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October 2, 2006
Part 2
Q. "How will my same-sex marriage hurt your marriage?"
This segment makes a key point and sets the tone for the rest of the presentation. Mr. Stanton makes this statement:
"You saying that your same-sex marriage is just as valuable, just as important, just as neccessary as my family absolutely sends that message to my little boys and my little girls. It says that they as gendered beings, as males and females are not essential for the family."
In those two sentences, we learn that some people are less valuable than others, that some parents, some families are not as important or as necessary as his family. If I were sitting in a public viewing, I hope I'd have the balls to leave, because I am not ok with any organization promoting value judgements of an entire class of people.
It is not your same-sex marriage hurting Mr. Stanton's family, it is what he tells himself about the value of you and your family that causes harm.
Q. "Is same-sex marriage like interracial marriage?"
He states emphatically the two are not the same, but this segment is not free of flaws. Even the graphic of what I assume is supposed to be a nuclear interracial family is problematic, if a white mommy and a black daddy have babies, wouldn't both of the children be approximately the same color? Mr. Stanton claims there is no data showing interracial marriage to be harmful to children, but that there is considerable data showing serious developmental harm to children in intentionally fatherless or motherless homes.
What he does not say is that this research is on children in same-sex homes, in fact, this data could represent a number of children as products of heterosexual marriages which ended in separation or divorce, or who were conceived by heterosexual parents who chose not to continue the relationship, or by single women and men who chose to conceive or adopt a child on their own. He dumps a whole big batch of data in one bucket and tries to pass it off as proof of it's applicability to a demographic which may not even be represented in it.
The reality, as we'll find out later is there isn't a "large body" of research on children in same-sex homes. But the research that is available shows little difference between children raised in heterosexual families and children raised in homosexual families.
Posted by Anna at October 2, 2006 12:42 AM