Why does the same-sex marriage debate seem so futile?

We won't make any progress unless we unpack some of the fundamental issues.

Why is it so hard to have a calm, rational debate about same-sex marriage? In the US, Australia and Britain it is becoming louder and more bitter by the day. But the torrent of words flows over stone, unabsorbed by the other side. What many people fail to grasp is that key terms of the debate are being interpreted in different ways. Unless these are clarified, there is little hope of a meeting of minds. Here are a few of the issues which need to be unpacked.

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Morality. Are homosexual acts moral or immoral? Nearly all discussion of same-sex marriage tiptoes around this issue. But unless we agree, there can be no progress. If they are moral, it is quite hard to explain why a relationship based on them should not be allowed to bond a marriage.

The question is not whether homosexual acts are legally permissible. The law offers scant help in determining what is moral and immoral. In fact, in Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark 2003 case which declared that it was unconstitutional to ban sodomy, the US Supreme Court declared itself to be agnostic about the moral value of homosexual acts. It acknowledged that “for centuries there have been powerful voices to condemn homosexual conduct as immoral. The condemnation has been shaped by religious beliefs, conceptions of right and acceptable behavior, and respect for the traditional family. For many persons these are not trivial concerns but profound and deep convictions accepted as ethical and moral principles to which they aspire and which thus determine the course of their lives.”

However, the majority ruled that moral considerations were essentially irrelevant. “The issue is whether the majority may use the power of the State to enforce these views on the whole society through operation of the criminal law.”

Asserting that homosexuality was made legal decades ago sidesteps the issue. By what principles should we assess the morality of these acts – or indeed of any acts? This is fundamentally what is at stake. If we want to be consistent, we have to be ready to accept all the downstream consequences which flow from accepting the principles. We have to use the same ethical principles to decide whether targeted assassination in Afghanistan, infanticide, or cyber-bullying is wrong.

Origins. Are they really “born that way”? Most supporters of same-sex marriage assume that homosexuality is as genetically determined as skin colour. Gays and lesbians were born that way and cannot change. Discrimination against them is as unjust as racial discrimination.

However, there is no settled science on whether homosexuality is hard-wired in one’s genes, determined by childhood experiences or a matter of choice. Even theAmerican Psychological Association – which supports same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting – admits that the cause or causes of homosexuality are extremely murky:

“There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay, or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors.”

In any case, genetics does not determine moral value. There is a genetic component to cancer, but cancer is not good. There may be a gene for alcoholism, but drunkenness does not excuse unruly behaviour.

It does seem unfair to deny marriage to a “sexual minority”, a group of people whose sexual preferences are inalterable from birth. But there is no consensus – even among homosexuals --that that homosexuality is genetically determined.

“Marriage”. What version of marriage are we talking about? After no-fault divorce was legalised and contraception became widespread, two parallel visions of marriage have emerged, the legally-sanctioned version and the pop culture version. Legally, marriage is “the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.” This version mandates exclusive fidelity to one partner for the whole of one’s life. If you accept this, then contemporary sexual mores are confused and deplorable. Public policy should be directed towards actively promoting fidelity and decreasing the number of divorces.

The other version allows infidelity and regards “until death do us part” as a polite fiction. Traditional marriage is battered on one side by gay activists and on the other by marriage "experts" who want to reshape it. As a corrupt example of this, British academic Catherine Hakim argued the other day that the problem with countries like the US, England and Australia is that there isn’t enough adultery. “Anyone rejecting a fresh approach to marriage and adultery, with a new set of rules to go with it, fails to recognise the benefits of a revitalised sex life outside the home,” she writes in her latest book, The New Rules of Marriage: Internet Dating, Playfairs and Erotic Power. She sounds exactly like gay sex adviser Dan Savage. 

The co-existence of two models of a fundamental institution creates a lot of confusion, and not just for homosexuals. Opponents of same-sex marriage, for the most part, have the legal definition in mind. Supporters believe that Catherine Hakim's version is just dandy. A real debate requires clarification of what kind of marriage is the ideal.

“Love”. “Love” is another equivocal concept. An ideal marriage has always been viewed as a loving marriage. But is this love solely sexual attraction? Most supporters of same-sex marriage seem to think so. The attraction between two males or two females is sufficient justification for marriage.

However, erotic love is just one component of traditional marriage described above. It would be truer to say that it is all about commitment -- of the spouses to each other and to the children — than that it is all about love. Traditionalists believe that redefining marriage to highlight the erotic dimension demeans the sacrifice which are necessary to create and sustain a family.

“Purpose”. Does sex have a purpose? Does marriage? In most debates over same-sex marriage the question of ends emerges almost immediately. Most people believe that natural institutions have a purpose. Our hands are for grasping; our brains are for thinking; water is for drinking. The whole universe has a purpose, mysterious though it may be.

However, this point of view finds little support among contemporary philosophers. The Darwinian theory of evolution has scrubbed science clean of "purpose". Things just are. Stuff just happens. Nowadays post-modern philosophers deny that words have a stable meaning. Instead, they assert with Humpty-Dumpty, that "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." If this is the case, then complaints that gays and lesbians are redefining marriage are simply unintelligible. Of course they are; what else are you supposed to do with words?

A presumption of malice. Effective debates are based on mutual respect. Your opponent may seem illogical, ignorant of the evidence or burdened by almost insurmountable prejudice. But both sides entered the debate aware that truth is elusive and hard to express. They realise that language is a blunt instrument but they persevere in the hope that conflicts can be resolved.

However, some parties -- on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate -- believe that in a matter as important as same-sex marriage it is impossible to hold a different opinion in good conscience. In their eyes, the issue is so blazingly obvious that only a fool or a knave could entertain a different point of view. Given that that their opponents are using words of more than one syllable and use a keyboard, they are not fools. Therefore they are "mendacious" (a favourite word) knaves, filled with hatred or a sheer lust for domination.

If this is the case, scorn and vilification are the appropriate responses. After all, would it be moral to shake hands with Hitler and exchange polite words about the weather? Of course not. Politeness would condone his evil policies. 

In my experience, the presumption of malice is more common among supporters of same-sex marriage. Opponents tend to believe that love and marriage are founded on eternal truths which can be discussed rationally, however difficult that may be. But supporters are generally post-modernists, philosophically speaking, who are sceptical of “truth”. In their eyes disagreements are disputes over power, not truth. Every debate is a winner-takes-all battle for domination and the “traditional” side is malicious, not just mistaken.

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Same-sex marriage is a deeply emotional issue. Conjugal life is sometimes strewn with boulders and hedged by thorns, but marriage is a time-tested path to lifelong happiness. The gay and lesbian lobby believe that they are being unjustly excluded. But perhaps if we clarify some of the words we use in the debate, we can make some progress towards uncovering where true happiness lies.  

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet. 

Growing Up With Two Moms: The Untold Children’s View

by Robert Oscar Lopez

August 6, 2012

The children of same-sex couples have a tough road ahead of them—I know, because I have been there. The last thing we should do is make them feel guilty if the strain gets to them and they feel strange.

Between 1973 and 1990, when my beloved mother passed away, she and her female romantic partner raised me. They had separate houses but spent nearly all their weekends together, with me, in a trailer tucked discreetly in an RV park 50 minutes away from the town where we lived. As the youngest of my mother’s biological children, I was the only child who experienced childhood without my father being around.

After my mother’s partner’s children had left for college, she moved into our house in town. I lived with both of them for the brief time before my mother died at the age of 53. I was 19. In other words, I was the only child who experienced life under “gay parenting” as that term is understood today.

Quite simply, growing up with gay parents was very difficult, and not because of prejudice from neighbors. People in our community didn’t really know what was going on in the house. To most outside observers, I was a well-raised, high-achieving child, finishing high school with straight A’s.
Inside, however, I was confused. When your home life is so drastically different from everyone around you, in a fundamental way striking at basic physical relations, you grow up weird. I have no mental health disorders or biological conditions. I just grew up in a house so unusual that I was destined to exist as a social outcast.

My peers learned all the unwritten rules of decorum and body language in their homes; they understood what was appropriate to say in certain settings and what wasn’t; they learned both traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine social mechanisms.

Even if my peers’ parents were divorced, and many of them were, they still grew up seeing male and female social models. They learned, typically, how to be bold and unflinching from male figures and how to write thank-you cards and be sensitive from female figures. These are stereotypes, of course, but stereotypes come in handy when you inevitably leave the safety of your lesbian mom’s trailer and have to work and survive in a world where everybody thinks in stereotypical terms, even gays.

I had no male figure at all to follow, and my mother and her partner were both unlike traditional fathers or traditional mothers. As a result, I had very few recognizable social cues to offer potential male or female friends, since I was neither confident nor sensitive to others. Thus I befriended people rarely and alienated others easily. Gay people who grew up in straight parents’ households may have struggled with their sexual orientation; but when it came to the vast social universe of adaptations not dealing with sexuality—how to act, how to speak, how to behave—they had the advantage of learning at home. Many gays don’t realize what a blessing it was to be reared in a traditional home.

My home life was not traditional nor conventional. I suffered because of it, in ways that are difficult for sociologists to index. Both nervous and yet blunt, I would later seem strange even in the eyes of gay and bisexual adults who had little patience for someone like me. I was just as odd to them as I was to straight people.

Life is hard when you are strange. Even now, I have very few friends and often feel as though I do not understand people because of the unspoken gender cues that everyone around me, even gays raised in traditional homes, takes for granted. Though I am hard-working and a quick learner, I have trouble in professional settings because co-workers find me bizarre.

In terms of sexuality, gays who grew up in traditional households benefited from at least seeing some kind of functional courtship rituals around them. I had no clue how to make myself attractive to girls. When I stepped outside of my mothers’ trailer, I was immediately tagged as an outcast because of my girlish mannerisms, funny clothes, lisp, and outlandishness. Not surprisingly, I left high school as a virgin, never having had a girlfriend, instead having gone to four proms as a wisecracking sidekick to girls who just wanted someone to chip in for a limousine.

When I got to college, I set off everyone’s “gaydar” and the campus LGBT group quickly descended upon me to tell me it was 100-percent certain I must be a homosexual. When I came out as bisexual, they told everyone I was lying and just wasn’t ready to come out of the closet as gay yet. Frightened and traumatized by my mother’s death, I dropped out of college in 1990 and fell in with what can only be called the gay underworld. Terrible things happened to me there.
It was not until I was twenty-eight that I suddenly found myself in a relationship with a woman, through coincidences that shocked everyone who knew me and surprised even myself. I call myself bisexual because it would take several novels to explain how I ended up “straight” after almost thirty years as a gay man. I don’t feel like dealing with gay activists skewering me the way they go on search-and-destroy missions against ex-gays, “closet cases,” or “homocons.”

Though I have a biography particularly relevant to gay issues, the first person who contacted me to thank me for sharing my perspective on LGBT issues was Mark Regnerus, in an email dated July 17, 2012. I was not part of his massive survey, but he noticed a comment I’d left on a website about it and took the initiative to begin an email correspondence.

Forty-one years I’d lived, and nobody—least of all gay activists—had wanted me to speak honestly about the complicated gay threads of my life. If for no other reason than this, Mark Regnerus deserves tremendous credit—and the gay community ought to be crediting him rather than trying to silence him.

Regnerus’s study identified 248 adult children of parents who had same-sex romantic relationships. Offered a chance to provide frank responses with the hindsight of adulthood, they gave reports unfavorable to the gay marriage equality agenda. Yet the results are backed up by an important thing in life called common sense: Growing up different from other people is difficult and the difficulties raise the risk that children will develop maladjustments or self-medicate with alcohol and other dangerous behaviors. Each of those 248 is a human story, no doubt with many complexities.

Like my story, these 248 people’s stories deserve to be told. The gay movement is doing everything it can to make sure that nobody hears them. But I care more about the stories than the numbers (especially as an English professor), and Regnerus stumbled unwittingly on a narrative treasure chest.

So why the code of silence from LGBT leaders? I can only speculate from where I’m sitting. I cherish my mother’s memory, but I don’t mince words when talking about how hard it was to grow up in a gay household. Earlier studies examined children still living with their gay parents, so the kids were not at liberty to speak, governed as all children are by filial piety, guilt, and fear of losing their allowances. For trying to speak honestly, I’ve been squelched, literally, for decades.

The latest attempt at trying to silence stories (and data) such as mine comes from Darren E. Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, who gave an interview to Tom Bartlett of the Chronicle of Higher Education, in which he said—and I quote—that Mark Regnerus’s study was “bullshit.” Bartlett’s article continues:

Among the problems Sherkat identified is the paper’s definition of “lesbian mothers” and “gay fathers”—an aspect that has been the focus of much of the public criticism. A woman could be identified as a “lesbian mother” in the study if she had had a relationship with another woman at any point after having a child, regardless of the brevity of that relationship and whether or not the two women raised the child as a couple.

Sherkat said that fact alone in the paper should have “disqualified it immediately” from being considered for publication.

The problem with Sherkat’s disqualification of Regnerus’s work is a manifold chicken-and-egg conundrum. Though Sherkat uses the term “LGBT” in the same interview with Bartlett, he privileges that L and G and discriminates severely against the B, bisexuals.

Where do children of LGBT parents come from? If the parents are 100-percent gay or lesbian, then the chances are that the children were conceived through surrogacy or insemination, or else adopted. Those cases are such a tiny percentage of LGBT parents, however, that it would be virtually impossible to find more than a half-dozen in a random sampling of tens of thousands of adults.

Most LGBT parents are, like me, and technically like my mother, “bisexual”—the forgotten B. We conceived our children because we engaged in heterosexual intercourse. Social complications naturally arise if you conceive a child with the opposite sex but still have attractions to the same sex. Sherkat calls these complications disqualifiable, as they are corrupting the purity of a homosexual model of parenting.

I would posit that children raised by same-sex couples are naturally going to be more curious about and experimental with homosexuality without necessarily being pure of any attraction to the opposite sex. Hence they will more likely fall into the bisexual category, as did I—meaning that the children of LGBT parents, once they are young adults, are likely to be the first ones disqualified by the social scientists who now claim to advocate for their parents.

Those who are 100-percent gay may view bisexuals with a mix of disgust and envy. Bisexual parents threaten the core of the LGBT parenting narrative—we do have a choice to live as gay or straight, and we dohave to decide the gender configuration of the household in which our children will grow up. While some gays see bisexuality as an easier position, the fact is that bisexual parents bear a more painful weight on their shoulders. Unlike homosexuals, we cannot write off our decisions as things forced on us by nature. We have no choice but to take responsibility for what we do as parents, and live with the guilt, regret, and self-criticism forever.

Our children do not arrive with clean legal immunity. As a man, though I am bisexual, I do not get to throw away the mother of my child as if she is a used incubator. I had to help my wife through the difficulties of pregnancy and postpartum depression. When she is struggling with discrimination against mothers or women at a sexist workplace, I have to be patient and listen. I must attend to her sexual needs. Once I was a father, I put aside my own homosexual past and vowed never to divorce my wife or take up with another person, male or female, before I died. I chose that commitment in order to protect my children from dealing with harmful drama, even as they grow up to be adults. When you are a parent, ethical questions revolve around your children and you put away your self-interest . . . forever.

Sherkat’s assessment of Regnerus’s work shows a total disregard for the emotional and sexual labor that bisexual parents contribute to their children. Bisexual parents must wrestle with their duties as parents while still contending with the temptations to enter into same-sex relationships. The turbulence documented in Mark Regnerus’s study is a testament to how hard that is. Rather than threatening, it is a reminder of the burden I carry and a goad to concern myself first and foremost with my children’s needs, not my sexual desires.

The other chicken-and-egg problem of Sherkat’s dismissal deals with conservative ideology. Many have dismissed my story with four simple words: “But you are conservative.” Yes, I am. How did I get that way? I moved to the right wing because I lived in precisely the kind of anti-normative, marginalized, and oppressed identity environment that the left celebrates: I am a bisexual Latino intellectual, raised by a lesbian, who experienced poverty in the Bronx as a young adult. I’m perceptive enough to notice that liberal social policies don’t actually help people in those conditions. Especially damning is the liberal attitude that we shouldn’t be judgmental about sex. In the Bronx gay world, I cleaned out enough apartments of men who’d died of AIDS to understand that resistance to sexual temptation is central to any kind of humane society. Sex can be hurtful not only because of infectious diseases but also because it leaves us vulnerable and more likely to cling to people who don’t love us, mourn those who leave us, and not know how to escape those who need us but whom we don’t love. The left understands none of that. That’s why I am conservative.

So yes, I am conservative and support Regnerus’s findings. Or is it that Regnerus’s findings revisit the things that made me conservative in the first place? Sherkat must figure that one out.
Having lived for forty-one years as a strange man, I see it as tragically fitting that the first instinct of experts and gay activists is to exclude my life profile as unfit for any “data sample,” or as Dr. Sherkat calls it, “bullshit.” So the game has gone for at least twenty-five years. For all the talk about LGBT alliances, bisexuality falls by the wayside, thanks to scholars such as Sherkat. For all the chatter about a “queer” movement, queer activists are just as likely to restrict their social circles to professionalized, normal people who know how to throw charming parties, make small talk, and blend in with the Art Deco furniture.

I thank Mark Regnerus. Far from being “bullshit,” his work is affirming to me, because it acknowledges what the gay activist movement has sought laboriously to erase, or at least ignore. Whether homosexuality is chosen or inbred, whether gay marriage gets legalized or not, being strange is hard; it takes a mental toll, makes it harder to find friends, interferes with professional growth, and sometimes leads one down a sodden path to self-medication in the form of alcoholism, drugs, gambling, antisocial behavior, and irresponsible sex. The children of same-sex couples have a tough road ahead of them—I know, because I have been there. The last thing we should do is make them feel guilty if the strain gets to them and they feel strange. We owe them, at the least, a dose of honesty. Thank you, Mark Regnerus, for taking the time to listen.

Robert Lopez is assistant professor of English at California State University-Northridge. He is the author of Colorful Conservative: American Conversations with the Ancients from Wheatley to Whitman. This year he will be publishing novels he wrote in the 1990s and 2000s.