SSM: THE GAY RUSSIANS LOVE THEIR CHILDREN TOO: Final same-sex marriage post for today. Another quick take on Unqualified Offerings. (I know I’m only addressing bits and bobs of his arguments. I promise, as this series goes on I’ll wrestle with lots of ’em, not just a few.)

UO writes, “I’ve probably got more to say about gender roles later, but a brief thought for now: From what I can tell, gays love their kids too. So if it becomes widely accepted that straight children of gay parents have special gender-model needs, particularly straight children opposite in gender to their parents, I would expect actual gay parents will invest a fair amount of thought and ingenuity in finding ways to meet those needs. Magazine articles, advice books, Yahoo groups, pediatrician’s office classes, the playgrounds of parks in gay neighborhoods, coffee klatches — all the places that parents try to figure out what the hell they’re doing before they ruin their children….”

Yeah, I think people generally love their kids. I also think–and this is pretty obvious really!–that parents often choose family structures that put their kids at a distinct disadvantage. That’s pretty much the entire “Unexpected Legacy of Divorce” argument in a nutshell.

If it is so easy to overcome problems in family structure simply by reading magazines and seeking out Gender Appropriate Role Models, why does this not work so well when it comes to divorce or single motherhood? Surely these parents, too, love their children. But it’s really hard to replace Dad. Maggie Gallagher (there’s that name again…) wrote an excellent 1992 piece about her own experience as a single mother (unavailable online, but you can find an excerpt here) that takes a hard-hitting look at this fact.

And as Jennifer Hamer’s important What It Means to Be Daddy: Fatherhood for Black Men Living Away from Their Children inadvertently showed, no matter how much a guy wants to be involved in his family, it’s really hard if he’s not married to his kids’ mother. And that’s true of the kids’ father, not their “father figure.” A friendly guy who comes over to the house a lot, and tries to be like a father to you, isn’t even close to a reliable, in-house, married father. There is really no substitute.

I should be crystal clear: People whose parents chose sub-optimal family forms, or had said forms thrust upon them, or some combination of choice and constraint, generally go on to lead only reasonably screwed-up lives just like everybody else. Nobody’s doomed because mommy and daddy didn’t marry. But it makes things harder. Often, a lot harder. Kids grow up, and they work through it, because we’re a tough breed, humans. But why should they have to?