If I've asked it once I've asked it a hundred times: how does marriage equality hurt heterosexuals?
Recently I posed the question yet again to Maggie Gallagher, outgoing president of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), as she visited my ethics class at Wayne State University via audio conference.
I "get" that Gallagher wants children to have mothers and fathers, and ideally, their own biological mothers and fathers. What I've never quite gotten is why extending marriage to gays and lesbians undermines that goal. One can be married without having children, one can have children without being married; and (most important) same-sex marriage is not about gay couples' snatching children away from their loving heterosexual parents. No sane person thinks otherwise.
Maggie Gallagher is a sane person. (Wrong, but sane.) For the record, she is not worried that marriage equality would give gays license to kidnap children. Nor does she oppose adoption by gay individuals or couples, although she thinks heterosexual married couples should be preferred. So what's the problem?
At the risk of oversimplifying, one could describe her concern-which she graciously explained to my class-as The Message Argument. The idea is this. The core reason society promotes marriage is to bind mothers and fathers together for the long-term welfare of their offspring. In doing so we send a message: "Children need their mothers and fathers."
But on Gallagher's view, extending marriage to gays and lesbians makes it virtually impossible to sustain that message. The central premise of the marriage-equality movement is that Jack and Bob's marriage is just as valid, qua marriage, as Jack and Jill's. (That's the whole point of calling it "marriage equality.") And if we make that equivalence, we cannot also say that children-some of whom Jack and Bob may be raising-need their mothers and fathers. Indeed, the latter claim would now seem offensive, even bigoted.
So Gallagher's argument poses a dilemma: either maintain the message that children need their mothers and fathers, and thus oppose marriage equality; or else embrace marriage equality, and thus relinquish the message. You can't have both.
Whatever else you want to say about this argument, it's not crazy. It's about how to maintain a message that seems well motivated, at least on the surface: children need their mothers and fathers.
Elsewhere I've argued that the claim "Children need their mothers and fathers" is ambiguous. On one reading it's obviously false. On another, it's more plausible, but it doesn't support the conclusion against marriage equality. For even if we were to grant for the sake of argument that the "ideal" situation for children is, on average, with their own biological mother and father, we ought not to discourage-and deny marriage to-other arrangements: stepfamilies, adoptive families, and same-sex households. It's a non-sequitur.
But that (familiar and ongoing) argument is somewhat beside the point. The Message Argument does not say that promoting children's welfare logically entails denying marriage to gays and lesbians. It says that, in practice, it is virtually impossible to maintain the message "Children need their mothers and fathers" while also promoting the message that "Gay families are just as good as straight ones." And given a choice between the two messages, Gallagher favors the former.
I think urging parents-especially fathers-to stick around for their offspring is an admirable and important goal. It's also one that has personal resonance for Gallagher, who has spoken candidly of her experience as a young single mother left behind by her child's father.
I also think that there are 1001 better ways to achieve this goal than fighting marriage equality. The fact that NOM targets gays and gays alone makes it hard to believe that we are merely collateral damage in their battle to promote children's welfare.
That said, I want to thank Gallagher for clarifying her position. I want to assure her that I'll take The Message dilemma seriously. I plan to grapple with it in future columns (and our forthcoming book).
But I also want to pose for her a counter-dilemma, which I hope she'll take equally seriously.
For it seems to me that, in practice, it is impossible to tell gay couples and families that they are full-fledged members of our society, deserving of equal respect and dignity, while also denying them the legal and social status of marriage.
Yes, marriage sends messages, but "children need their mothers and fathers" is scarcely the only one. Marriage sends the message that it's good for people to have someone special to take care of them, and vice-versa-to have and to hold, for better or worse, till death do they part.
Marriage sends a message about the importance of forming family, even when those families don't include children; about making the transition from being a child in one's family of origin to being an adult in one's family of choice.
Gallagher claims that she loves and respects gay people, and I want to believe her. But how can she sustain that message while also opposing marriage equality? How does her own preferred message not tell gay families-not to mention stepfamilies, adoptive families, and single-parent households-that "Your family isn't real"?
Yes, marriage sends messages. So does its denial.
6 Comments for “Marriage and Messages”
posted by Jimmy on
What children need are good parents, and there is likely enough reliable academic work out there that suggests that the various gender make-up of couples who are good parents is pretty irrelevant. Even a good single parent is better than two hostile ones whose incessant combat produces a shell-shocked kid. A man and woman can make a baby and be called parents, but that doesn’t mean they know anything about nurturing a child; they don’t have to pass a test to take the kid home from the hospital. Same-sex and opposite sex couples who want to adopt are scrutinized in a way that most natural parents are not. It is just assumed that natural parents will fulfill the expectation that the ideal calls for. If all of them did, there would be no need for Child Protective Services.
When we talk about what is ideally the best for children, I wish the conversation could be more about what makes good parents. This has to go beyond an assumption that a paired man and woman, by the virtue of their opposite sex pairing, are ideal.
posted by Eric on
It seems to me that for Ms Gallagher to be logically consistent with this argument that the purpose of marriage is to bind mothers & fathers together for the sake of children, that she should be lobbying just as hard to make divorce more difficult to obtain as she is to prevent gay marriage.
posted by Regan DuCasse on
Actually, this points out the fact that couples NEED MARRIAGE.
Since, getting married isn’t contingent having children at all, Gallagher’s message falls apart altogether as a means of discrimination against gay couples.
That discrimination would have to extend to sterile people, those beyond childbearing age and those who don’t intend or want children, wouldn’t it?
So it’s HER message that is mixed and confused and doesn’t even exist in marriage law.
It’s MARRIAGE itself, BY itself that’s necessary for inclusion and support within a community. It’s a standard that marks you as an adult who has vowed to be mature, trustworthy and willing to support other human beings so the public won’t have to.
Marriage was a means of IDENTIFYING children in the beginning. Hence, the necessity for virgin marriage and so on. Men especially wanted to think and believe that child was THEIRS.
Marriage itself, the benefits beyond material and social are why the incarcerated and physically disparate are included. Especially that, because we’d otherwise consider exclusion based on advanced age, physical disability or disparity, or illness or economic status to be exceptionally cruel.
It’s no less so, to wax nostalgic and supportive of marriage and it’s benefits, then say to gay people ‘but not you’ listing all kinds of reasons that aren’t legal now, and no one else is denied by them.
Which, means, is that Maggie is two faced about the whole issue.
And is deliberately so. Because a pendulum forced to the middle, does not move for good or mark the passage of progress.
posted by Lymis on
Doesn’t work.
The big kicker that shoots everything else down is your absolutely valid point that nobody is proposing that gay couples (or heterosexual infertile couples, or grandparents, or foster parents) get to kidnap children from their birth parents.
One doesn’t get to just come up with a catch-phrase and call it a message. “Children need their mothers and fathers” is a lovely catch-phrase, but, especially if it is supposed to be a message, the first and most important question is “what does it mean?”
People (including you, above) throw out the idea that is it somehow ideal for children to be with their biological mother and father. That is precisely backwards. The definition of “biological mother and father” is NOT a monogamous married couple who love each other and are emotionally and financially stable. The definition is NOT two people who have chosen to conceive a child and are ready and willing to do the work of raising them safely.
The definition of “biological mother” is someone who produced an egg, and (speaking practically) carried a child to term. The definition of “biological father” is someone who produced some sperm. Saying, even for the sake of argument that it is ideal for a child to be raised by its biological mother and father is saying that is might be ideal for a child to be raised by a rapist and a crack whore, or a frightened teenager and someone she met at a frat party, or any other combination of life circumstance. That’s ludicrous.
Let’s be real. Even historically, the pressure has never been “keep the child with its biological parents.” The pressure was always, “You got pregnant/You got her pregnant, now you need to get married.” The pressure was to isolate pregnant (“ruined”) single women and get the child put up for adoption – by a married couple – as soon as possible. The scandal of single motherhood wasn’t, even as recently as the Murphy Brown plotline, that the biological father wasn’t around, it was that the parents weren’t married.
The question, as you note, is not whether to take children away from ideal families. The question is how to create more ideal families, and how to support the families that already exist so that their circumstances become more ideal.
And of course, it has to be stated that producing and raising children is only one of many things that marriage is “for” – and is not mandatory, even for straight couples.
posted by Debra on
If you change “Children need their mothers and fathers” to “Children need two loving parents”, then the need for marriage equality becomes obvious. Without marriage equality, children are born into same-sex families with only one legal parent (in some states, the 2nd parent can adopt but this is a lengthy and costly process). With marriage equality, children born into same-sex families have two legal parents from the moment of birth. Isn’t this the ideal, two parents to love and care for the child with legal obligations of support? Even if the parents later divorce (which 50% of hetero couples will), the child’s relationship with both parents will be protected. Children will be born into same-sex households, opposite households, and single-parent households. Shouldn’t the law provide every advantage possible for any of these children? Maggie Gallagher’s ideal world makes life harder for some children.
posted by Rodney on
I believe Gallagher is being disingenuous. “Children need their mothers and fathers” is *NOT* their entire message. Their real fear is that their kids might be more tempted to turn gay if same-sex marriage is accepted and visible. It’s this “kidnapping” of their children that they are most worried about. It’s this often unstated fear that they appeal to and stoke in their audience.