Jiminy Crickets! Little Billy doesn’t want gays to get married!

June 3, 2006

Guest Post by Morbo

[tag]Focus on the Family[/tag]’s newest ad promoting the [tag]Federal Marriage Amendment[/tag] is just out. It shows a freckle-faced tyke with a distraught look on his mug. The caption reads, “[tag]Every Child Needs a Mother and a Father[/tag].” (Similar ads targeting specific senators by name are being placed in newspaper nationwide.)

Actually, what every child needs is good parenting and a nurturing, loving environment at home. I see no reason why same-sex couples cannot provide this. Indeed, I am sure that many are doing so right now.

How you have sex is no predictor of what type of parent you will be. Mrs. Morbo and I have two children, and since becoming a father I’ve tended to pay more attention to the parenting styles of others — especially in public places. Frankly, I’ve seen a lot of lousy heterosexual parenting.

A recent example: On Memorial Day, a friend and I took our sons to a carnival. It featured amusement rides, games, deep-fried food, etc. While we were all enjoying a snack, I observed the opposite-sex couple at the table next to us interact with their two boys, aged perhaps 10 and 12. Over the course of about 15 minutes, I heard these parents say nothing pleasant to these boys. Instead, they unleashed a steady stream of verbal abuse. It was about 95 degrees outside, and one boy poured a little water on his head. His mother grabbed the bottle and shrieked, “I paid two dollars for that! It’s not for pouring on your head.”

Everything said to these kids was harsh and negative. There was no joy in this family’s existence, and the boys seemed worn down. I can only imagine what years of living like that must do to a young spirit.

I’ve observed other parents beat their children in public — an action that never fails to infuriate me. Anyone who has raised children knows they push your buttons from time to time, but since when does that justify physical violence? In what other social relationship is it permissible to beat someone who screws up or acts out?

So forgive me for failing to agree with Focus. Children need more than a mom and a dad. They need quality parenting — and it makes no sense to assert that straight couples, by mere virtue of their heterosexuality, do a better job at providing that.

So what makes good parents? Education, for one thing. A new study by the National Center on Health Statistics finds that college-educated men have fewer out-of-wedlock children and are more involved in their kids’ lives than men who have not been to college. Reported the Associated Press:

The study showed that among all men 22 to 44 years old, 47 percent with less than a high school education have had a child outside of marriage, compared with 6 percent of college graduates. And researchers said fathers with higher education levels were also more likely to play with and bathe their children than those who didn’t finish high school. The study also found that dads are just as likely as moms to find parenting worthwhile despite the expense and effort involved.

Parenting is demanding, but that doesn’t mean it is rocket science. You are to love and nurture your children, be patient with them, refrain from physically assaulting them and provide for their material needs as well as their intellectual development.

This last point is important, because it is here that I believe many parents fall down. Read to your children every day. Visit the library. Model good behavior by letting them see you read. Turn off the damn TV. Listen to kids’ questions. When they ask you something you don’t know, admit that and find a book or Web site that has the answer. Learn something new together. Take them places. Be involved in their schooling.

These are a few of the hallmarks of good parenting. And here’s a newsflash for Focus on the Family: You don’t have to be straight to do any of them.

One final thought on this: Interestingly, there is a feature of American life, one that is legal right now, which often results in children being denied two full-time parents. This procedure, commonly used by opposite-sex couples, almost always has a detrimental effect on [tag]children[/tag] and leads to the break-up of families every day. It is called “divorce.” I haven’t heard [tag]Dobson[/tag] say a thing about it in ages.

It is called “divorce.” I haven’t heard Dobson say a thing about it in ages.

Careful, don’t give them ideas. The catholics have been officially against divorce for a long time. (Of course, they also had “annullment” as an equivalent, though it requires jumping through more hoops.) And a general anti-divorce sentiment is not at all uncommon (albeit often held hypocritically) throughout greater wingnuttia.

As a general rule, don’t imagine that just because something is insane, counterproductive and widely unpopular that the ultra-right religious is too sensible to embrace it.

  • Many great points here, Morbo. If I were forced to pick one, I’d pick “Turn off the damn TV.” I believe TV, aside from numbing rather than educating, shows heterosexuals how to be bad parents. Given our nation’s prejudice against gay parenting I have a pretty limited sample for comparison, but those I’ve observed seem to go the extra mile being good parents.

    As a university professor who has no kids, I enjoyably spent my adult life in a classroom, taking advantage of other parents’ past efforts on behalf of their children. An added pleasure: my wife and I frequently had college “kids” over for dinner. When I do get out in “the real world” I am amazed how many parents seem to be acting out ausive roles they learned from bad TV. They seem to have fixed on an abusive line of speech which they repeat as if they’re dazzled by their rehearsed speech in front of their captive audience – their own kid and those adults within hearing who are forced to listen to it. The kids who are the target of this verbal seem to take it the way they take TV, too: they remain as oblivious as possible. Like inmates in our prisons, they seem to be just “doing time” until their sentence is up.

    I know this is all part of a wider societal problem. In the 1950s (which I definitely do not favor a return to) it took one parent to earn enough to raise and educate four children. Now it takes more than two incomes (i.e., debt) to deal with less than half as many kids. It’s no wonder that both parents, exhausted from pointless work for uncaring corporations and bureaucracies, can think of little more than plopping down in front the TV till it’s time for sleep. Those TVs teach the parents to fear for their children’s safety, thus robbing the kids of unsupervised play in the neighborhood. Those TVs show parents and their kids an impossibly vast world of commodities and unrealizable hopes of material well being. And, just in case the kids might get together and realize they’re being screwed by parents who would rather watch TV than be with them, the corporate world has added further instruments of interpersonal isolation: the latest cell phone and iPod.

    I find it ironic that American society, relentlessly turning its family members into little more than atomized consumer units, is voting in state after state to prevent certain loving couples who really want to make a go of family life from doing so, simply because they’re gay.

  • From my perspective, children learn their values at home and the values they adopt are primarily discerned in proportion to the degree of sincerity and integrity they believe exists in their parents. In this construct, the degradation of family values originates within individual families as a result of a child’s perception that their parents are inauthentic and hypocritical. It’s also important to keep in mind that nearly every homosexual is the product of a heterosexual relationship and a heterosexual family. Consequently, the fact that the vast majority of children are raised in traditional heterosexual families makes the premise that homosexuals endanger the family not only flawed, but blatantly absurd.

    In trying to then determine what is wrong with families, the indicators seem abundantly evident. Firstly, a family cannot succeed if the parents aren’t committed to personal responsibility, a trait that frankly cuts a swath across all of society in its impact on the overall health of civilization. When personal responsibility is abandoned, so are the family and ultimately the society.

    Ultimately, the family succeeds one child at a time and that must start at home. The relationship of the Mexican couple down the street or the gay couple in the grocery store can only threaten one family…their own. Time spent obsessing about the actions of other families simply detracts from the precious time each family needs to succeed. The sooner families begin to act accordingly, the sooner the value of all families can be maximized. If and when this happens, the individual will flourish and society will endure.

    read full article here:

    http://www.thoughttheater.com

  • And from another corner of the religious right we get this:

    TVC Opposed to Marriage Protection Amendment

    Dear TVC Supporter

    Traditional Values Coalition has always taken a strong position in supporting traditional marriage and opposing any statutory imitations of marriage designed to appease the homosexual lobby. While Traditional Values Coalition supports the need for a federal constitutional amendment, because it is the only way to ensure that marriage between one man and one woman is protected, we strongly oppose S. J. Res. 1, the Marriage Protection Amendment, because of the second sentence. Please see our letter that went to the Senate.

    June 1, 2006

    Re: Opposition to S. J. Res. 1 the Marriage Protection Amendment Because of the Second Sentence

    Dear Senator:

    Traditional Values Coalition has always taken a strong position in supporting traditional marriage and opposing any statutory imitations of marriage designed to appease the homosexual lobby. 

    While Traditional Values Coalition supports the need for a federal constitutional amendment, because it is the only way to ensure that marriage between one man and one woman is protected, we strongly oppose S. J. Res. 1, the Marriage Protection Amendment, because of the second sentence.

    The situation at this moment could be called a triumph of anti-federalism. Not only do states not have an individual voice in this debate – one state, Massachusetts, has imposed homosexual marriage through the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution on the other 49 states.

    Coverage of the marriage battle being fought across America often overlooks the corrupt nature of what happened in Massachusetts. The citizens of Massachusetts had conducted a signature drive to put the marriage issue on the ballot for a commonwealth-wide referendum there. Extra parliamentary and illegal maneuvers by the Massachusetts House Speaker Thomas Birmingham kept the legislature from conducting a vote to put the measure on the ballot. Experts believe the legislature would have approved the measure had it ever been put to a vote, and the resulting public referendum would have resoundingly supported traditional marriage.

    The refusal of one House leader to allow the vote in the legislature deprived the public of its voice in the debate in Massachusetts. Furthermore, the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts took advantage of the delay to issue a decision which thwarted the will of the people and substituted, in its place, the will of a handful of liberal judges.

    Homosexual activists had been advocating so-called civil unions because (a) they assumed marriage was years away from being a politically attainable goal and (b) because they felt civil unions would be the transitional step to the ultimate goal of homosexual marriage.

    All of this brings us to two important points about the current version of the Marriage Protection Amendment now before the Senate.

    First, the wording of the second sentence would allow for civil unions, domestic partnerships and any other innovative synonym for marriage. Matt Daniels, the Chairman of the Alliance for Marriage told Time Magazine in February, 2004, the amendment was written to preserve the right of states to enact civil unions.

    “The amendment would limit marriage to opposite-sex couples, but it would not out-law civil unions, which Daniels believes should be available to all states,” the TIME article reported.

    We understand the faulty argument that this is a political sop which must be thrown to some in order to win their vote. But we also understand that this negates the impact of the first sentence.

    Second, the homosexual leaders are right. Civil unions are the stepping stone to full recognition of homosexual marriage. Any reasonable person and even some federal judges would recognize that there is only a nominal difference between civil unions and marriage. 

    We believe proponents of the amendment have settled for a rhetorical and superficial “victory” of form which will ultimately amount to a defeat in the important substance so necessary to defending traditional marriage.

    Proponents have led the American people to believe that the MPA “fixes the problem” and “stops homosexual marriage” and its counterfeits.  Many have artfully avoided the discussion, which Mr. Daniels, to his credit honestly admits is about an amendment which is both pro-marriage and pro-civil unions.

    No polling question has ever been formulated to give Americans the choice which proponents of this amendment attempt to make for them. If asked, to choose between traditional marriage and homosexual civil unions, most Americans would recognize this “distinction without a difference” gimmickry and reply neither.

    We believe an amendment which is simple and clear about the uniqueness of marriage is what most Americans want and we encourage you to use your voice and your vote to bring forth an amendment which delivers marriage from those who would destroy it.

    We believe a one sentence amendment, “Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman as husband and wife,” which is simple and clear about the uniqueness of marriage, is what most Americans want, and we encourage you to use your voice and your vote to bring forth an amendment which delivers marriage from those who would destroy it.

    In theological circles, there is a saying that “on the far side of complexity lies simplicity.”  This is truly a case in which simplicity and directness are required. Political maneuvering with a wink to our opponents or some attempt to finesse our differences with the homosexual lobby will reduce this debate to a confused state in which the truth becomes merely another opinion.

    Please support a simple and clear amendment that fully protects marriage and withhold your support from the current amendment and anything else which is less.

    Sincerely,

    Rev. Louis P. Sheldon
    Chairman

  • I agree with all of this…. to me, it’s the quality of the parenting that matters, not the gender of the parents.

    As someone who just celebrated 30 years of “marriage” to his same-sex partner, I still don’t get how my relationship threatens anyone else’s marriage. My partner has four siblings, all of whom have children. Two of the marriages resulted in wonderful, well adjusted kids, and two marriages were failures and resulted in badly misbehaving brats. In fact, the badly misbehaving brats look to Rick and me as role models for a stable, well-functioning family. One even told us he wanted to move in with us because we had a better home life than his parents offered.

    I suspect that gays may offer some unique advantages as parents in some ways. So many of us learned to deal with hostility, hatred, repression and bigotry in ways that taught us sensitivity, compassion, and understanding on how to cope with life’s difficulties. Many of my gay friends who have kids say that they are better able to help the kids handle the everyday traumas of growing up (not being picked for choose up teams, being teased or bullied, not being asked to the prom) because they learned how to cope with being “Different.”

    Then again, I suppose some same sex couples would make lousy parent, just as straight couples do. But that’s no reason to preclude others from forming families.

  • Fantastic post, Morbo.

    I don’t have too much to add, except that to me this issue is so transparently clear that I often wish the Democrats and others on “our side” would just take on the Christofascist bigots directly, rather than try to elide the question (how’d that work out, Senator Kerry?). The opponents have no recourse except fear, ignorance, and “our religious text says this.”

    I will note that a friend of mine, who’s deeply religious and I think opposes gay marriage, has admitted to me that his position is a hypocritical one as long as no-fault divorce remains the law in much of the country. So that’s one argument Christians with some capacity for rational thought can’t really dismiss out of hand.

  • Morbo,
    I’m not convinced it’s divorce that’s the most threat to marriage – usually divorce is a product of adultry. That’s the real culprit.

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