Gay marriage advocates deploy distorted generalizations based on women’s rights to have a child with or without a man. This magically translates into a demand that society provide gay men with other people’s kids. Let’s examine this. Social policy is not meant to redress the fact that women can have babies and men can’t or that women and men can reproduce and same sex couples can’t…. The new social justice dictum is that society owes LBGT people the flesh and blood of other people’s children because they are “married” now. Let’s be honest. Love does not make a family in this case. Human trafficking does.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recently announced it will review a November decision by the Sixth Circuit Court—which represents Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee—that upheld marriage as between a man and a woman. Will the Supreme Court side with the two judges in the majority, or with the one dissenting judge?

The majority ruling dismisses any possibility of a constitutional right to gay marriage, while the dissent focuses on an entirely different question of whether gay parents are as good as straight ones. The latter controversy is something that the majority decision explicitly refused to weigh in on, so the dissent is a curious non sequitur.

Since I was raised in the LBGT household and am the daughter of a lesbian, I am anxious to see if children’s rights are something that the Supreme Court considers. The dissent from Martha Craig Daughtrey does not consider the rights of children. Rather, she treats children as a social nuisance and or as an entitlement owed to same-sex couples.

LGBT ‘Rights’ Trample Women and Children’s Rights

The “marriage equality” arguments leverage children, often claiming that if gay adults can marry the children they are raising will benefit from broader “protections.” This is doublespeak. The “protections” consist of the gay adults’ access to and control of children as commodities. Activists have enough savvy to realize it is better that people did not see this hidden inconsistency. Most people are still fixated on the initial claims: “between two consenting adults who are not hurting anyone else.”

Not a single same-sex couple can reproduce together. It behooves us to analyze the ways that same-sex marriage demands other people’s children as a “civil right” and in so doing invariably denies both women their own children and children their right to a mother and a father.

The dissent rests primarily on the personal vignettes of the cherry-picked litigants, who are rather predictable, gold-star lesbian moms. Women play better than men in these cases. The plaintiffs in DeBoer v. Snyder are a lesbian couple with three adopted children. The argument taps into old prejudices against children born out of wedlock and downgrades supposedly irresponsible women. Judge Daughtrey’s dissent pays special attention to the biographical specifics of these children:

N was born . . . to a biological mother who was homeless, had psychological impairments, was unable to care for N, and subsequently surrendered her legal rights to N. The plaintiffs volunteered to care for the boy, brought him into their home following his birth…

Daughtrey is sure to note of the biological mother, “She surrendered her legal rights.” How did the birth mother do this if she was “impaired”? The unstable and impoverished mother is a useful trope in misogynistic and classist discourse. I wonder what was done to find this biological mother housing so she could in fact leave the hospital with her son. It is likely that few if any good-faith attempts were made to keep “N” with his mother, let alone find his father and enforce child support or at least compel some kind of connection so “N” could know his origins.

Using the State to Tear Families Apart

Rather than a story of an abusive system ripping a child away from where he came from, it is presented as a tale of sacrifice and heroism on the part of the women who adopted the infants. Equally disturbing is the fact that this is expressed with no regard to the child’s future feelings, only as it serves to make the couple appear worthy and deserving.

This begs the question as whether or not this “biological mother” had the mental capacity to surrender her rights. Could the adoptive “mothers” have had legal counsel, while the birth mother was without any support navigating the often-hostile legal maze? When these stories go public, these details are hidden, seemingly by design, and asking such questions is treated as taboo. Perhaps upon further scrutiny, readers will discover that gay families are compromised by their need to tear apart other people’s families using the oppressive force of the state and its legal apparatuses.

In so many ways the dissenting opinion stands as the perfect postmodern artifact, the chalice of the cultural warriors who traffic in distortions. It uses privilege and entitlement while claiming to correct inequality. The end result is that the misogyny of the LGBT movement flings women backward to a dark era, when the rule was prejudice against single mothers and unintended pregnancy.

The dissent’s next example is worse: “J was born . . . premature . . . to a drug addicted prostitute” (p. 46). Here we have the other “bad mother” trope—“the junky whore.” Many mothers would have demanded that all discussion of the children be removed from the public eye because it can and will be hurtful to them. I wonder if either these women did that, or knew they could.

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