Same-sex marriage is often touted as a harmless expansion of individual liberty. Yet the legal redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples has far from innocuous consequences, particularly with regard to children’s well-being and religious liberty.
Redefining marriage also strikes at our fundamental liberties in deeper though less obvious ways.
A crucial aspect of liberty is respect for subsidiarity—in particular, recognition that the family, based on marriage, is a pre-political community with natural and original authority over its internal affairs, especially the education and upbringing of children.
Redefining marriage in law to include same-sex couples undermines the principled basis for the primacy of parental childrearing authority by obliterating the link between marriage and procreation as well as the norm of conjoined biological parenthood that conjugal marriage laws help to foster.
What was once almost unanimously understood to be a normative ideal—the intact biological family composed of married mother and father with their biological children—is now culturally (and to a large extent legally) demoted to being merely one among an increasingly wide variety of family forms.
This essay explores the implications for parental authority and subsidiarity of this promotion of new family forms. Tomorrow, I provide a principled case for the primacy of parental childrearing authority.
State-Owned Children
The view of marriage as a mere creature of the state to be redefined at will goes hand in hand with the idea that children “belong” primarily to the state, which then delegates (limited) childrearing authority to whomever the state defines as the child’s parents.
We see this trend in Canada, where the 2005 bill redefining marriage to include same-sex partnerships replaced the term “natural parent” with “legal parent” throughout Canadian federal law.
Similarly, in at least nineteen US states as well as the District of Columbia, same-sex partners can now both be listed as parents on a child’s birth certificate, substituting politically correct legal fiction for the implacable (hetero)sexism of biological reality. Continue reading
Sources
- Public Discourse, from an article by Melissa Moschella, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America.
- Image: MercatorNet
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