I think discrimination is great. I think we should discriminate based on age, sex, disability, and sexual orientation. And I bet most Americans agree with me.
We should discriminate against people of certain ages. No person under the age of 21 should be allowed to purchase a handgun. Agreed? I want to discriminate against women too. We should restrict them from using certain medications...like Viagra. And don’t forget the disabled. I insist we discriminate against the blind and prevent them from obtaining driver’s licenses. Finally, let’s discriminate against same-sex couples by refusing to issue them marriage certificates.
Not all discrimination is bad. In fact, we do it every day. Discriminating is simply making a distinction. The question becomes, is the distinction legitimate or not? Can we discriminate against the blind by restricting their access to driver’s licenses? Of course we can.
That’s because we make the distinction between people who are qualified to drive a car and those who aren’t. The blind are different than those who can see in a way that disqualifies them from driving. They’re not the same as sighted people—they’re different. That’s not unreasonable and no one is complaining this is unfair discrimination.
Is it fair, then, to discriminate against same-sex couples? Yes, because there’s a legitimate distinction between homosexual and heterosexual couples. No amount of judicial power can make them the same.
The difference is significant. Same-sex marriage, by design, will always deny a child their mother or father. It also makes mothers and fathers interchangeable. So a mother offers no unique contribution to her children. She is just a warm body. A man could accomplish all her parenting functions just as well.
This is not only counterintuitive, it flies in the face of decades of research that demonstrates children do best when they are raised by their biological mother and father. For example, studies show that fatherless children suffer from higher incidents of mental illness, educational failure, substance abuse, criminal behavior, sexual abuse, and other problems.
The fact that not every opposite-sex couple will have children doesn’t change anything. Marriage creates, by design, the environment in which children will grow up. We shouldn’t intentionally create a parenting model that is inadequate to raise healthy children. But that’s what happens when we endorse same-sex marriage.
Lesbian parent Rosie O'Donnell candidly revealed her motivation behind same-sex parenting. When asked by her son, “Mommy, why can’t I have a daddy?” Rosie answered, “Because I’m the kind of mommy who wants another mommy.”1 Notice that it’s about her and what she wants—not her son’s needs. The motivation is selfish.
Advocates of this revisionist model argue that marriage is merely a social construction, something we can change as culture changes. That’s impossible. Gregory Koukl writes that, “It is not culture that constructs marriages or the families that marriages begin. Rather, it is the other way around: Marriage and family construct culture. As the building blocks of civilization, families are logically prior to society as the parts are prior to the whole. Bricks aren’t the result of the building because the building is made up of bricks. You must have the first before you can get the second.”2
That’s why government protects and privileges opposite-sex marriages and families. They provide tax incentives, inheritance rights, and other advantages to protect families that produce the next generation and create civilization itself. No society, in all of human history, has ever granted these privileges and protections to same-sex couples. Doing so is a social experiment that uses children as guinea pigs.
Except with this experiment, we already know the outcome. We’ve already seen the harmful effects of fatherless and motherless children in our culture. Same-sex marriage simply makes government (read: you and me) sponsor these brave new families.