Should Marriage for Same Sex Couples be Legal?

All You Need is Love

The Alliance Defense Fund maintains that children without the “traditional” heterosexual parents will ultimately be a harmful influence on these children. Even though they proclaim all sorts of unbiased evidence exists to support their claim, they make no mention of it and, in this debate, it has become really important to make your “non-partisan research” known, and better yet, to quote it, so that your assertions are clear and verifiable. Lambda Legal, in their objection, quotes their own sources, and provides links to them, and these sources are of an authoritative nature. Now, to ADF’s credit, the ADF does paraphrase a source with a name in their response to the objection, but we still have no idea what part of the text they refer to in these sources or how we might even find these sources. The point is, unnamed sources might as well not exist, and unquoted sources, without any citation or means enabling verification, could very well misinterpret ideas or take them out of context.

For the sake of argument, let’s disregard the alleged science of anyone’s claims and use some good ‘ole “common sense” ADF implores. Now, psychologists might say that a child develops this way because a mother provides influence A and the father provides influence B, and perhaps we can quantify all such influences on child development, and then perhaps we could construct an ideal situation to raise children in. But who knows what all the influences and factors and combinations there are, let alone how any treatment or situation might work out? Is it better to spank or not to spank? Daycare or no daycare? Homeschool or no homeschool? Perhaps there is an answer to every one of these kinds of questions, but you don’t need me to tell you we have all the answers, and that, if we have sufficient answers, we’re ready to believe them. That’s why the government still gives parents a lot of free reign over their children. We step in for a few things, like “food, clothing, health care, and education,” and housing, and a caring family environment, because the majority of people think that’s what children need, at a minimum, to live. For children to thrive, that’s another question, my friend, one that works in same-sex and heterosexual parents, and ballet lessons, and Sesame Street, and Pre-K education—we will work hard and study these things, and perhaps one day the list of things child protection agencies and adoption organizations check up on will increase, but for now, in a reality not of absolutes but of heated controversy and, paradoxically, blurred distinctions, in child-rearing methodology, we have to give every loving parent a child to raise as best they can. And God knows that love is better than anything else we can give them.