Should California Pass Prop 8?

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It’s a biological fact: Same-sex couples cannot have children with one another. To bring children into the picture, married homosexual couples have to go outside the marital relationship.

This creates a host of issues — especially for male couples, who would depend on a woman being either a) artificially inseminated or b) pregnant already and not desiring to keep the child. Either way, the woman would have to agree to give her child over to the couple after carrying the child to term.

Many women who agree to such arrangements later change their minds after developing emotional attachments to the children inside them. Same-sex male couples would besiege courts with lawsuits seeking to enforce a contractual arrangement that courts are already reluctant to enforce for policy reasons. Also, imagine the complications that could potentially arise from a joint-custody arrangement when the extramarital, biological parent wants to be involved in his or her child’s life.

Then there’s the impact on the children themselves. Same-sex relationships deprive a child of having both a mother AND a father, and overtly make the statement that one or the other is not important despite strong evidence to the contrary. According to a very recent study by California psychologist Dr. Laura A. Haynes, children of same-sex couples often long for the gendered parent they do not have, and for good reason. Imagine a male couple taking their preteen daughter to buy her first bra, or a female couple trying to teach their 15-year-old son how to shave.

Further, as Dr. Haynes writes: “A same-sex couple is inherently deficient in ability to prepare a child for the future heterosexual married life that the vast majority of children will aspire to as adults. Two parents of the same sex cannot teach a child how to relate deeply to both sexes in the same way that growing up with married parents — one of each sex — can.”

In addition, studies of countries that permit same-sex marriage show that gay marriages have a much lower stability rate than heterosexual marriages do. According to one American study, the average length of homosexuals’ longest relationship is two years, meaning the divorce rate among homosexuals stands to be much higher than that of heterosexuals, which is already around 50 percent. The death rate among gays is also higher than it is for heterosexuals, both due to a high suicide rate and diseases associated with the gay lifestyle.

Considering all the emotional and psychological difficulties parents’ deaths and broken marriages bring children, do we really need to expose children to those things further?