SAME-SEX PARENTING: Mark Tardiff

Some of the arguments for SSM use the fallacy of contrasting the worst heterosexual situation with the best homosexual situation: e.g. abusive heterosexual parents as opposed to loving homosexual parents. The reasonable approach is to compare the best with the best, and the worst with the worst. Anything else is not argument but manipulative rhetoric.

Along this line, I worry about children being raised by same-sex parents. The lack of relation to the opposite sex has been noted, and some reply by saying how two men (for example) raising children seek to involve more sisters, aunts, etc. What was missed was the importance of modeling man-woman relationships by a mother and father. To point out that abusive marriages don't model it well either or that single parents don't model it at all is to commit the fallacy pointed out above.

What concerns me even more is the effect of changing the law. The fact is: the law is a teacher. Many proponents want the introduction of legal SSM precisely for its teaching value. They want society, through its laws, to teach that homosexual relationships are as acceptable as heterosexual relationships.

The problem is that it would teach much more than that. It would teach that marriage: (1) is an intimate sexual relationship with no intrinsic relation to procreation; (2) has no intrinsic relation to gender.

It would enshrine in law an untenable mind-body dualism in which my body is instrumental to my conscious self, instead of a more holistic understanding that I am my body and my mind and my consciousness etc.
posted by Eve at 12:57 AM VOTE

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