MORE ON PARENTS AND ADOPTION: Gabriel Rosenberg

A syllogism I proposed here has sparked an ongoing discussion over whether aoptive parents are parents in the sense that "parents ought to be married". If the answer is "yes", then my syllogism "Parents ought to be married; Gays are parents; Gays ought to be married." holds. ... The latest response in this discussion came from Mary Catelli at MarriageDebate.com. ...

Unlike the previous paragraph, in this one Ms. Catelli does seem to acknowledge here that adoption does make some difference, just not enough to justify marriage. Her reason is that the marriage itself does not secure any responsibility towards the child that adoption does not already secure. This misses two important points, though. First, marriage make this legal responsibillity automatic and immediate for children born into the marriage. In addition to saving parents thousands of dollars in adoption fees that could better be spent on the child's health and education, the immediacy can be extremely important for the child in those early critical months. To give just one example, the child may benefit immensely by being covered by her parent's health insurance. More importantly, marriage does much more than just establish the legal responsibiliities of a parent. If that were the only benefit of marriage to children, it wouldn't matter if parents remained married. Once paterninty was established the marriage would have served "its purpose". This view of marriage ignores its immense value in helping a family to raise children. And of course, if marriage only mattered for children it wouldn't matter if a couple without children--or whose children were raised--remained married.

So no, I wouldn't require someone in a same-sex couple to adopt their stepchildren as a condition of marriage, just as we don't require this of oppoiste-sex couples. I would expect that both parents would take legal responsiblity for any children brought into the marriage, though. And as we have seen, a same-sex couple does not necessarily consist of a parent and stepparent. So I respectfully submit that my argument does indeed still stand.

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posted by Eve at 10:41 AM VOTE

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