Paula Ettelbrick, a law professor who runs the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, recommends legalizing a wide variety of marriage alternatives, including polyamory, or group wedlock. An example could include a lesbian couple living with a sperm-donor father, or a network of men and women who share sexual relations.
One aim, she says, is to break the stranglehold that married heterosexual couples have on health benefits and legal rights. The other goal is to "push the parameters of sex, sexuality and family, and in the process transform the very fabric of society."
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"Leaving God out of the equation, it is irrefutable that Nature had a well-ordered design. Male + female = offspring."
-- Kathleen Parker,
Orlando Sentinel columnist
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Another common objection to gay marriage involves children.
"If it were not for kids, I would have no problem whatsoever with gay marriage," says Kevin Ryder, a morning DJ on KROQ-FM. Children need both a father and a mother to thrive, he explains. "That's the ideal, and that's what should be upheld.... To purposely start without one of the sexes makes it worse on a kid."
Although KROQ listeners skewered Ryder when he stated his views on the air recently, countless scientific studies back him up, according to David Blankenhorn, author of "Fatherless America" and president of the Institute for American Values. Children are psychologically better off when raised by the mom and dad who brought them into the world, Blankenhorn says.
The audience for such reasoning is limited, partly because many heterosexual families also don't live up to optimum standards. As the National Review magazine noted, if research on ideal households is used to attack gay marriage, "a large part of the public will flinch."
Meanwhile, because homosexuals are already becoming parents, conservative gay commentator Sullivan suggests it would be "far better for those kids to be protected in their families by legal marriage than to live with instability and possible custodial problems."
Blankenhorn disagrees, arguing that such a move would fundamentally alter the definition of parenthood by erasing the words "mother" and "father" from the law and replacing them with androgynous terminology. "Parental unit," perhaps?
Saying that children need mothers and fathers might come to be regarded as a form of hate speech, he adds.
