Won't Somebody PLEASE Think of the Children?!!!!

Maggie Gallagher offers yet more "proof" that civil recognition of gay marriage will destroy the family. She cites the experience of a single individual (who wished to remain anonymous, and took the alias "Cassidy") who was raised by two women in the late 70s and early 80s. I'll defer to Andrew Sullivan for an entree into this whale of a tale:

Cassidy's story is not science. It's just her own feelings. Many researchers say most kids do just fine in these alternative family forms. Cassidy doesn't buy that research, though. "I don't think a fair study could be conducted because children currently in that family wouldn't necessarily be open to speaking their true feelings about it."

Oh, so that settles it. You don't need science or research, you just need one anecdote! Don't you think, for example, that you could find a child of a mixed race couple who feels and felt socially isolated in childhood or the object of peer pressure as a kid? Would that make a mixed-race marriage a "selfish" proposition for two adults in love? Yes, that was exactly the argument used in the 1950s and 1960s against inter-racial marriage: think of what it does to the kids.

Actually, Andrew, who I suspect is getting a little tired of having to deal with this stuff, is going way too easy on Maggie. You have to read between the lines of what is an opinion piece not very well disguised as reportage. Think about what Gallagher's methodology amounts to: not only does one solitary anecdote, taken from a period in time far less receptive to the idea of "out" and monogamous homosexuality---imagine someone surveying a mulatto child about his experiences in 1950s Alabama, and arguing that his reminiscences are relevant to 2000s culture---tell in favor of the argument against recognition for gay couples, but all counterevidence is at minimum suspicious and at maximum worthless because of the contents of that same individual experience. Neither social science nor assurances from children of gay parents that they are loved and happy can be trusted because, Maggie's subject tells us, and Maggie has the clairvoyance to be able to confirm, "children currently in that family wouldn't necessarily be open to speaking their true feelings about it."

There's a detail that Andrew missed (or decided not to follow up on) that seems to be included for purely pornographic effect: "The two women stayed together for 16 years, until Pat died. Three years later, Cassidy's mother married a man." No explanatory or contextualizing comments follow. But surely some conclusions can be drawn. Why, isn't it perfectly obvious that Cassidy's mother wasn't really a lesbian after all? Surely it is, and that must mean that she was quite capable of marrying a man in the first place and sparing her daughter the victimization of growing up in a two-mom household. Wasn't it, in fact, downright criminal of her mom to have the presumption to "fulfill [her] emotional needs" at her daughter's expense?

And it's just an easy hop, skip, and a jump from that point to recognition that homosexual relationships are immature and selfish hobbies of immature and selfish adults, destructive of The Family and the bonds of society, rooted not in love but in animalistic lust that, FOR THE SAKE OF THE CHILDREN, has to be tamed by rational self-discipline. All of this is then couched in a tone either of hysterical, Mrs. Lovejoy-type pleading on the CHILDREN's behalf, or, even more ingratiating, a smug, Joseph Lieberman-style "I'm awfully disappointed in you because you know better" moral superiority (or both).

This small point, and the larger article in which it is embedded, tell you everything you need to know about Maggiegallagherism (and I know whereof I speak, having had some personal experience with Maggiegallagherists). Its indispensable postulate is that anything but the most hideously restrictive concept of adult freedom poses a mortal threat to the The Family because [insert facile, unfalsifiable slippery-slope argument here]. The Family,* a fictional species that ceased to exist even as a compelling myth c. 1963, will therefore be destroyed without robust action to defend it, and the universe will be sucked into the black hole created by The Family's implosion.

The war against civil rights for homosexuals is one that concerns everybody. To paraphrase Marx's second and much better answer to the Jewish question, as long as the gays aren't free, nobody is free.


*Hard-working dad who plays by the rules and gets ahead, mom who stays at home and cleans things, 2.3 gorgeously featured celibate drug-free children who excel in Sunday school and have perfect teeth, and---this is crucial---no gay cousins or uncles. Any other familial social unit is a perversion of the telos of family, and as such is both socially inferior and morally condemnable.