Gay father defends traditional marriage

Traditional marriage has a unique proponent in Doug Mainwaring, the openly gay co-founder of the National Capital Tea Party Patriots who lives with his ex-wife to co-parent their two adopted sons.

Mainwaring divorced his wife to explore his homosexual desires, but in a piece for Public Discourse he explained how he discovered over the course of a decade that “creating a family with another man is not completely equal to creating a family with a woman.” He also found that “denying children parents of both genders is an objective evil. Kids need and yearn for both.”

Mainwaring notes one instance when he saw his rough and rowdy 16-year-old son kiss his mother. “With two dads in the house, this little moment of warmth and tenderness would never had occurred. … To be fully formed, children need to be free to generously receive from and express affection to parents of both genders.”

Mainwaring went on to explain that to do what is best for his children, he moved back in with his ex-wife and has denied his sexual impulses. Rather than feeling repressed, he believes it has led to psychological health and his family’s flourishing. Men who make their homosexuality the dominant aspect of their lives diminish other aspects of their lives socially, familially, emotionally, and intellectually, Mainwaring wrote.

“Gay and lesbian activists, and more importantly, the progressives urging them on, seek to redefine marriage in order to achieve an ideological agenda that ultimately seeks to undefine families as nothing more than one of an array of equally desirable ‘social units,’ and thus open the door to the increase of government’s role in our lives,” he writes.

Mainwaring is quick to admit that his opinions don’t take root in tradition and religion, but in his experiences. He said he wholeheartedly supports civil unions for homosexual couples. It’s same-sex marriage he doesn’t agree with.

“Genderless marriage is not marriage at all,” he wrote. “It is something else entirely. Marriage is not an elastic term. It is immutable. It offers the very best for children and society.”