“A child needs a father like a fish needs a bicycle”

I just sat down to my computer and looked at the list of posts — four drafts, one right after the next, with unfinished thoughts.  So I’m going to try to finish these, or at least offer my rough draft ideas to the world.  

OK, no one’s said that — yet.  But sometimes I think that’s where we’re headed.

Yesterday, one of my pro-gay-marriage facebook friends posted a link where — in the comments to the article was the statement that “gay marriage opponents keep saying that gay marriage should rightly be banned because children need a mother and a father.  But everyone knows that the courts have consistently rejected the idea that marriage has anything to do with children.  Study after study has shown that having two male, or two female parents has no impact on a child’s well-being.”  This was in the context of the Michigan judge’s decision that the state constitutional amendment defining marriage as one-man, one-woman was a violation of the U.S. constitution.  The judge summarily dismissed the state’s witnesses as not credible, but agreed with the “no difference” studies.

I’ve said this before and I know I’m just repeating myself in writing this again, but:

How can we convince men — and women — not to procreate unless they’re married, when at the same time, our conventional wisdom increasingly says, when it comes to gay marriage (and “single moms by choice”), that it doesn’t matter?

That’s as far as I got.  The problem is that those of us who believe that children should have married parents, are starting to be in the minority, relative to those who actively believe that’s irrelevant, or those who don’t really care.  Effectively their creed is “a child needs a father like a fish needs a bicycle” and it’s so much an article of faith that evidence to the contrary doesn’t have a chance of persuading them.  So what do you do?  And how far will current trends go?