To have and to hold.

In honor of today's landmark ruling by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, finding no constitutionally-defensible reason for the state to prohibit gay marriage, I'm reprinting below an e-mail I sent to my friend Rebecca. (She posted this on her blog a month or so ago; I've edited it slightly here.) I was writing in response to this essay by conservative pundit David Frum. For the record, while Rebecca has been a Frum fan, she parts ways with him on this issue.

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Here's one from your golden boy, David Frum. Frum seems to be saying that we shouldn't allow gay marriage because these not-quite-marriage thingies that are proliferating around Western Europe and North America are too fuzzy and don't provide a stable family union in which to raise children. Alas, he's created an incredibly faulty syllogism, and I'm a bit disappointed that one as wicked smart as Frum has gotten so intellectually lazy.

Of course I disagree with him completely in his opposition to gay marriage. But if he read his piece over, I think he'd have to recognize that he's not made a case against gay marriage at all. He's simply made a case against the non-marriage thingies, which he himself recognizes are used by almost as many straight couples as gays in places like France and Canada.

Frum states that kids benefit significantly from growing up in stable two-parent households. He also says kids do better when they have both a mother and a father at home. But he doesn't provide any anecdotal or statistical evidence as to whether kids who grow up with ANY two parents at home in a stable committed family relationship do better than kids who grow up in single-parent homes or whose parents are divorced. I think he's right that kids do better when they have two parents at home who love one another and are committed to the family relationship. He's wrong to say that these two parents must be a man and a woman. He's also missing a huge logical step in his argument by claiming that the short life span of the non-marriage "pacts" or civil unions means that gay marriages are doomed to be short-lived as well. Nothing in Frum's piece provides any evidence that gay civil unions last a shorter (or longer) time than straight civil unions. And nothing indicates that gay marriages are any less (or more) likely to last than straight marriages. If marriage lasts longer than civil unions, then why shouldn't gay marriages last longer than gay civil unions? And if Frum wants to promote marriage over fuzzy civil partnerships because it's better for children, why is he opposed to gay marriages?

What Frum should realize is the true point his article makes is that marriage is better for kids, and that if gay marriage was legalized everywhere, gay people would be fully empowered by law to raise their kids in stable two-parent homes with all the legal benefits of marriage AND the stronger commitment of marriage compared with non-marriage partnerships. Why doesn't Frum take his logical thread to this obvious conclusion? Because he just hates the idea of gay marriage. Why? As a straight person who has absolutely no tolerance for or ability to comprehend homophobia, I really can't tell you. But Frum clearly is afraid of the very idea that healthy, well-adjusted children can be raised by gay people who've made a lifetime commitment to one another.

Comments

[jean]

Was it a commentary piece in the National Post called " A blow to Canada's Families".