Yet More Tired Arguments against Marriage Equality

I recently ran upon an article on the Witherspoon Institute by writer Katy Faust titled Dear Justice Kennedy: An Open Letter from the Child of a Loving Gay Parent. In it the author argues against extending marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples. I want to address two specific points she makes.

I identify with the instinct of those children to be protective of their gay parent. In fact, I’ve done it myself. I remember how many times I repeated my speech: “I’m so happy that my parents got divorced so that I could know all of you wonderful women.” I quaffed the praise and savored the accolades. The women in my mother’s circle swooned at my maturity, my worldliness. I said it over and over, and with every refrain my performance improved. It was what all the adults in my life wanted to hear. I could have been the public service announcement for gay parenting.

I cringe when I think of it now, because it was a lie. My parents’ divorce has been the most traumatic event in my thirty-eight years of life. While I did love my mother’s partner and friends, I would have traded every one of them to have my mom and my dad loving me under the same roof. This should come as no surprise to anyone who is willing to remove the politically correct lens that we all seem to have over our eyes.

Okay, so I’m wondering something now. Is Faust unaware that straight people get divorced too? Does she not know that there are plenty of children of straight divorced parents out there who would be willing to do anything to have their parents under one roof? As a friend of mine stated after reading this article, “My straight parents got divorced, does that mean I should be against straight marriage?”

Furthermore, while Faust isn’t clear about the reasons for her parents’ divorce, unless her mother was bisexual her mother’s position as a lesbian woman married to a straight man almost certainly played a role. In a society where gay people are accepted as readily as straight people—and extending marriage to gay people is part of that acceptance—gay and lesbian individuals will be less likely to enter into marriages with individuals of the opposite gender to begin with, thus cutting down on the number of couples who divorce for reasons like hers.

What I don’t understand when reading articles like this (and I’ve read them before) is why this isn’t blatantly obvious. The author wasn’t harmed by marriage equality—her experience occurred before same-sex marriage was legal, after all. Marriage equality extends traditional marriage benefits to same-sex relationships, but there is nothing stopping lesbian women married to straight men from divorcing and finding a female partner even without marriage equality—indeed, this has already been happening for decades.

It’s also worth noting that as lesbian and gay individuals become more and more accepted in today’s society and fewer of them feel the need to enter relationships with the opposite sex, fewer children of gay and lesbian couples will be in Faust’s situation. In other words, more and more children of gay and lesbian individuals will come into their families through sperm donors, surrogacy, and adoption rather than through disrupted straight relationships.

I want to touch on one other part of Faust’s article:

Now that I am a parent, I see clearly the beautiful differences my husband and I bring to our family. I see the wholeness and health that my children receive because they have both of their parents living with and loving them. I see how important the role of their father is and how irreplaceable I am as their mother. We play complementary roles in their lives, and neither of us is disposable. In fact, we are both critical. It’s almost as if Mother Nature got this whole reproduction thing exactly right.

This argument that men and women by default fill complementary roles assumes that all women or all men are interchangeable. In other words, it ignores that there are large differences among women and among men.

My next-in-age sister and I are very close, and in many ways very complimentary. She is more of a feelings person while my tendency is to be more logical. She can see beauty for beauty’s sake while I am more interested in what is practical. She sees money as something to be spent while I see it as something to be saved—she reminds me to loosen up and I encourage her to spend wisely.

The idea that all women are somehow complimentary to all men, but that women cannot be complementary to women or men to men is ludicrous. It’s not just ludicrous, it’s downright insulting.

I think about my female friends who have children, and I am struck by how incredibly different from each other as mothers. I think about my husband and my male friends with children, and once again, I am struck by how different they all are. In our home, I am the more relaxed parent and Sean is the firmer parent. In my parents’ home growing up, the opposite was true (you couldn’t get away with anything with mom, but dad might just be open to persuasion).

Can we stop putting people in boxes and then making assumptions about them? Can we accept people as people first? Is that so much to ask?

It strikes me as extremely relevant Faust became an evangelical Christian in high school and is now married to a pastor. She even recommends Mark Driscoll’s book on sex in marriage! In other words, it is likely that Faust’s belief that children need a mother and a father—and that the two are complementary—comes not so much from her own personal experience as from her religious beliefs. And if she beliefs what Driscoll teaches, she also believes that husbands are to lead and wives are to submit.

To me it appears that some evangelicals are realizing that religious objections to marriage equality aren’t going to cut it, and so are dressing up objections that are at heart religious as wholly secular. I’m curious to hear from children of lesbian or gay parents who don’t not have religious objections to homosexuality but still oppose marriage equality, but then, I have yet to meet any.