Mrs Roback Morse highlighted the likely negative consequences should same sex marriage become law. Dr Roback Morse stresses the issue is not one of allowing same sex marriage but rather it is about REDEFINING Marriage.
You will read of how same sex marriage has created more problems than it solved.
In the text below, I have made a few slight changes or additions which are coloured purple, to give this view some Australian currency.
Kind regards,
Gusto
**********
Redefining Marriage
A birth certificate records the biological truth. There has already been an attempt in the US to change a minors passport from a Mother and Father to Parent A and Parent B.
The attempted change was presented to the people as being more realistic because it is taking into account of the fact that we have all these unconventional families.
This is where the law is heading.
Marriage is “something” and the government is considering changing what that “something” is.
Instead of Marriage as being between a man and a woman that is ordered toward procreation and the good of the child and the good of spouses, Marriage will become the union of any two spouses and it will not be able to be the same kind of thing once it has been redefined.
If Marriage is redefined, it will not be possible to have a same sex marriage here and an opposite sex marriage there. There will be a new law that is going to affect everyone. Everyone will be playing by the new rules.
What will happen if we redefine marriage to allow two males to marry or two females to marry each other?
Negative Consequence 1
Marriage will become the kind of thing that detaches or separates children from at least one of their parents.
Same sex couples obviously no not procreate naturally and there has been a lot of talk designed to get you to forget that point, designed to obscure that fact.
Often you will hear people say “Well look, same sex couples are having kids already so we should let their parents get married so that they can have all the legal protections of parenthood.”
Well there are a couple of things wrong with that.
Elton John and his boyfriend, in no meaningful sense, had a baby. They did not have a baby. What they did was acquire legal custody of a child.
That is what happened.
The question is now, “Do we think this is a good idea?”
It is a different thing than a man and a woman procreating naturally.
What Elton john and his boyfriend had to do, was to find an egg donor and find a gestational mother to bring the child to term for them. Interestingly enough, if the egg donor and the gestational mother had been the same person, what would we have been talking about?
We would have been talking about an adoption. We would have been talking about a woman having a baby and giving her baby to Elton John and his boyfriend, one of whom is the biological father.
What would be happening is a mother giving her over her baby and full custody to this same sex couple.
It is very hard for a mother to give up her own baby so that is why there was this separation of the egg donor to the child carrier. There are also protections for women who place their baby up for adoption and those protections don’t exactly apply to surrogate mothers and egg donors.
What you need to see is that it is the same sex union that allows the fiction to take place that two members of the same sex couple are in fact the parents of the child. The opposite sex parents have somehow been ushered off the stage. Another example would be where the father of the child of a lesbian couple has been taken from the picture. It is their civil union that has made the lesbian couple parents of the child.
Their union, instead of being a union that attaches a child to both biological parents, is instead the vehicle for detaching the child from one of their biological parents.
It undermines the principle that a child is entitled to a relationship with both biological parents.
How is this situation different from adoption?
Adoption is a child centred social institution. Adoption exists to give children the parents they need. It does not exist to give adults the kids they want.
That is the difference.
Adoption is carried when something untoward has happened to someone. A child for some reason cannot be taken care of by their biological parents and we have a backup plan. Obviously the best solution is always if the child can be raised by their own mother and father.
What happens to a child in such a situation and how society responds to it, is different in kind to a situation where adults have decided to manufacture a child where they know the child will be detached from one of their biological parents. This decision is one of the life long plans that is being made by one of the child’s parents.
This point has nothing to do with same sex marriage per se, it is to do with the proper act of sexual reproduction. Because of the advances in IVF, we have stumbled into a whole ethical minefield, without ever thinking through what we have been doing.
This reminds me of the frog in the pot of cold water on the stove where the heat has slowly been turned up. The frog has not noticed the apparent small changes until it is too late.
This is a good opportunity to reconsider what we have been doing and see whether we want to continue down that path or whether we should pull in the reins a little bit here and retract our steps.
Negative Consequence 2
Fathers will be marginalised from the family.
What is being pushed on us is that children don’t really need a mum and a dad. It is not really necessary. Parents are interchangeable with one another.
To say that mums and dads are equal and interchangeable is not equal. It will impact men differently than it will women.
When a baby is born we know who the mother is and the attachment to the mother is usually pretty secure. It is the attaching the father to the family and to the child that is the social problem.
When someone says it doesn’t matter if a child has two mums, two dads or one of each, it is men who will be systematically marginalised from the family.
When people see a same sex couple, such as two women, raising a child together there will be some people who will say “See, it is just like I always suspected, who needs a man in the house anyway?” Do you think when people see Elton John and his boyfriend with a child, they will say “See, kids don’t really need a mother.”
It is not parallel. People will not draw the same conclusion.
For instance in the UK where IVF treatment is available through their public health service, it used to be that an unmarried woman who went to use that service had to sign an affidavit saying that there will be a male parental figure in the child’s life.
Once same sex marriage came into practice in the UK, they did away with that requirement. It was a nominal requirement however it was removed because it was deemed offensive to same sex couples to say the child needs a male parental figure in their life.
Birth Certificates
Jurisdictions that have redefined marriage to include same sex couples have had to do something to their birth certificates. They have had to change them. Canada has had same sex marriage for a number of years now. Since the law was passed, nobody debated or argued and no law was passed when those in government administration thought they had to change the birth certificates.
In British Columbia, for example, what they came up with was keeping the mothers name and information unchanged but where you would normally have the fathers information it is now a tick box where you can tick either “Father” or “Co-parent” where a person has agree to co-parent this child. So fatherhood has been reduced to a box you can tick or leave blank.
This is not an insignificant change.
In 2006, the Spanish government announced a ministerial order that new births would have to be registered at the State Civil Registries in the Family Book under the headings of Parent (progenitor) A, and Parent (progenitor) B. But this order didn’t last long and the government overturned this order. But this was an attempt where the terms “Father” and “Mother” were to be no to be longer used
What does it mean where you can put Parent A and Parent B on the birth certificate?
It means that you are not taking notice who the biological parent is.
Lets use and example where we had a couple that consists of two women, one gets pregnant and the other wants to be listed as co-parent (or whatever that term is going to be). If they register themselves on the birth certificate as Parent A and Parent B, they are not allowing the Government to record which of these two is the mother. Therefore these two women have equal standing with respect to the law as far as their parental rights. In other words, being the biological mother is no longer a big deal and the law is officially not noticing who is the mother.
This contradicts the fact that when a woman gives birth to a baby there is an unrebuttable presumption that she is the mother of the child. Now we don’t know for sure who the mother is of the child.
You might think this is an abstract example but there is a legal case currently in the US courts where this has come into play. It is a famous case (Lisa Miller v Janet Jenkins) with jurisdictional problems between Vermont and Virginia.
Lisa Miller (the biological mother) and Janet Jenkins has a civil union in Vermont. Their relationship broke up after the baby was born and Janet Jenkins wanted custody rights and treated in effect like a divorced father so she could have parental rights with this child. The real father is nowhere to be seen, except if someone searched a sperm bank database. The law has already moved the father off the stage and he has no legal claim and is effect a legal stranger, in this case.
Lisa Miller did not want her child to have anything to do with Janet Jenkins. She was operating on the assumption that she was the mother of the child and she had some say who her child got into a relationship with and who they spent time with.
Because of their civil union in Vermont, the court ruled that her former partner did have parental rights and therefore Lisa Miller was required to turn over the child for unsupervised overnight visits. The child would return to Lisa Miller upset. There were allegations of child abuse and so she really did not want her child to see this person again. Lisa Miller was found in contempt of court for not following the court order of visitation and is now in hiding with her child.
The courts have assigned legal parenting to the former partner, not because the mother has abused the child in anyway but simply because of contempt of court. The Government has completely redefined parenthood.
Now there are a couple of things worth pointing out in this case.
The latest decision is as if Lisa Miller placed her child for adoption with Janet Jenkins. It is as if it didn’t matter which one was the biological mother and which one was the social mum. They are equally parent or equally non-parent, whatever you think it is.
It is as if Lisa Miller surrendered her maternal rights and agreed to readopt her child on the same basis as the person who is not biologically related to the child.
It is as if the biological relationship doesn’t matter anymore.
In this example we saw a charming lesbian couple that decided to have a baby and then their whole relationship breaks down.
Now lets think about that.
When a husband and wife have a baby, is there a lot of stress? Yes. No matter how good a relationship is a lot of stress enters their relationship. Is there conflict over what to do for the child? Yes, there can be conflict. Is it easy for a mother to share care for her baby, even with the baby’s father? What do you think it is like to share the care of your baby with another woman, even a woman you love very much like your mum or sister? Is it OK to say to this other woman has all the rights and responsibilities with respect to my baby as I do? Women don’t understand this question properly until they have a baby. Motherhood is an abstraction until it happens to you.
What does the law typically say for adoption? It says you have the right to change your mind for a period of time. It is only Lisa Miller who doesn’t get the chance to change her mind. A woman in a same sex union with another woman does not get the chance to say “I have no idea what this is going to be like to share my baby with this woman that I love. It is my baby. It is not her baby.”
Women don’t know what that is going to feel like. It is only a mother in a same sex union that is required in effect to put their child up for adoption with their partner and readopt it together and no longer count as the biological mother.
To suggest same sex marriage is required for equality in society means we are trying to treat relationships equally but there are too many features that are different between a same sex couple and an opposite sex couple that it is not really possible to treat all relationships equally. There are all these other inequalities that we have to suppress.
We are marginalising fathers by saying fathers and mothers are interchangeable. That is not a small deal.
Same sex unions require you to ignore biology.
- They are insisting that the biological mother not notice she is the biological mother and the other person isn’t.
- They are insisting that children not notice whether they have biological parents with them or someone else.
- They are insisting that mothers and fathers are completely interchangeable and fathers are not going to care.
One response you may hear when you suggest one aspect of same sex marriage is an attempt to redefine parenthood is “Oh, that’s just biology” or “Oh, that’s just the body” as if we are above the body, as if we can somehow rise above the body and not notice it anymore.
How unrealistic is it?
Negative Consequence 3
The trend toward triple parenting will be unstoppable
Once biology is no longer the basic way we do parenting, the pressure will be to redefine parenthood in different kinds of ways.
In Canada and Pennsylvania three names are being put on birth certificates. Three adults are being given legal custody and parental rights of the child. Once you take away biology as the basic way we understand parenthood, there is no obvious reason why you need only two parents. The West Australian Saturday 18th July 2009 edition (pages 3 and 23) ran a full page article to soften people up to this arrangement. The same has occurred in the US with papers such as the Boston Globe.
Same sex marriage isn’t the end game. The next step is normalising contract parenting, which happened when baby Quinn Woodley O’Keefe was born to three parents, as stated in the West Australian article. The next step is for multiple same sex adults to work out visitation days, responsibilities and the government is meant to enforce it.
Biology is out of the window and the interests of the child is out of the window. That is where the same sex marriage movement is headed. That is where it has to go.
Every child in this arrangement will be like a foster child.
Negative Consequence 4
The expansion of government power will be breathtaking in its scope.
The government will decide who is the parent of the child, regardless that a person may not be biologically related to the child. The government will determine the criterion whether someone is a parent in a same sex relationship.
Marriage between a man and a woman occurs in every time and place. It regenerates itself and it doesn’t really need the government. Marriage can take care of itself.
Same sex marriage on the other hand is something that is completely invented by the government. It is artificially created by the government, which means the government has to prop it up. The government has to keep it going. The government will have to teach it in the schools.
One example in May 2011 occurred in British Columbia where the threat of legal liability was raised if it wasn’t taught. Another example in March 2011 occurred in California
Other examples of changes in the education system due to same sex marriage include Massachusetts Scotland Spain Canada Canada -Vancouver. It is of course no surprise to anyone that there has already been an attempt to push the boundaries to the extreme in teaching homosexuality in schools.
One would be naive to think that the forces that are pushing for same sex marriage to be made legal would not want push for changes in our education system here in Australia and any attempt to stop these changes would result in lawsuits.
If you offer a service for weddings (venue hire, flowers etc) you have to offer it to same sex couples whether you like it or not. That is where the law of discrimination is heading.
With the recent decision in New York to allow same sex marriage, the decision says failure to provide same-sex ceremonies would not “result in any state or local government action to penalise, withhold benefits, or discriminate against such religious corporation, benevolent order, a not-for-profit corporation operated, supervised or controlled by a religious corporation.”
New York Bishop DiMarzio said the amendment showed that “our political leaders do not believe their own rhetoric.” “If they did, how in good conscience could they carve out any exemption for institutions that would be proponents of bigotry and prejudice?” he asked. (Source: therecord.com.au)
In May 2011 the Quebec government launched the Québec policy against homophobia. What this policy says is that the Quebec government is committing itself to outlawing discrimination and homophobia, heterosexism and heteronormativity.
They want to outlaw the belief that heterosexuality is normal.
What does this mean? It means that the Quebec government is writing a blank cheque where they can intervene in any area of public and social life they want.
The idea that men and women are different and relate to one another differently will reassert itself time after time after time. In this policy you will see they want to wipe out heterenormativity in the workplace, in the school, on the sporting field and in the family. That is what they are talking about.
This is a hostile takeover of civil society by the government. Canada is a few years ahead of Australia in this attempt.
Jennifer Roback Morse.
(and Gusto - Australia)
