marriage hurts children. Gays can be wonderful parents, but children whenever possible should have both a mother and a father. Think of it this way: A lesbian can be a very good mother, but she cannot be a good father. Jewish tradition specifies different roles for mothers and fathers. For example, the Talmud states that a father should teach his child to swim. The Midrash says mothers should introduce their children to Torah. There are also intangible notions of what it means for a girl to become a woman, and how a man should treat a woman, for example, that one learns best from one’s mother and father.

However, under same-sex marriage in Massachusetts and California, legislatures and courts have required adoption agencies and fertility doctors to ignore whether a family provides both a mother and a father in providing services. In Massachusetts, in fact, if an adoption agency gives mother-father families even a slight tiebreaker preference, it faces being shut down by the government.

The more same-sex marriage succeeds, the quicker the idea will take hold throughout the government and society that favoring man-woman marriage is a kind of bigotry akin to racism. Teachers will be punished if they teach that marriage is a union of a man and a woman. Students who express distaste for same-sex marriage and state that they only want an opposite-sex spouse may even be reprimanded for being closed-minded.

I know that liberal Jews in particular are unlikely to be persuaded by some of the arguments above. But I hope everyone can agree that they are legitimate arguments, and that those of us who agree with Judaism’s prescription for man-woman marriage are not narrow-minded bigots trying to make gays into second-class citizens. Rather, we are individuals using our free-speech rights and our votes to help shape a society that is consistent with our values.

 

Why did African-Americans vote so heavily (70 percent) for Proposition 8 in California? It’s been suggested that the reason is because blacks are more religious and church-oriented than whites. Yet the NAACP is pro-choice, as are many blacks (certainly more than 30 percent). African-Americans are overwhelmingly liberal on most issues (gay marriage and school choice are the two exceptions I can think of) so there has to be a reason beyond “religious” to explain the lopsided black vote for Prop. 8.

It’s also been suggested that African-Americans were rejecting the civil-rights rhetoric of the “No on 8″ campaign, and taking a stand that gay-marriage isn’t a civil rights issue in any way comparable to the African-American freedom struggle. I like that explanation, but doubt it was wholly responsible for such a large swing in the black vote against the standard liberal position.

So why didn’t blacks support gays, their erstwhile allies, in California in November? The floor is open for discussion.

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.