Three Children, Five Parents, & Changing Marriage

Her brother, says Masha Gessen, former head of the Moscow office of US Radio Liberty, a work of our State Department, is the father of her second wife’s daughter. In her current arrangement, as reported by Breitbart, “We have three kids and five parents . . . more or less, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have five parents legally.”

She had earlier said that “we [homosexual people] should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it is a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist.”

. . . Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we’re going to do with marriage when we get there, because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie. The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change, and again, I don’t think it should exist.

The few conservative advocates of homosexual marriage, like Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch, will say that she’s wrong about the effect of same-sex marriage and the alleged lie. But if marriage is the sort of purely affective relation, completely unrelated to the sex of the spouses, as it has to be to justify same-sex marriage, the conservative proponents have no grounds to oppose those who find other forms of legal or formal relation necessary for their happiness.