Practical Concerns Valid And Necessary
Is Mary Schroyer a bigot? “I have five kids, I’m a teacher by profession, I’ve always followed issues that have to do with families, kids and education,” Mary says, explaining her involvement with Take It to the People, a Vermont group that wants gay marriage decided by truly democratic means.
“I guess my main concern is that whatever you put into law becomes something taught in school, gets a stamp of approval. I personally don’t think same-sex marriage is the direction we should be going. Men and women are different; if you have children they are best in households in which they have a mom and a dad.”
Is that a reasonable position, one decent people can say in public?
State Rep. George Schiavone does volunteer work for homeless shelters. In the hurried, overwrought and increasingly uncivil atmosphere in Vermont created by advocates of same-sex unions, he, too, is a man whose views do not merit the dignity of a polite response. “I had to get up on the floor and argue against a Republican who was calling us homophobes and bigots, Schiavone says. “Anyone who even questions same-sex unions gets called bigoted and hateful.”
This sustained campaign of stigmatization is apparently successful. Although polls show twothirds of Vermonters oppose same-sex marriage, grass-roots are no longer showing up in force.
“They are tired of being called bigots,” according to Schiavone. “My wife says now it’s the traditional marriage people that are going into the closet.”
Nice lesbian mothers bring their babies to hearings and insist that if and only if same-sex unions are legitimated will their babies be protected. Having decided on their own that this is an OK thing to do to children, they want us to ratify and institutionalize their personal choice, without even questioning the long-term consequences.
Do it fast, do it now, do it above all without raising questions lest you be struck down as a hatemonger. Will children really be better off in a society in which the law officially declares mothers and fathers interchangeable and disposable? The babies, I notice, though paraded for political effect, are as yet silent in this. How do children raised in homosexual unions feel about the experience?
We do not know the answer, yet the state legislature is being stampeded into giving same-sex unions the same status as marriage.
Why does it matter? Same-sex advocates draw parallels to the struggle for civil rights. But I am haunted by the much closer resemblance to the divorce revolution. In the ‘70s, adults suddenly insisted divorce was no problem at all for kids. It took 20 years, when children of divorce grew up and told us firsthand about the traumas of fatherlessness, for us to begin to change our minds.
What is the hurry now in Vermont to introduce another new revolutionary social change, to freeze in law an assertion that we do not know to be true, and (if not true) potentially devastating to kids: that when it comes to families, there is no difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals, between a same-sex union and a marriage, between having two dads and having a mom and a dad?
The fact is, marriage as an institution is in crisis. Only half of marriages survive. A third of babies are now born outside of marriage. The marriage system we built in the ‘70s is not working very well for millions of children. Rebuilding it, I believe, will require jettisoning some fashionable tenets, especially the idea (which same-sex unions will institutionalize) that children don’t need both mothers and fathers very much.
The advocates of same-sex marriage keep coming before the state legislature to say they are good folk, worthy of respect. To which Schiavone replies, simply, “Yes, they are wonderful people, but this is not about them. It’s about traditional marriage.”
Or maybe just marriage, if you ask me.