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| NOM wants us to ignore families like this one. |
A reader of this blog made an excellent point when it come to the National Organization for Marriage's passive-aggressive and phony "defense of traditional marriage:"
Whether same sex marriage is legal or not, same sex couples are going to continue to form families and raise children. So how is denying these couples the right to marry going to be advantageous for their children? How exactly are they being "protected" by not allowing their parents to marry? Do they think these couples will suddenly all go out and find an opposite sex partner if denied the right to marry otherwise?
I get that they feel having a mother and a father together is the ideal situation for raising a child, but again, how is denying same sex parents the right to marry going to help the children they already have or will have?
Basically it's simple. When NOM talk about "protecting marriage," it's an ugly smokescreen. What exactly is this organization protecting and from what? The way NOM tells it, same-sex households raising children are not deserving of the same rights as heterosexual households.
And if they get those rights, then heterosexual households will suffer. So the best thing we should do is to ignore same-sex households AND their children. Not because ignoring them will make them go away, but because in the eyes of NOM and folks like Maggie Gallagher, Brian Brown, and Frank Schubert, these families and their children are so inferior that they don't matter.
But acknowledging these families won't cause heterosexual families to suffer because the two entities are not at war nor in any type of competition with each other. NOM may think of reasons via anecdotes and distorted stories, but these reasons are highly specious.
Ignoring same-sex families on the other hand, which NOM and its employees want us to do, will harm not only them, but their children. By ignoring these families we will deprive them of their voice and the protection they should receive, like all families who provide love and support should receive.
This simple fact begs the question:
If NOM is successful at "saving traditional marriage," then who will be there to protect families from NOM?
If you notice, NOM never mentions ANY families that aren't headed by biological mothers and fathers. It's like they have this utopian version of marriage that excludes half the population, but they couldn't care less as long as they're able to demonize gay people in the process.
ReplyDeleteI envision billboards, magazine ads, (whatever) with pictures showing families like the one in your column and captions such as
ReplyDelete"Don't tell my children that we are not a family"
"You might not like my family, but we love each other and are still a family"
"Our children are entitled to the same civil rights and benefits as yours"
"We know what our family is worth"
Yeah, my very, *very* fundie grandparents rant against NOM even though they agree with them RE "traditional" marriage because my grandfather feels that NOM would feel the same way about them having raised me that they would about a same sex couple raising children.
ReplyDeleteThat is an excellent idea, westburb ;p
ReplyDelete