Politics WA Supremes: Some Children Are More Equal Than Others
As with New York’s recent decision on gay marriage, the WA Supremes views marriage as a way to protect children. From today’s decision:
…limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation, essential to the survival of the human race, and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by the children’s biological parents.
But what of children being raised by same-sex couples? What about their well-being?
There’s something perversely stingy about the WA and NY decisions. How does preventing same-sex couples from marrying make marriage a more stabilizing force in the lives of heterosexual couples? How does making my child’s life more insecure make the life of the kid with straight parents next door more secure? As one of the dissenting justices in NY pointed out, there is no shortage of marriage licenses—there are plenty to go around.
Even if you believe that marriage has a special role to play in the lives of heterosexuals (a point I’m only to happy to concede), can it not also play a similar-if-different role in the lives of homosexuals? Even among heterosexuals, marriage can have a different function depending on the circumstances of individual heterosexual couples. When my widowed grandfather remarried at age 65, he wasn’t seeking to further “the well-being of [his] children,” who were all grown and out of the house. He was seeking the security, stablity, companionship, and protections of marriage—for himself (and his female partner). The survival of the human race was the furthest thing from his mind.
So it comes to this, I guess: It seems that heterosexuals—so essential to the survival of the human race (Keep breeding, heteros! There just aren’t enough us on the planet!)—are the ones who need to be afforded special rights. Without the exclusive right to marriage, two courts in liberal states on opposite ends of the country both assume that heterosexuals could not be bothered to produce offspring at all—or, once they’ve produced them, could not be bothered to care for them.
Dissenting Justice Mary Fairhurst gets it:
The plurality and concurrence condone blatant discrimination against Washington’s gay and lesbian citizens in the name of encouraging procreation, marriage for individuals in relationships that result in children, and raising children in homes headed by opposite-sex parents, while ignoring the fact that denying same-sex couples the right to marry has no prospect of furthering any of those interests.
Reading on, it seems the the WA Supremes are siding with the fundies: Homosexuality, they arque, is not an “immutable characteristic”—in other, and more familiar words, the WA Supremes believe that homosexuality is a choice, and, what’s more, gay men and lesbians are not discriminated against because we are free to marry opposite-sex partners whenever we like.
Does the rationale behind this decision--that it's best for the (hetero's) kids--mean that those kids with homosexual parents are at risk? Maybe we can pass a Defense of Kids with Gay Parents Act retroactively declaring gay parenting illegal and rescuing those poor souls back into the foster care system.