Conservatives working to destroy marriage!

Ed Brayton has a link to an interesting column by Dale Carpenter, entitled "The Un-Conservative Effects of Opposing Gay Marriage". The basic premise of the article is summed up in the first paragraph:

By opposing gay marriage, conservatives are forcing gay families to seek refuge through untraditional means that could undermine marriage or destabilize family concepts in ways that gay marriage itself would not.

He lists four examples of this:

• Second-parent adoption Married couples can jointly adopt a child, but since gays can't get married, they can't do this. So a work-around was developed for them: "'second-parent' adoptions by which two unmarried people could both be a child's legal parents."
  

  Here's the kicker. Second-parent adoptions have also become available to unmarried heterosexual couples. Thus, a legal reform intended to compensate for the unavailability of same-sex marriage has been seized by those who can marry but choose not to. It reduces the incentive to marry and means more children will be raised out-of-wedlock.



• Triple parenting This is when the courts award custody to the biological father or mother (a sperm donor or surrogate mother) as well as the two gay parents, in effect giving the child three parents, rather than the "two" that people opposed to gay marriage seem to believe is a magic number.
  

  Another unconservative consequence of the ban on gay marriage is illustrated by a recent case in Pennsylvania. The case involved a lesbian couple who enlisted a male friend to act as a sperm donor, resulting in the births of two children to one of the women. When the lesbian couple split, the state courts decided that the women should share custody and that the sperm donor should be allowed monthly visits and be ordered to pay child support. Thus, the children would in effect have three parents shuttling them back and forth among three different homes.
  
  Marriage exists in part to clarify legal responsibility for children. If gay couples could marry, as straight couples using sperm donors or surrogate mothers can, they would be more likely to seek exclusive parental rights at the outset (as married straight couples do) because they could adopt as a couple and because of the additional security marriage would give their relationship and their children. Sperm donors and surrogate mothers, for their part, would be more likely to surrender any parental rights since they would be reassured the child would live in a two-parent family fully protected in the law.

  
  I'm not sure what his evidence for this is... I think he's just assuming that it would work out that way because that's what happens with opposite-sex couples that use sperm donors or surrogate mothers.


• Parental visitation He cites a Minnesota case in which two women split up; only one of them was the legal parent of the children, and tried to prevent her ex-partner from seeing the kids. The non-parent sued for parental visitation rights, and won:
  

  The court ordered that the non-parent be given the right to visit the children on a schedule exactly like what a divorced parent would get (weekends, alternate holidays, long summer vacations) — all without having to pay child support.
  
  The Minnesota decision was correct under state law and was perfectly justified given that the lesbian couple could not marry and that both women raised the children. But it does set a precedent by which an unmarried heterosexual partner could likewise claim full parental visitation rights without accompanying support obligations. Another incentive to marry is eroded.



• Adult-adult adoptions Since adoption laws generally don't have an age limit, same-sex couples who can't marry may adopt each other to get some forms of legal protection.

Mr. Carpenter concludes,

Think of it this way: Gay families are a rising river stretching across the country. Conservative opposition to gay marriage is a dam blocking the way. Impeded in its natural course, the river does not dry up; its flow is simply deflected into a hundred rivulets and low pastures.

Many conservatives may conclude in the end that the collateral damage being done to stability and tradition is worth it to keep gay couples from marrying. But before family policy is further inundated, they should at least weigh the unconservative consequences.

I have long since thought that the catchphrase "Marriage is one man and one woman!" does a lot to devaluate marriage. Strictly speaking, it says that any two people of the opposite sex constitute a "marriage", no matter their actual relationship. It completely strips away the fact that marriage is supposed to be first and foremost a union. But the "one man, one woman" mentality puts the sex of the participants before that, and before everything else that might be considered in a marriage. And that truly devalues marriage.