Marriage is about rights of the children

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This was published 12 years ago

Marriage is about rights of the children

Same-sex marriage ignores what a marriage means and who it serves.

By Nicholas Tonti-Filippini

In an extraordinary show of unity, more than 50 national leaders of Christian churches have endorsed a document on marriage as a legal institution that promotes and protects the identity of children and their internationally recognised right to know, to have access to and to be nurtured by both their mother and father.

This is not a debate about the worth to the community of same-sex unions. The social values such couples exhibit in their daily lives are indistinguishable from those of their neighbours. We should acknowledge loyalty, commitment and devotion, the contribution made to neighbourhoods and to making communities safer and better places to live, and the many other ways in which people living interdependent lives enrich the community through the stability of their unions.

Nor is this a debate about equality and non-discrimination. The federal law in Australia has already been changed to give same-sex partners the same legal rights as those who are married, and in most states the right to register their unions. The remaining issue, therefore, is the definition of marriage, and the question is why society has an interest in continuing to secure marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman.

Revising the definition of marriage has been presented simply as a justice issue of non-inclusion. There has been little in the media about the fact that this would mean revising what marriage means, so that it would be about romance only and no longer focused on establishing a relationship in which children are nurtured by both their mother and father.

That marriage is between a man and a woman has stood across millenniums and all cultures and is very important, if not sacred, to a lot of people. Those who value the definition of marriage hold it deeply. Perhaps most importantly, though, it is about securing as a community value the right of a child to a mother and father and placing an expectation on parents that wherever possible they have a responsibility to stay together for that child and to provide the equal love of a mother and father in his or her growth.

The high incidence of fatherless youth in the recent London riots is a reminder of the potential implications for youth, and social cohesion more generally, if governments fail to do all in their power to encourage by example a natural and stable environment for children to grow and mature. Marriage as currently defined does this.

There are same-sex households in which there are children, either from previous relationships or through the use of technology. Nationally, same-sex couple families represent one in a thousand couples with children. Surrogacy makes it possible for same-sex male households to parent children. The law copes with those eventualities by defining and securing the child's relationship to parents or substitute parents.

However, the reality is that a same-sex relationship does not generate children and the child always comes from outside the relationship. A complex matrix of parental relationships is formed of genetic, gestational or birth mother and social or substitute parents.

A parliamentary inquiry into people who were donor conceived has demonstrated just how important to the child all those relationships are, and the right of a person to know who he or she is and who his or her genetic family and half siblings may be.

A child's relationship to both mother and father is inherent to marriage. Children conceived by other means may find themselves with people in parental roles who are in a same-sex relationship, but such relationships are not the origin of the child. It is likely for children to be loved and nurtured in such a household, but however good that nurturing, it will not provide the biological link and security of identity and relationship that marriage naturally demands and confirms.

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If marriage were redefined, the law would teach that marriage is fundamentally about adults' emotional unions, about romance only, not complementary bodily union or generating and nurturing children.

What is at stake is an ideal that seeks to ensure that a child has both a mother and a father. That the ideal sometimes breaks down or that there are exceptions to it does not make marriage any less ideal. The bodily union of mutual love that is integral to marriage helps to create stable and harmonious conditions suitable for children, and the children can look back to an origin in the love of their parents.

It is one thing to say that the law has nothing to do with what two men or two women do in their private life, it is quite another to change the law to promote those relationships. If marriage is redefined, then that is what we are going to have to teach and affirm to our children and in our schools. The revisionist case reduces marriage to a matter of choice and love between adults only. If the definition of marriage is changed, that will affect all of us, children in particular, because ''marriage'' will primarily serve the interests of adults.

Nicholas Tonti-Filippini, associate professor at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, was an author of the national church leaders' statement on marriage.

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