Arguments for Same-Sex Marriage

There will soon be a postal vote in Australia over whether gays and lesbians can get marriage, so the issue of same-sex marriage has been in the news lately. I am not at all gay nor do I aspire to marry, but I am absolutely surprised at how anyone can vote against gay marriage. What gays and lesbians do privately among themselves is their business. Homosexuals getting married does hurt anyone either. No one is forcing anyone to do anything they don't want to do. No one is killing anyone. It should be a non-issue, but it isn't.

In particular, Dr Kevin Donnely from the Australian Catholic University wrote an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald titled This is why I'll be voting 'no' on same sex marriage, and when I read it, it is just filled with logical errors, so I feel a need to expose them here.

There's no doubt that central to the concept of family is a definition of marriage involving a man and a woman for the purpose of procreation. With only minor exceptions over some hundreds of years and across all the major religions, this is how marriage has been, and continues to be, defined.

Definitions can change, and definitions in legislation change all the time.

No matter how much gays and lesbians might want to wish otherwise from a physiological and biological point of view, only men and women can have children. Such is the nature of conceiving and giving birth that to pretend otherwise is to deny how nature works.

The issue here is not whether gays or lesbians can or cannot produce children. The issue is whether they should be allowed to get married. The two are separate.

Furthermore, gays and lesbians can have children. This is not a denial of nature. For example, a lesbian can simply buy sperm from a donor and impregnate a female. There is also adoption.

To put it bluntly, gays and lesbians are physically incapable of procreation and having their own children. For them to believe otherwise is to deny the life choice they have made and to believe they should be entitled to something normally associated with biological parents.

This is wrong. Gays and lesbians can have their own children, e.g. via adoption or artificial insemination.

It's also true that the ideal situation is where children are raised by their biological parents instead of conception involving a third party donating sperm or paying a surrogate mother. As any parent well knows, the intimate and unique bond between a biological parent and his or her child is primal in its force.

I won't provide them here but there are many studies that show that children of homosexual parents grow up fine. There are many factors that affect the welfare of children, e.g. what sort of education they receive, whether the parents a drug addicts, etc. It is easy to understand how, e.g. drug addiction by a parent can affect child welfare, but what does sexual orientation have to do with the welfare of the child? Furthermore, if government can regulate the sexual orientation of the parents if sexual orientation affects child welfare, then it sets a precedent that everything that could affect child welfare must be regulated, e.g. parents need to undergo regular drug tests, be financially audited by government auditors to make sure they have enough money to raise children, etc. Rather that try to focus on the factors that may affect child welfare and regulate that (which will result in a huge violation of freedom) it is easier to simply oversee the welfare of children and remove children from their parents where it is clear there is a problem, e.g. child abuse.

Both genetically and emotionally, and what is expected socially, men and women are different. While much has been done to promote equality of the sexes the fact is that boys need strong, male role models.

If the child wants a strong male role model, that role model doesn't need to be a parent.

In the same way, despite the campaign by feminists to erase gender stereotyping, young girls generally copy their mothers and express themselves in a feminine way. As a general rule, boys are more physical than girls and less emotionally demonstrative.

This has nothing to do with gay or lesbian marriage. If someone wants to act feminine, he can. If someone wants to act masculine and doesn't see that behavior in his parents, he can look at other people. Furthermore, even in a hetrosexual marriage you may not have a strong male role model. The man may be feminine. You could have a lesbian couple where both of them act masculine, and the if the child wants to copy masculine behavior, he can look at his masculine female parents. If he doesn't want that, he can look elsewhere, e.g. find a friend who is masculine.

The argument that the marriage act should not be radically redefined is based on the fact that gays and lesbians already enjoy all the rights and privileges of de-facto couples. Long gone are the days when gays and lesbians were ostracised or discriminated against.

Many heterosexual couples want to marry rather than be in de-facto relationships, so they must see some benefit to marriage beyond a de-facto relationship. Why would it be any different for homosexual couples?