No to Gay Marriage but Yes to Gay Adoption?

Paul Ryan’s recent off-the-cuff statement that he supports gay adoption while he opposes gay marriage is as likely to be a one-time slip as a change in position. Whether or not it represents his real view, it certainly is gaining traction among some Christians. This trend reveals a profound ignorance of the reasons for opposing same-sex marriage even among those who do oppose it. If Americans are to better understand the case for opposing same-sex marriage, they must look to France. 

Anyone who has been following the debate over same-sex marriage in France will know that the opposition has focused on L'homoparentalité or “same-sex parenting.” The commission established by the National Assembly, the “Mission of Inquiry on the Family and the Rights of Children” (usually referred to as the Pécresse Commission, after its rapporteure) reported in 2006 that

The link between marriage and filiation is so close that the question of making marriage accessible is inseparable from that of making adoption and medically assisted conception accessible. This link was acknowledged by almost all witnesses, whether they were in favor of or opposed to developments in this area.

In this, they were prescient; the recent legislation does authorize both SSM and joint adoption by same-sex couples. Allowing an unmarried couple to adopt a child jointly was rejected. As the Minister of Justice observed,

We must be guided by the basic purpose of adoption, which is to give a child who has no family to a family itself unable to have one. While de facto spouses form a couple, they do not form a family. They may end their relationship at any time, without the exercise at any point of control by a judicial authority. This significant risk of family instability can prove especially harmful for an adopted child, who, given the nature of his or her personal history, in many cases expresses a greater need for emotional security.

The Commission also noted that the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Inter-country Adoption of 29 May 1993, of which France is a state signatory, restricts adoption to married couples.

The Commission found further reasons to oppose joint adoption by same-sex couples, regardless of marital status, summarized in the evidence of the eminent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Pierre Lévy-Soussan, an adviser to the Ministry of Health. “It is in the child’s best interests to join a nuclear family that is already socially accepted so that he or she does not have to take on the additional task, following a history of abandonment, of adapting to a family that is, for whatever reason, ‘non-standard.’”

Read more at First Things