[LINK] "How the War on Gay Marriage Turned Into a War on Adoption"
Esquire politics blogger Tom Junod takes on the peculiar fundamentalism of anti-same-sex marriage factions in the United States who also look down on adoption, believing that only opposite-sex partners with children product of the partners' genes count. This does go some way towards illustrating the background behind the recent statement by NOM Chairman John Eastman that families produced by adoption, like those of US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, were second-best.
I first became aware of the contempt that “pro-marriage” forces had for my own enduring union and for my own adoptive family last year, when I attended a conservative conference and accepted a pamphlet published by an adjunct to the National Organization for Marriage called “The Ruth Institute.” Entitled “77 Non-Religious Reasons to Support Man/Woman Marriage,” the pamphlet offered a list what it called “incontrovertible statements in support of Natural Marriage”, most of which extolled the bond between children and their biological parents and decried the consequences of its ever being broken. Now, as an adoptive parent, I am well aware of the importance of biology, and believe that a child’s connection to his or her biological family should be preserved whenever possible. But the National Organization for Marriage pamphlet stunned me for not for its recognition of the biological bond between parents and children but rather for its suggestion that all families built outside that bond were the result of unseemly adult machinations - and so “inverted the purpose of marriage.” Indeed, its argument against same-sex marriage was secondary to its argument against any violation of what it regarded as the natural order, from “artificial reproductive technology” to, once again, adoption. It was a sweeping broadside, and for every truism it contained - “adopted children...tell us they long for relationship with their biological parents” - it proffered a nugget of pseudo-scientific hysteria, such as the assurance that “pre-teen girls not living with their biological fathers get their menstrual periods earlier than girls who live with their fathers.”
Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised by anything written in a pamphlet handed out at a conservative conference by volunteers for the National Organization for Marriage. But I have been surprised, over the last two days, to hear the language of the “77 Reasons” pamphlet recurring over and over in the arguments of those lined up in defense of “natural marriage,” from demonstrators quoted by NPR on the courthouse steps (“The simple purpose of marriage is to link parents and children, and without that we’re going to have social chaos”) to the Times’ redoubtable Ross Douthat (“the share of single-parent households is ultimately a less meaningful indicator of family solidity...than the share of children living in married households with both their biological parents”). The conservative movement that once minimized the difficulties of adoption because it provided an alternative to abortion is now both explicitly and implicitly denigrating adoption precisely because it provides an alternative to the perfect biological families said to have a patent on God’s purpose. Adoption is not essential to same-sex marriage; it is, however, essential to many same-sex couples who wish to build families, and since families present all marriages with a built-in case for their own legitimacy, it is adoption, as well as same-sex marriage, that has come under attack.
I first became aware of the contempt that “pro-marriage” forces had for my own enduring union and for my own adoptive family last year, when I attended a conservative conference and accepted a pamphlet published by an adjunct to the National Organization for Marriage called “The Ruth Institute.” Entitled “77 Non-Religious Reasons to Support Man/Woman Marriage,” the pamphlet offered a list what it called “incontrovertible statements in support of Natural Marriage”, most of which extolled the bond between children and their biological parents and decried the consequences of its ever being broken. Now, as an adoptive parent, I am well aware of the importance of biology, and believe that a child’s connection to his or her biological family should be preserved whenever possible. But the National Organization for Marriage pamphlet stunned me for not for its recognition of the biological bond between parents and children but rather for its suggestion that all families built outside that bond were the result of unseemly adult machinations - and so “inverted the purpose of marriage.” Indeed, its argument against same-sex marriage was secondary to its argument against any violation of what it regarded as the natural order, from “artificial reproductive technology” to, once again, adoption. It was a sweeping broadside, and for every truism it contained - “adopted children...tell us they long for relationship with their biological parents” - it proffered a nugget of pseudo-scientific hysteria, such as the assurance that “pre-teen girls not living with their biological fathers get their menstrual periods earlier than girls who live with their fathers.”
Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised by anything written in a pamphlet handed out at a conservative conference by volunteers for the National Organization for Marriage. But I have been surprised, over the last two days, to hear the language of the “77 Reasons” pamphlet recurring over and over in the arguments of those lined up in defense of “natural marriage,” from demonstrators quoted by NPR on the courthouse steps (“The simple purpose of marriage is to link parents and children, and without that we’re going to have social chaos”) to the Times’ redoubtable Ross Douthat (“the share of single-parent households is ultimately a less meaningful indicator of family solidity...than the share of children living in married households with both their biological parents”). The conservative movement that once minimized the difficulties of adoption because it provided an alternative to abortion is now both explicitly and implicitly denigrating adoption precisely because it provides an alternative to the perfect biological families said to have a patent on God’s purpose. Adoption is not essential to same-sex marriage; it is, however, essential to many same-sex couples who wish to build families, and since families present all marriages with a built-in case for their own legitimacy, it is adoption, as well as same-sex marriage, that has come under attack.