Senate file 925 supporters tell us that same sex marriage is a matter of equality.
It's a no brainer, they say.
Just the next step in the struggle against discrimination and racism.
The bill, they insist, would merely expand the institution of marriage to include same-sex
couples.
How will my same-sex marriage hurt your heterosexual marriage is their mantra.
But a look at this bill reveals that something much more insidious is underway here.
For the bill would not just authorize any two persons to marry as its title suggests.
In fact, it would strip the words mother and father of meaning under Minnesota law.
Henceforth the bill states these two words, among the most beloved and culturally fraited
in the english language, must be construed in a neutral manner to refer to a person of
either gender.
Of course, mother and father aren't gender neutral words.
That's a fiction.
All Minnesotans, all of us in this room have a mother and a father, female and male respectively,
whose sexual union brought us into being.
As legislators, you may be powerful but you can't repeal this fact of nature and human
biology.
But same-sex marriage advocates have to pretend you can if they are to convince you and the
rest of us that a union of two people of the same sex is identical to that of a man and
woman who sexual complimentarily is the only thing that can produce children—the next
generation.
This stripping of meaning from mother and father is just one signal of the tectonic
shift that will transform our society over time if we try to redefine marriage in a way
that portrays the anatomical, social and psychological differences between men and woman as irrelevant
to human life and to the procreation and rearing of children just as shoe size and hair color
are.
Marriage has been a male-female institution through recorded history and long before governments
were formed.
Is this because people in the past just weren't as smart as we are or were bigots?
Of course not.
It's because marriage has a vital public purpose.
It binds fathers to mothers and to the children their sexual union creates.
This is crucial to children's well being and to society's future.
If same sex marriage supporters are to succeed in redefining marriage, they must deny the
public purpose of marriage instead they tell us the only criteria should be that people
love each other.
It's emotional intensity that distinguishes marriage from all human relationships.
This claim has far reaching implications and if adopted it will profoundly affect our nation's
marriage culture over time as it applies to both homosexual heterosexual relationships.
First, if marriage is merely about emotional intensity, traditional marital norms based
on male-female complimentarily sexual exclusivity and permanence no longer make sense or at
least become optional.
Yet these norms are vital to the well-being of children.
Second, if emanational attachment is all that's required, the logic for limiting marriage
to two people or even to people in a sexual relationship disappears.
Third, making marriage a gender-neutral institution would radically alter parenthood.
Children need both a mother and a father who bring different and complimentary qualities
to childrearing and the research on this is very clear— starting with breast feeding.
Two lesbians or two gay men, two lesbians and a sperm donor, no matter how loving cannot
replicate this.
Most importantly, redefining marriage as a unisex institution would utterly and decisively
delink marriage from procreation and childrearing in the public's mind.
Our marriage culture is all fraying.
Our children are paying a devastating price for that.
Same sex marriage would accelerate the erosion of our marriage culture by telegraphing that
the government is utterly and indifferent as a matter of public policy to whether a
child's mother is married to his father.
The greatest victims will be our most vulnerable youngsters, low income and minority children
who already suffer most from fatherlessness.
Same-sex marriage advocates argue that men and women don't need to pass a fertility test
to marry and so neither should they.
The point though is every marriage between a man and a woman is capable of giving a father
and a mother to a child, whether born to the couple or adopted.
And marriage between older couples does help to protect children.
Because if the husband keeps his vow of sexual exclusivity he will not produce out of wedlock
children.
Same sex marriage supporters compare laws confining marriage to male-female couples
to laws banning interracial marriage in the Jim Crowe South.
But this analogy is woefully false.
Race is irrelevant to marriage.
And laws against interracial kept men and women apart, frustrating the core purpose
of marriage.
But male-female sexual complimitarity is central to marriage, whose positive public purpose
is to direct male-female erotic desire into a social fruitful channel.
I began by saying that Senate File 925 would require Minnesotans to accept a fiction — that
henceforth mother and father will be gender neutral words under Minnesota law.
The bill contains another fiction.
It states that henceforth the lesbian partner of a woman who gives birth to a child in the
same-sex marriage will be presumed, by law, to be the father of that child.
And the bill really doesn't' authorize marriage between any two persons.
It prohibits gay people, like heterosexuals, from marrying a sibling, a cousin or other
relative.
This makes sense of course where heterosexuals are concerned.
It guards against the danger of genetic defects in children born to a couple who are related.
But there's no logical reason for this prohibition when it comes to gay people.
In fact, a gay person might well demand of you "how will my marriage with my cousin harm
any one else's' marriage?
Who are you to say I can't marry the person I love?"
And you will have no logical answer.
The reason that Senate File 925 includes these prohibitions, is this bill is an attempt to
graft an unprecedented new sort of human relationship, same-sex marriage, onto heterosexual marriage
on grounds that the two are identical.
But the logical incoherents of provisions like this make clear that these relationships
are in fact very different.
Minnesotans have a right to live and to love exactly as they please.
But they don't' have the right to redefine marriage, our most fundamental social institution
for everyone else.
Thank you.