A decade of disaster for children

A non-binding resolution in Idaho is challenging Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court’s 2015 gay marriage ruling. Shaky judicial grounds aside, Idaho argues marriage law is a matter of states’ rights—SCOTUS lacks the authority to dictate marriage policy.

Other states should follow Idaho’s lead—not on grounds of states’ rights, but on grounds of children’s rights.

In 2015, gay marriage rode a wave of popular support under the banner of adult practicality. Gay marriage will level inequities in insurance coverage. We just want to visit our partner in the hospital, they pleaded. To secure their novel definition of marriage, activists largely severed it from its historical procreative purpose. What does marriage have to do with kids? Plenty of heterosexual couples don’t or can't have children, so what’s the difference?

A decade later, the difference is clear.

Despite warnings from several scholars and organizations—myself included—that same-sex marriage would erode children’s right to their mother and father, the court ruled otherwise. The result? Children have paid the highest price.

When marriage makes husbands and wives legally optional, mothers and fathers become legally optional, too.

The United States was the 17th country to legalize gay marriage. Had we studied the other 16, it would have been obvious that promoting same-sex marriage requires demoting children’s right to their biological parents.

Take Canada, which legalized gay marriage in 2005. It immediately replaced references to biological parents with “legal parents,” making it easier to assign children to unrelated same-sex partners. More recently, Taiwan “emerged as a new market” for surrogacy clinics after legalizing gay marriage in 2017. Thailand is relaxing its surrogacy laws following the just-passed Equal Marriage Act. Never mind that Thailand had highly restricted surrogacy in 2015 due to its links to child victimization.

Today, 38 countries have legalized same-sex marriage—none of which have reinforced the claim children have to their natural parents. That’s because same-sex marriage and children’s right to their mother and father are incompatible.

In state after state, activists have argued that equality requires making parenthood gender-neutral and elevating “social parents” (unrelated adults in the home who have not undergone background checks). Fathers have been legally erased from birth certificates to accommodate “two moms” and vice versa. Activists have insisted on requiring insurance to fund the creation of fatherless and motherless children. Biology and adoption are bypassed in favor of “intent-based” parenthood. Giving same-sex couples equal access to the marital “constellation of benefits” denied children equal access to their mother and father.

Before Obergefell, social scientists agreed: Children fare best with their married, biological mother and father. But just in time for court deliberations, a suspicious wave of studies emerged declaring children with “two moms” or “two dads” fared “no different” or “better” than those in heterosexual homes. These studies, though widely publicized, were methodically flawed, employing small sample sizes, utilizing recruited rather than randomly derived participants, and often relying on parental opinion (“gay fathers report”) rather than objective child outcomes.

Few stopped to ask why whenever sociologists studied any form of family other than gay parenting, they agreed that genetic parents provide higher levels of investment and protection, that mothers and fathers offer distinct complementary benefits to child development, and that unrelated adults in the home elevate risks of abuse and neglect (the very reason adoptive parents undergo rigorous screening). Yet, conveniently, none of these findings applied to same-sex households—where a biological parent is always missing from a child’s life, either maternal or paternal love is absent, and an unrelated adult is present 100% of the time.

Unsurprisingly, when social science gold standards are employed, outcomes show drastically worse academic and emotional outcomes for children in same-sex-headed households.

The stories of identity struggles, searches for a missing parent, and mother- or father-hunger reinforce the universal reality that children not only fare best when raised in the home of their married, biological mother and father. It’s also what they want.

Ten years ago, most Americans fell for the “How does my gay marriage hurt anyone else?” canard. But now, as story after story of intentionally motherless and fatherless children flood social media, as transnational organizations coach single, double, triple, and HIV-positive men on how to procure motherless babies, and as scholars from both the left and right acknowledge the privilege that married, biological parents provide, the reality that legalized gay marriage hurts children is coming into focus.

Children need, deserve, want, and have a right to their mother and father. That reality stands regardless of what five Supreme Court justices decree. The question is whether our definition of marriage will reflect that truth—or continue to victimize children by denying it.

Idaho wants the chance to define marriage in a way that protects children. Other states should do the same.