According to Andrew Haines, writing in Ethika Politika, the blog of the Center for Morality in Public Life, without children, the whole point of marriage vanishes. That is, you and your spouse don’t actually love each other; you’re just in it for the good genes. While this is not a new theory (in fact, it is so old as to have been thoroughly debunked over and over again), Haines’ take on it is a novel one; he seems to be saying that if two people who cannot have children together are allowed to get married, everyone else’s marriage will fall apart.
I guess he’s worried that people who did get married and who had kids will realize that they could have just hooked up without the pain and hassle of kids and will therefore immediately get a divorce. Or something.
Not surprisingly, Haines is focused on preventing marriage equality from becoming a reality, but along the way he manages to throw an awful lot of others under the bus along with gays and lesbians. Speaking of adoptive parents, he says that “although these couples can raise children, they cannot create them – and the latter is intimately connect to the former. So something is lacking.” Yeah, there’s something lacking in your marriage, your family, your kids, if you adopt.
On the one hand, he claims that parenting is a requirement for marriage stability but on the other, he argues that raising children does not make you a parent, only genetics can do that. So I guess someone who drops a load of sperm and disappears is more of a father than someone who spends 20 years caring for and raising a child to whom he is not genetically related. Way to go, Levi Johnston, your marriage to that Palin girl is going to last! Oh, wait…
And make no mistake, Haines is not claiming that a married couple’s inability to have genetic children means that their marriage — and their’s alone — is at risk; he is saying that allowing anyone who cannot procreate to get married undermines the stability of everyone else’s marriage. Yes, he is against marriage equality because letting people who are unable to “create” a child are, in his own words, “a threat to the stability and character of marital union in general (including heterosexual marriage).” In other words, if you get married and find out that you’re sterile, I’m more likely to get a divorce. Even if I don’t know you, never meet you, and am happily married. And don’t bother adopting because that’s not really being a parent, according to Haines.
Worst of all, although he is using children as his reasoning, he is ignoring them and their needs completely. Shouldn’t children have the right to a loving home? Shouldn’t all children’s parents be given the right to get married if they so choose? Why would we ever tell a kid that his or her parents were not as good as someone else’s parents and didn’t deserve the same rights? What sort of a monster would treat children that way?
Let’s face it. Mr. Haines’ argument is nothing more than that if some people get married who can’t have children together, everyone else’s marriage will fall apart, so we have to prevent those people from getting married. Of course, that makes no sense at all and is degrading to adoptive parents, LGBT parents, and pretty much all children.
I disagree completely with this pseudo-logic; I think that love and friendship make a marriage strong and that kids deserve a happy, stable home in which to grow and thrive. Family is what you make it and I don’t think kids really care about their parent’s naughty bits so long as their parents love and care for them. What are your thoughts? Can a marriage be stable without kids? Can it last? Can the rest of us manage to hold our own marriages together despite people getting married and not having kids?
Tags: adoption, civil rights, divorce, genetics, glbt, lgbt, marriage, marriage equality, noh8, parenting, procreation, prop8
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