Justice Through Diversity? by Sweeney Michael J.;

Author:Sweeney, Michael J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

This last point highlights the social harms at stake.

A revisionist redefinition of marriage law would teach people to internalize a view that makes marriage’s stabilizing norms seem optional. That would erode them in practice, which would undermine stability for children—and as Corvino says, “Social scientists have known for a long time [that] divorce, abandonment, and other such disruptions negatively impact child welfare.” (Besides, there’s independent value, for both parents and children, to keeping children with their biological parents where reasonably possible.[8]) So these effects would harm the next generation and thus every aspect of the common good. If the policy status quo (including no-fault divorce) already erodes key marital norms, as the conjugal view’s defenders contend, then resisting the redefinition of marriage is for us not an end, but one step toward strengthening marriage.

Corvino answers that the public definition of marriage won’t affect how many children grow up with their own, committed mother and father. (Can what happens with same-sex couples affect anyone else, he asks?) This reply reveals an extraordinarily flatfooted view of social institutions—which Corvino elsewhere gets beyond, as anyone concerned about this institution must.

To make this vivid: imagine two boys in different societies. One comes of age learning revisionism. He’s taught by law—and, not unrelatedly, by school and popular culture—that marriage is set apart by emotional union for adult satisfaction. That it’s therefore inauthentic to stay married once romantic desire has faded for good, or wandered. That mothers and fathers are interchangeable.

The other grows up leaning from law, school, and popular culture that marriage isn’t just your number one bond. It requires a man and woman because their uniquely all-encompassing union requires total commitment; because they tend to have different parenting gifts; because it takes both to make children, who do best when reared by their own mother and father.

Once grown, each falls in love with a woman. Now: Which will be likelier to marry her before having children? To stay with her, for their children, however he feels? Whose children will more likely have the lasting attention of both their father and mother? These questions answer themselves and highlight the argument Corvino entirely misses.

Moreover, promoting same-sex marriage as a right means perforce promoting same-sex parenting as a right. And it would be a surprise if that did not lead to more same-sex partners artificially creating children deprived (deliberately) of their own father or mother.

So social institutions affect people’s behavior, with consequences for third parties. Why else should Corvino, or anyone, care about the shape of this one? And yet his prescribed changes for it would entrench changes to the social meaning of marriage that undermine children’s good, and thus the common good.

These revisionist harms would apply even if same- and opposite-sex adoptive parenting had all the same measurable outcomes. But I should take a moment to note that Corvino overstates the evidence for the “no differences” thesis and downplays incipient contrary evidence.

No same-sex parenting study meets the standard to which top-quality social science aspires: large, random, and representative samples observed longitudinally.

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