Has the case against same-sex marriage strengthened or weakened over time?

Just over 14 years ago I first wrote my first long essay against same-sex marriage. I was still new at making the case, but I did my best. Sadly, we lost. I think we lost because Christians were not being equipped to make a case for natural marriage that would be convincing to non-Christians. If we want to live in a society that protects children, we have to be able to do that.

Before we begin, it’s worth reviewing why the government has an interesting in recognizing marriage as distinct from other relationships. The state recognizes natural marriage as valuable because the state has an interest in what marriage produces, namely, children who are raised in a stable environment.

Natural marriage is built on the norms of gender complementarity, exclusivity and permanence. It’s the coming together of a man and a woman that creates children. And when the children are created, each biological parent has an allegiance to that child, because they contributed to that child’s DNA. And who else but the biological parents will have a stronger interest in the well-being of their own child?

Stability is achieved because of the norms of exclusivity (fidelity) and permanence (commitment). In a properly functioning marriage, the adults give up some of their own freedoms in the short term in order to provide the children with long-term stability. And government used to give a special status to relationships that gave children that stabiliity.

In my original post, I talked about how the normalizing premarital sex and legalizing no-fault divorce would harm children. Same-sex marriage came after, and it also harms children. And some new articles pick up on that theme with new evidence.

Here’s an article from Katy Faust, published in The Blaze. She writes about how parents are now assigned by the state:

Since 2015, activists have been arguing state by state that equality requires making parenthood gender-neutral and elevating “social parents” (unrelated adults in the home who have not undergone background checks). Fathers have been legally erased from birth certificates to accommodate “two moms” and vice versa. Activists have insisted on requiring insurance or the government to fund the creation of fatherless and motherless children. Biology and adoption are bypassed in favor of “intent-based” parenthood. Giving same-sex couples equal access to the marital “constellation of benefits” denied children equal access to their own mother and father.

What happened to the idea of two people with two different natures coming together to commit for life, in order to have and raise children? It’s gone. Now, children are lower than pets. No one is thinking about God’s design for getting men and women to work together to care for their children. Now people are in it for themselves, and children are just expendable accessories.

Katy’s article talks about the cataclysmic effects that undoing the complementary genders norm had on the schools. Schools don’t talk about mothers and fathers. In fact, they indoctrinate kids to think that mothers and fathers are not even normal for marriage and family. Public libraries promote books to children to make them feel bad about needing to be loved by their father and mother. All in the name of “don’t judge”.

Katy also notes:

The culture shift and the legal restructuring contributed to a booming fertility market. Surrogate pregnancies more than doubled from 2.2% in 2011 to 4.7% in 2020. Fertility clinics often direct gay couples to surrogacy grants in the name of “equitable access to parenthood.”

These children did not lose their mothers to tragedy. They lost their mothers to adult “equality.”

Many children are not growing up with a mother and father in the home. By the way, Katy had a civil debate with a gay activist in Australia, and you might like to watch it if you want to debate this issue well.

The second article from First Things talks more about how children are affected:

The overwhelming desire to be connected to one’s biological parents is evident in the 70 percent of donor-conceived adults who believe they have been harmed by not knowing the identity of a biological parent. Seventy-seven percent agree that a sperm or egg donor is “half of who I am,” and 86 percent believe that a biological parent’s information belongs to the adult child.

These are not abstract trends; they negatively impact children every day.

That article also notes how the same-sex marriage has caused all sorts of bad effects on society. Now that relationships are about adult selfishness, people just don’t even bother marrying before they have kids.

Look at this:

[A] historically low marriage rate: An all-time low of 46.8 percent of households were headed by a married couple in 2022.

And this:

[A] historically low birth rate: Live births decreased nearly 9 percent from 2014, the year before Obergefell was decided, to 2019, the year before Covid-19 decreased live births even further.

And this:

Third, young people are increasingly confused about their identity: Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four who identify as transgender increased 422 percent from 2014 to 2023.

It’s not just kids that are affected, it’s society as a whole. It will result in a drop in tax revenues, which are used to pay for social programs. And we will get a drop in workers in sectors like energy, health care, and other critical industries.

My thoughts

I don’t have any experience raising children, but I do have experience with parrots. My family had several, back where I immigrated from. And I know that parrots need to have stability in order to be happy. They need to feel that if they call, their humans will come. They don’t like to move to a different house. They don’t like the furniture to move. They like routines and they like head scratches, but they have to trust you first. I remember being in grad school, and calling home from the computer lab to check on the parrot, because I didn’t trust my lazy, selfish older brother to monitor the bird while I was gone. The TSA staff at my local airport in the US got so used to me bringing home balsa wood blocks and California Spray Millet that they would call me “The Parrot Guy”.  Parrots are so little. They need the bigger people to look after them!

I just cannot imagine how people could want children, and then not understand children need stable relationships with their real mother and father! We have so much evidence showing the effects of divorce on kids, and the effects of same-sex parenting on kids. We need marriage to be child-focused, not adult-focused.

If you want to hear Rose and I talk about it, we did an episode. Audio is here.

And we did an episode with Frank Turek. Audio is here.