Same-sex parenting is insane

I was at Pizza Hut with my three primary-age sons just after an Australian children's program, Play School, aired its lesbian "two mothers" episode. My youngest son asked very seriously, "Daddy, can two boys marry?" and the middle son stepped in, "No, but two girls can marry. They were talking about it at school".

I do not like strangers messing with the minds of my children. I object to anybody inserting disturbing notions into their sanely happy understanding of marriage and family.

Yet the disturbance is becoming all-pervasive, with an Australian Senate enquiry into the Greens-sponsored Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2009, and the launch this week of a national television campaign for gay marriage. From the commanding heights of culture come strange decrees that two women, or two men, are just as good as a mother and father when it comes to raising a child. Who are these surreal city-dwellers, so out of touch with nature?

In the northern state of Queensland it was Premier Anna Bligh who announced last month that two men will be allowed to get a baby of their own by surrogacy. In Western Australia two homosexual men have already been given a child by adoption. In the southern state of Victoria two women are allowed to obtain a child using a stranger’s sperm, and be named as that child’s "two parents" on the birth certificate.

Think from the child’s perspective. A little girl should not have to look up and see two erotically involved men posing as her "parents". No matter how competent and caring a lesbian partner may be, she can never be a Dad to a young boy. Little children must not be subjected, by the law of the land, to a prolonged and uncontrolled experiment on their emotional development.

Anger with such governmental child abuse is entirely consistent with neighbourly friendliness to those fellow citizens afflicted with same-sex attraction. All privacy and respect is to be given to adults who have to live with this profoundly complex condition, but no little child is to be made to participate in their affliction.

A baby needs the love of both her mother and her father! How can anyone with normal experience of life question that? Certainly there are tragedies of a parent’s death or desertion which destroy the foundation of many a child’s world -- but that is a tragedy nobody would ever wish upon a child. Yet here the state deliberately inflicts this tragedy upon an innocent baby by decreeing that he or she will enter the world without even the possibility of both a Mum and a Dad.

No politicians have the authority to so violate the primal needs of a child or mess with the deep sanity of nature.

In such a debate, evidence from social science has only a secondary role. Certainly the best-designed studies confirm the obvious -- that a child does best in every respect when raised by his or her own parents, or in the nearest equivalent context of an adopting mother and father. In the light of this research, the American College of Pediatricians in 2004 concludes: "The environment in which children are reared is absolutely critical to their development. Given the current body of research, the American College of Pediatricians believes it is inappropriate, potentially hazardous to children, and dangerously irresponsible to change the age-old prohibition on homosexual parenting, whether by adoption, foster care, or by reproductive manipulation. This position is rooted in the best available science."

However, nobody needs to resort to "the best available science" to defend the obvious insight that a little child needs both a mother and a father. The judgment of anyone who cannot see this as a self-evident fact of life, as the most commonsense and necessary condition of a child’s wellbeing, is suspect.

As for political strategy, pro-family activists sometimes forget that defending marriage is meaningless if they cannot defend the right of a child to a natural upbringing. If homosexual adults are disallowed from calling their union "marriage" but are still allowed to obtain children by artificial means, then marriage is a dead word.

That is because marriage is primarily a license to form a family, not merely a license for sexual relations. As atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in Marriage and Morals (1929): "It is through children alone that sexual relations become of importance to society, and worthy to be taken cognizance of by a legal institution." Homosexual acts cannot create children; therefore the State has no interest in regulating homosexual relationships.

The legal institution of marriage buttresses a biological phenomenon for the sake of social stability. It is society’s way of binding a feral-by-nature male to his mate and his child, in order that a child can benefit from the complementary nurture of both a mother and father.

As David Blankenhorn wrote in The Future of Marriage (2007): "Marriage is fundamentally about the needs of children… Redefining marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would eliminate entirely in law, and weaken still further in culture, the basic idea of a mother and a father for every child."

Nothing less is at stake than that an innocent child, first opening her eyes in this world, should see the faces of those two people, her own mother and father, who together gave her life, not the faces of two men who will be her technologically-contrived, State-decreed "parents".

Time is running out to restrain the social vandals who write laws in our land. As Blankenhorn warned: "Once this proposed reform (of gay marriage) became law, even to say the words out loud in public -- ‘Every child needs a father and a mother’ -- would probably be viewed as explicitly divisive and discriminatory, possibly even as hate speech."

For the sake of all children yet to be born we must despise threats of "hate speech" and say out loud that every child needs the love of a father and a mother.

Dr David van Gend is a family doctor in Toowoomba, Australia.