July 8^th

Mona Charen’s message today is that legitimizing gay marriage will affect your marriage and Mona will tell you how this happens….but she doesn’t! It is clear that she is very unhappy about the SCOTUS ruling; we get the usual “these five unelected judges yada, yada, yada.” Then she tries to convince her readers that their marriage is at risk because of this ruling: she asks, “How can extending marriage to gays possibly affect your marriage? The answer lies in the hidden message.” (If the topic weren’t so serious I’d be tempted to write, “OK folks get your magic decoder rings out so you can read the hidden message.”)

The problem, Charen tell us, has its origins in the feminist movement. “Feminists argued that there were no important differences between the sexes.” Mona throws in the weasel word “Important” which gets her off the hook for this nonsensical comment. Then she goes on to claim that if this were so “mothering and fathering would be interchangeable.” I assume she was speaking metaphorically and not biologically, but who knows? The upshot is it follows that two daddies or two mommies are just as good as one mommy and one daddy. Not really of course but Charen says so, presumably because both are called “parents.”

This is the crux of her argument:  She says that, “Every homosexual couple who chooses to raise a child together is denying that child a parent of the other sex.” She further claims that, “When homosexuals marry, any child raised must lose one natural parent. …the message to heterosexuals is to continue to devalue the biological importance of mothers and fathers and to discount the needs of the children.” Note this quote, “Any child raised must lose one natural parent.” No Mona, any child so raised has already lost one natural parent!

What an amazing oversimplification! Which children are adopted by gay couples? I suppose Charen believes these are happy kids from intact heterosexual marriages. They aren’t; they are single parent kids, often children of divorce because one of the parents is gay. In many cases the children have been abandoned by the other parent or lost in a custody fight. The result is that the child is raised by one parent unless the custodial parent remarries. If the gay parent remarries someone gay it will result in a gay marriage. The choice is that these children will be in a one parent household or a gay household. Charen talks as if the parental choice is between a pair of heterosexual parents or a pair of homosexual parents; it very simply isn’t that choice at all.

And finally Charen says nothing at all about gay marriages between older people who have been together for years and have no thought of adopting children. Not far from where I live two women, one eighty and one seventy-three, will be married soon. Give Mona time and she will think of some unfortunate effect this ceremony will have on the fabric of the country.