Thursday, January 30, 2014
The voices of children in same-sex households should not be ignored
I will agree with the anti-gay right about one thing (don't pass out) regarding the argument over marriage equality. Part of it is about the children. What bothers me to the highest level is how they seem to always frame the actuality of same-sex families as an untested hypothetical. The fact of the matter is that with or without the right to marry, same-sex couples raising children exist. They have existed before all of our attention was turned towards marriage equality and will continue to exist should the lgbt community lose this battle. But we will not lose.
The one thing I want to emphasize in this post are in fact the children. Children who are in same-sex families. Not some religious right talking head spinning tales of woe, but actual boys and girls talking about their families. Their voices need to be heard.
The video above is of Riley Hackford-Peer at a recent rally for marriage equality in Utah. Listen to him. Does this sound like a damaged child to you?
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You're right that it's infuriating to hear rhetoric treating LGBT-parented children as hypothetical. It's also personally incredibly offensive to me to observe the hypocrisy of people claiming to care about families while simultaneously denigrating those families and their childrens' future. Maybe that goes back to my having co-parented two boys with my former partner.
Finally, maybe it's my science background, but it's infuriating to see the integrity of science manipulated and cynically undermined by these b.s. fake science 'studies' funded by the 'Christian' right, and the misquotation of legitimate studies to the point that those studies' authors feel the need to write public denunciations of the misuse of their data.
Not coincidentally, the same bogus scientific and sociological arguments were made by 'good Christians' -- even the majority establishments -- against coverture, women's suffrage, abolition of slavery, integration, interracial marriage, Jews (of course), and even left-handedness. In all these cases, theology, science, and the well-being of actual people had nothing to do with the real argument; they were red herrings. The real argument is always about power: who has the power to establish and impose biblical interpretation, control, and social sanctions on other people. Too bad that so many (millions of) human beings have become cannon fodder and 'collateral damage' to resistance to equality.
My prediction: some day, the descendants of these anti-LGBT 'christians' will hardly believe that there was ever such a controversy. And the churches involved will do everything they can to delete their history from public awareness. Only historians will keep that knowledge alive.
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