Voices against gay marriage.
Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas:
Social science on this matter is conclusive: Children need both a mom and a dad. Study after study has shown that children do best in a home with a married, biological mother and father.… [T]he government has a special responsibility to safeguard the needs of children; the social costs of not doing so are tremendous.…
Giving public sanction to homosexual “marriage” would violate this government responsibility to safeguard the needs of children by placing individual adult desires above the best interests of children. There is no reliable social-scientific data demonstrating that children raised by same-sex couples (or groups) do as well as children raised by married, heterosexual parents. Redefining marriage is certain to harm children and the broader social good if that redefinition weakens government’s legitimate goal of encouraging men and women who intend to have children to get married.
If the experience of the last 40 years tells us anything, it is that the consequences of weakening the institution of marriage are tragic for society at large.…
There is a real question about the future of societies that do not uphold traditional marriage.
(*) Indeed, no society has endured long while it tolerated homosexual marriage. History records no such society. Gay marriage treats society like a science experiment.
Maggie Gallagher quotes Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney:
“Given the decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. . . Should we abandon marriage as we know it and as it was known by the framers of our Constitution? Has America been wrong about marriage for 200 plus years? Were generations that spanned thousands of years from all the civilizations of the world wrong about marriage? Are the philosophies and teachings of all the world’s major religions simply wrong? Or is it more likely that four people among the seven that sat in a court in Massachusetts have erred? I believe that is the case.”
Then Mitt Romney put his finger on where the error comes from: the limited perspectives of lawyers and judges. “They viewed marriage as an institution principally designed for adults. Adults are who they saw. Adults stood before them in the courtroom. And so they thought of adult rights, equal rights for adults. If heterosexual adults can marry, then homosexual adults must also marry to have equal rights.”
But, he went on, marriage is not solely for adults. “Marriage is also for children. In fact, marriage is principally for the nurturing and development of children. The children of America have the right to have a father and a mother.”
The advocates tell us the skies have not fallen in Massachusetts; nothing has changed, they assure us. Romney points out that small things have already begun to change, foretelling the bigger, sadder changes to come. First, the marriage licenses change so they no longer read husband and wife but “Party A” and “Party B.” The Department of Health insists that birth certificates also change. The line for mother and father becomes “Parent A” and “Parent B.…”
In Goodridge the court ruled that something called the “presumption of parentage” is one of the rights of marriage. Until that ruling, there was nothing called the presumption of parentage in the law. The traditional marriage idea was the “presumption of paternity” — that is, the husband is presumed by law to be the father of any baby his wife has.
But how can same-sex marriages really be viewed as the equivalent of husband-and-wife unions if we cling to such outmoded, biologically rooted notions of parenthood?
(†) The presumptiveness of the claim that our civilization has been wrong for thousands of years is more than melodramatic; it is chilling.
Writer Lawrence Auster calls gay marriage “the apocalypse of liberalism.”
Being the final revelation of liberalism, homosexual marriage with its attendant denial of sexual differentiation can only be decisively turned back when we reject liberalism as the organizing idea of society. In this ultimate conflict, there will be no neutral ground.
Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah:
After Goodridge, which itself came on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court declaring a constitutional right to individual sexual autonomy, the choice is no longer between amending the Constitution or leaving this issue to the states. The only choice is between popular resolution of the effort to protect traditional marriage or judicial resolution of this question in favor of same-sex marriage. In the face of this threat, it is flatly irresponsible for elected officials, sworn to uphold the Constitution, to sit idly by as courts corrupt our national charter and advance a social experiment explicitly rejected in state after state, and in every region of the country.
(§) A larger confrontation with the judiciary is brewing.