Does Gay Marriage Put Children First?
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Answering the Hard Questions
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A woman who identifies as a lesbian can be a loving mother, but she cannot be a father. A gay man can be a loving father, but he cannot be a mother. Children need, deserve, and have a right to both.
Adoption and foster care are for children. They are the clients, not adults. Whenever possible children should be placed with a married mother and father, so they can receive the benefits that come from a male and female parent. If a heterosexual married couple is not available, social workers must make a decision based on the child’s best interest.
Even if a married same-sex couple does not have a child, the legal existence of same-sex marriage requires the redefinition of legal parenthood in a way that makes a child’s mother or father optional in their life. The redefinition of marriage overhauls the definition of family for everyone.
Children have a right to their mother and father. No adult has a right to a non-biologically related child. No child should lose their mother or father so an adult- gay, straight, single or married- can create a baby.
Every credible study of family structure proves that biological connection advantages children, mothers and fathers offer distinct and complementary benefits, and parental loss diminishes child outcomes.
Studies of same-sex-headed households — which are always missing a biological parent, maternal or paternal love, and in which the child has suffered parental loss — largely suffer from poor methodology.
The Respect for Marriage Act only requires states to recognize, not license, same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. After an Obergefell reversal, that recognition requirement would likely face constitutional challenge in the courts. Without Obergefell, there would also be no clear legal basis to treat child access as a “right” of same-sex marriage.
What does that mean? There’s no legal status of marriage? That family isn’t real? No protection for husbands, wives, or kids? No laws about child custody or inheritance? Or people want the state to deny human nature and make up new rules that try to replace all those things? Either way, that’s not taking the government out of marriage. That’s tyranny dressed up as liberty.
Legally, Loving v. Virginia and Obergefell v. Hodges rest on entirely different foundations.
Loving struck down race-based marriage bans under the Equal Protection Clause. It did not redefine male/female marriage; it simply prohibited racial discrimination within it. Obergefell, by contrast, relied on substantive due process to declare a new, historically unknown “fundamental right” to same-sex marriage.
Culturally, the two are near opposites. Interracial marriage joins a child to both biological parents, preserving their full ancestry and giving them access to both maternal and paternal love. Same-sex marriage deprives a child of either a mother or a father, separates them from at least one biological parent, and severs half or all of their natural heritage.
Reversing Obergefell has no impact on Loving v. Virginia.
Who Are You Fighting For?
For most of human history, the loss of a child’s mother or father was treated as a tragedy—real wounds to be acknowledged, mitigated, and, where possible, repaired. What has changed is not the pain, disadvantage, or harm of the mother- or father-loss but its legal meaning. Gay marriage required the law to take the child deprivation that once demanded compassion and correction—and promote it as an approved template for family building.
Before Obergefell v. Hodges, family law was anchored to a simple, child-centered truth: Children come from a man and a woman. Because of that reality, the relationship with the baby born to us, and the parents we are born to, held a privileged position in law. It was hard to detach a child from their mother or father, and even harder to attach them to a biological stranger. That is good policy. Because statistically a child’s own mother and father provide a level of protectiveness, connectedness, and investment that other adults seldom replicate. Those two adults are also critical when it comes to identity formation and healthy development. When children lose their mother or father, they are harmed.
After Obergefell, in the name of constitutional rights, the law had to accomplish what biology prohibited- making two adults of the same sex parents of a child. That legal mandate has reshaped family law in sweeping ways: parenthood statutes have been stripped of sexed terms, regarding mothers and fathers as interchangeable “parents”; infertility has been reclassified so that same-sex couples can deliberately produce motherless or fatherless children with the help of insurance subsidies; birth certificates have been altered to legally exclude a child’s biological parent, new parentage pathways have been created that bypass both biological and adoptive safeguards; genetic parenthood has been downgraded as just one option among many; procreation has been stripped of its unique social value within adult partnerships.
The result: instead of the law viewing them as subjects of rights who deserve protection, children become objects of rights to be acquired by any and every adult, being denied their mother or father in the name of “adult equality.”
We don’t have to guess about the impact that mother- or father-loss has on children. We already know their faces and it’s time that you heard their stories. These are the children who need your protection.
Overall, unrelated adults in the home are less connected to, and protective, of children
“My conception was bought and sold, my father, the sperm prostitute. He is a seller not a donor. The cryobanks are a billion dollar corporation not a benevolent nonprofit organization to help the infertile. Money is all that matters. Money is dirty and I was born out of it…. My life had a price and I am the one who bears the consequences.”
– Science Owns Me
Overall, unrelated adults in the home are less connected to, and protective, of children
I feel like I can’t discuss [my donor conception] with anyone because nobody would understand. Hell, I don’t understand. Some of these feelings I know are not rational, yet I can’t help feeling the way I do. I feel like I don’t know who I am. I feel like I am not real. I feel like a science experiment. I feel like I’m a fraud.
– Katy Faust and Stacy Manning
Them Before Us (Post Hill Press, 2021), 152
Overall, unrelated adults in the home are less connected to, and protective, of children
“One of my mother’s husbands moved us across the state (four hour drive away)…. . . . My mother had twins with this man and was dependent on him, so she thought. He was physically abusive to both of us but mostly me. My dad had always taught me to have a strong spirit and stand up for myself, and I did. I paid for it though, always…. . . . I put up with the physical abuse silently. The slaps in the face, the hair pulling, the screaming. He held me down once and his hand went up my shirt. I just knew I’d be raped. I was only thirteen and still very much a little girl. I was terrified to feel his erection against my clothed rear, even though I didn’t even fully know what it was at the time. He didn’t rape me, he let me go. I didn’t come home from school the next day. I told my counselor at school, and ended up in foster care for an entire summer until I was placed with my dad.”
– Rachelle’s Story
Overall, unrelated adults in the home are less connected to, and protective, of children
“I [was conceived with] an egg donor. Male. I found out when I was sixteen, now in my midtwenties. Years later I still wonder and ponder, “Who is my real mother?” Where is she? Is she even alive? My current mother, well growing up never accepted me, or even cared to grow a bond with me. It makes sense why now.”
– IVF (Egg Donor Conceived)
Overall, unrelated adults in the home are less connected to, and protective, of children
Corbin’s mother identified as a lesbian and he was raised with little contact with his father. He shares, “Making myself “open” to male presence out of unconscious desperation for male presence, sometimes meant being exposed to men who took advantage of me in a “predatory” way and/or began “grooming” me . . . I took other boys’ rough-housing more personally than I should have, because my mother never rough-housed in a sane way. She would actually strike us if we played too rough and say “you don’t hit girls!” Because we never had a father to teach the “balance” of such play, I had no “off switch” when it came to rough-housing.”
– Corbin’s Story
Overall, unrelated adults in the home are less connected to, and protective, of children
“From an early age I found myself being drawn to my friends’ fathers, or at least the ones who seemed like good, responsible, loving dads. I think my [two mothers] knew somewhere in the back of their minds that this was necessary for me and didn’t discourage this, which was smart on their part. My best friend’s dad also probably recognized the role he was fulfilling in my life and did so willingly and that’s something I’m forever grateful for.”
– Comment via Facebook
message to the author, June 22, 2019
Overall, unrelated adults in the home are less connected to, and protective, of children
“My Moms always made a good image. Smile everybody and pertend to be happy that was our family motto. But I didnt feel happy every time I came home from a friends house and saw how diffrent it was in their homes. My best friends dad was the greatest guy he was funny and nice and always taking us places. He listened to us. I was jealous of my friend and wrote the word Daddy on a peice of paper and put it under my pillow. I wanted a Daddy like my friend had. My friends family all knew how much I liked their Dad cuz I was always asking if I could help him. One day my friends mom asks me are you a Daddys Girl? It means you are the kind of girl who realy loves her Daddy and is real close to him. Well I went home and cried becuz I dont have that and never will know what thats like.”
– Love Is Hate
Overall, unrelated adults in the home are less connected to, and protective, of children
“I yearned for the affection that my friends received from their dads. As far as I was concerned, I already had one mother; I did not need another. My grandfathers and uncles did the best they could when it came to spending time with me and doing all the daddy-daughter stuff, but it was not the same as having a full-time father, and I knew it. It always felt secondhand.”
– Brandi Walton
Overall, unrelated adults in the home are less connected to, and protective, of children
“I spent [Father’s Day] searching the internet as I often do, with my small amount of non-identifying information that only leads to dead ends. I scrolled through my Instagram feed full of my friends and their fathers, and I asked myself the never-ending question of “why me? Why is it that I don’t get to know my father?” [I have the hope of] one day finding my father. I can’t accept nor imagine dying without ever meeting him…. I love my father, which is crazy because I feel some anger and frustration towards him. I can’t explain exactly why I love him; I just do.”
– News to Me at 22
Overall, unrelated adults in the home are less connected to, and protective, of children
“When I was 12 my mother told me that the man on my birth certificate was not my dad. It’s like my history kind of stopped. Most people you hear, like, about generations past and there’s just continuity of story. But mine didn’t. It’s like there was just no information. There was nowhere I could go to find anything. When I was a kid I remember wondering like, ‘could that be my dad?’ I would look for the face of my father in strangers and look at myself. “Am I like this person? Could we be related? Are we not related?” Once I finally found my dad and it was confirmed that it was absolutely him I was numb. I was dumbstruck. I was at a loss for words. But that energy that caused me to look and seek I feel like it’s very much calmed. I feel more comfortable in my own skin. I know where I come from. I have lineage. Now that I know who I am, I can help my son understand who he is.”
– Sonny’s Story
Overall, unrelated adults in the home are less connected to, and protective, of children
“[When I learned I was conceived via sperm donor] my world fell apart. I spent several days under a blanket in bed, crying hysterically. When I was able to regain my composure, as I was going about my morning routine I caught sight of myself in the mirror and came to the realization that I had no idea who I was anymore. The nose I thought had come from my dad wasn’t his. That round nose that I thought connected me to family was suddenly hideous. The shape of my fingers, so similar to my dad’s, now looked alien and terrifying. There were several years in my midtwenties when I couldn’t look at myself in a mirror without bursting into tears, so I avoided mirrors. . . .”
– Ellie’s Story
Some things aren't up for debate.
Children's rights are one of them.
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