Monday, July 16, 2007
Faggot Panic
What the fuck is this, 2004? Elizabeth Marquardt of the Family Values Institute (red alert) has written a screed decrying the emergence of triple-parent family unit, an outgrowth she traces directly to the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage and gay adoption.
This is how she starts in: Sometimes when the earth shudders it doesn’t make a sound. That Old Testament-esque allusion to the very firmament of the universe trembling beneath our misguided experiments with the divinely-mandated natural order is a pretty tired trope. The hideous immoral deviant that is a lesbian mom is enough to make the whole world buckle apart.
Her big beef is with a Pennsylvania court's finding that a child may have three legal parents: two lesbian mothers and the biological father, all equally obligated to support their offspring. Unsurprisingly, Marquardt's language refuses recognition that both women could be mothers--she coins the ungainly co-parents--but oddly, nowhere is the word father to be found. There is a sperm donor who is a friend of the couple, but that's it. Here's a conservative who's willing to delegitimize this family more expansively than just casting aspersions at the unity of two women.
So apparently this ruling constitutes yet another in the escalating series of mortal wounds liberals and the LGBT community care to inflict upon Civilization itself (in the name of procreating, natch). In other Western nations, there have been legal moves to institutionalize family structures with more than one parent, and this is Badforthechildren. Marquardt "pre-empts" the possible refutation of her paranoia by arguing against a simplistic "three is better than two, right?" line of thinking, comparing the polyparent situation to a divorce.
When you only tepidly endorse gay marriage to begin with, it's frustrating to have to defend it, but comparisons of building a family with dissolving a family are just too facile. It just doesn't make sense unless one is convinced from the start that there is some metaphysical dimension where rules come from and man+woman=the way it's always been, in which case there's no arguing with you because you have God on your side and that's all there is to it.
She writes: We found that even these children must grow up traveling between two worlds, having to make sense on their own of the different values, beliefs and ways of living they find in each home. They have to grow up too soon. When a court assigns a child several parents, some of whom never intend to share a home, they consign that child, at best, to a “good” divorce situation. Is it the court intervention into the sacrosanct nuclear family, the State-sanctioned social engineering that she finds so repellent? Because responsible parenting can't possibly be at odds with exposing children to "different values, beliefs and ways of living." Unless you want them home-schooled, away from the evolutionists. Obviously that sort of talk boils down to "gay parents will manufacture gay children, which we certainly don't need more of." But this is hardly a case where a normal heterosexual couple's ideals for childrearing have been infiltrated by the homosexual agenda--everyone involved is a consensual party, going to court to seek governmental legitimacy for their complex and previously unaddressed legal situation. They're not suing each other. There is no acrimony. It's not a divorce. Kids won't be shuttled between different houses by jealous parents or held hostage to their petty disputes. The only example of "different values" is Marquardt's idea of what morality is versus the lesbian lifestyle.
And even if there is a divorce involved, divorce exists. Gay people exist. With gay marriage will come gay divorce, which conservatives will cite as further proof that gay people are evil, when it's actually proof that gay people are fallible. Having three people claim parental status is, in a sense, a logical continuation in the relaxation of anachronistic bigotry that passes for the government's approach to marriage. Straight divorce can and ought to lead to the same outcome if the circumstances merit. The nuclear family has been saddled with responsibilities far beyond what it's capable of. It doesn't necessarily take a village, but reality can't be governed by a sentimental reference point to some fleeting and largely mythical postwar gender paradigm wedded (if you will) to biblical morality. At least Marquardt doesn't wonder about a man marrying a goat.
She concludes by tying the well-being of children to a dual-headed household, with no empirical evidence. Just one study about divorce being bad. (Of course, she doesn't speak a word against divorce, let alone its high occurrence in red America). This is the most frustrating thing about conservatism: you can say whatever you want and make assumptions all over the place because God's got your back. You can be as authoritarian as you want, and any attempt to adapt to cultural changes becomes nefarious "social engineering" and can be plotted on an axis of our eventual ruin. Just like when vitro fertilization begat a race of amoral cyborgs who can't love, legally recognizing three parents when there are in fact three (or four when there are four) is tampering with the Divine Plan. The earth is quaking because gay people may have found a way to make more of themselves. We grant the people to want to have children parental rights at our peril.
This is how she starts in: Sometimes when the earth shudders it doesn’t make a sound. That Old Testament-esque allusion to the very firmament of the universe trembling beneath our misguided experiments with the divinely-mandated natural order is a pretty tired trope. The hideous immoral deviant that is a lesbian mom is enough to make the whole world buckle apart.
Her big beef is with a Pennsylvania court's finding that a child may have three legal parents: two lesbian mothers and the biological father, all equally obligated to support their offspring. Unsurprisingly, Marquardt's language refuses recognition that both women could be mothers--she coins the ungainly co-parents--but oddly, nowhere is the word father to be found. There is a sperm donor who is a friend of the couple, but that's it. Here's a conservative who's willing to delegitimize this family more expansively than just casting aspersions at the unity of two women.
So apparently this ruling constitutes yet another in the escalating series of mortal wounds liberals and the LGBT community care to inflict upon Civilization itself (in the name of procreating, natch). In other Western nations, there have been legal moves to institutionalize family structures with more than one parent, and this is Badforthechildren. Marquardt "pre-empts" the possible refutation of her paranoia by arguing against a simplistic "three is better than two, right?" line of thinking, comparing the polyparent situation to a divorce.
When you only tepidly endorse gay marriage to begin with, it's frustrating to have to defend it, but comparisons of building a family with dissolving a family are just too facile. It just doesn't make sense unless one is convinced from the start that there is some metaphysical dimension where rules come from and man+woman=the way it's always been, in which case there's no arguing with you because you have God on your side and that's all there is to it.
She writes: We found that even these children must grow up traveling between two worlds, having to make sense on their own of the different values, beliefs and ways of living they find in each home. They have to grow up too soon. When a court assigns a child several parents, some of whom never intend to share a home, they consign that child, at best, to a “good” divorce situation. Is it the court intervention into the sacrosanct nuclear family, the State-sanctioned social engineering that she finds so repellent? Because responsible parenting can't possibly be at odds with exposing children to "different values, beliefs and ways of living." Unless you want them home-schooled, away from the evolutionists. Obviously that sort of talk boils down to "gay parents will manufacture gay children, which we certainly don't need more of." But this is hardly a case where a normal heterosexual couple's ideals for childrearing have been infiltrated by the homosexual agenda--everyone involved is a consensual party, going to court to seek governmental legitimacy for their complex and previously unaddressed legal situation. They're not suing each other. There is no acrimony. It's not a divorce. Kids won't be shuttled between different houses by jealous parents or held hostage to their petty disputes. The only example of "different values" is Marquardt's idea of what morality is versus the lesbian lifestyle.
And even if there is a divorce involved, divorce exists. Gay people exist. With gay marriage will come gay divorce, which conservatives will cite as further proof that gay people are evil, when it's actually proof that gay people are fallible. Having three people claim parental status is, in a sense, a logical continuation in the relaxation of anachronistic bigotry that passes for the government's approach to marriage. Straight divorce can and ought to lead to the same outcome if the circumstances merit. The nuclear family has been saddled with responsibilities far beyond what it's capable of. It doesn't necessarily take a village, but reality can't be governed by a sentimental reference point to some fleeting and largely mythical postwar gender paradigm wedded (if you will) to biblical morality. At least Marquardt doesn't wonder about a man marrying a goat.
She concludes by tying the well-being of children to a dual-headed household, with no empirical evidence. Just one study about divorce being bad. (Of course, she doesn't speak a word against divorce, let alone its high occurrence in red America). This is the most frustrating thing about conservatism: you can say whatever you want and make assumptions all over the place because God's got your back. You can be as authoritarian as you want, and any attempt to adapt to cultural changes becomes nefarious "social engineering" and can be plotted on an axis of our eventual ruin. Just like when vitro fertilization begat a race of amoral cyborgs who can't love, legally recognizing three parents when there are in fact three (or four when there are four) is tampering with the Divine Plan. The earth is quaking because gay people may have found a way to make more of themselves. We grant the people to want to have children parental rights at our peril.
