Same-Sex Marriage and Parenting: Four Big Myths Debunked | Sister Renee Mirkes | CWR
A rising chorus of voices is rejecting the supposedly settled matter of same-sex marriage and parenting
Popular opinion would have us believe the legalization of same-sex marriage and parenting is a straightforward matter of justice. But not everyone concurs. In fact, the dissenters constitute a rising chorus of voices who identify salient myths smuggled into the ostensibly settled opinion. From one side, the voice of experiential and reasoned testimony from individuals who either identify as homosexuals and/or have been raised by same-sex parents. From another, the voice of empirical evidence from social science researchers. This essay sets their cumulative crescendo center stage.
Myth #1: Only heterosexuals and conservative religious persons are opposed to the legalization of same-sex parenting.
When an interviewer asked Xavier Bongibault whether his opposition to France’s same-sex marriage law arose from religious conviction, he replied: “Absolutely not, I am atheist.” As a homosexual atheist, Bongibault is against France’s new marriage law for the same reason he’s critical of LGBT alliances: it’s homophobic. “The idea that a homosexual must be for homosexual marriage because he’s homosexual” is ideology right out of the play book of a social philosophy that insists gays and lesbians cannot reflect politically, except through sexual instinct.1
As it turns out, Bongibault represents the opposition of a sizable segment of the French non-religious homosexual community who are seldom given the microphone. Jean-Marc Ayrault who has lived with a man for 20 years, insists: “The LGBT movement that speaks out in the media . . . doesn’t speak for me. As a society we should not be encouraging [same-sex marriage]. It’s not biologically natural.”2
Jean-Dominique Bunel, a specialist in humanitarian law who’s done relief work in war-torn areas, was outraged by the French same-sex marriage law. He admitted to Le Figaro that, after being raised by two women, he has “suffered from the lack of a father,” from the lack of “a daily presence, a character and a properly masculine example, some counterweight to the relationship of my mother to her lover. I lived that absence of a father, experienced it, as an amputation.”3
Other adult children of same-sex parents emphasize that their opposition to gay marriage is shared by a majority of the gay community.
Comments