2015 | Week of February 2 – #1083
“If you really cared about children, you’d be encouraging people of the same-sex to marry.” That’s pretty much what Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals said in late August when he presided over oral arguments in cases dealing with Wisconsin’s and Indiana’s marriage protection laws. Just nine days later, the court gave its ruling on the cases, siding with the lower courts that had said our marriage amendment and Indiana’s marriage statute are unconstitutional. Judge Posner wrote the opinion and reiterated what he had said in the courtroom, adding that allowing same-sex couples to marry would take the stigma off the children in those relationships.
That was in early September. However, meanwhile in another Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, a different story was brewing. Last month, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on marriage amendments in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Part of the filings that were done in that court included a friend-of-the-court brief with testimonies from four individuals who are being called the “quartet of truth.” All four of these folks, now adults, grew up in homes headed by homosexuals. Each testimony clearly and strongly makes the case that marriage should not be redefined to include people of the same-sex.
B.N. Klein of the quartet says she grew up “with a parent and her partners in an atmosphere in which gay ideology was used as a tool of repression, retribution and abuse.” Klein wrote that she felt like a “prop to be publicly displayed to prove that gay families are just like heterosexual ones.” She said, that “never in my lifetime put children first as anything other than a piece of property, a past mistake, or a political tool….”
Robert Lopez keenly felt the lack of a father, while admitting his upbringing “represented the best possible conditions for a child raised by a same-sex couple.” But those conditions, Lopez says, didn’t satisfy his insatiable desire for a dad—and he looked in all the wrong places, including homosexual prostitution. He added that “placing children in same-sex couples’ homes is dangerous, because they have no space or latitude to express negative feelings about losing a mom or dad, and in fact, they have much fear if they do.” He was referring to repercussions he and others in similar households faced if they broke the silence and told the truth about being brought up by two parents of the same sex.
Katy Faust acknowledged that she was loved by both of the women who brought her up—and cared for very well. However, she too keenly realized the lack of a father but kept quiet out of fear. As an adult, she has decided to break the silence, regardless of the cost, because, as she says, ““we are normalizing a family structure where a child will always be deprived daily of one gender influence and the relationship with at least one natural parent. Our cultural narrative, she says, becomes one that, in essence, tells children that they have no right to the natural family structure or their biological parents, but that children simply exist for the satisfaction of adult desires.”
Dawn Steanowicz wrote candidly of being immersed in the dark underworld of the homosexual and transgender subcultures. She was exposed, she says, to “sodomy, nudity, pornography, group sex, sadomasochism” and more. Like the other three, Dawn felt keenly that “there’s a missing biological parent.” Her anguish and those of the other three was not because the homosexuals raising them couldn’t get married.
Judge Posner is wrong—100% wrong. Children growing up in same-sex households won’t be better off if the two men or two women raising them can marry. This issue isn’t about whether two men or two women can love a child or provide for them. Of course they can. What this is about, as Katy Faust told the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, is that every child has two rights: “First, the right to live. Second, the right to have a relationship with his/her father or mother.” Friends, that’s a child’s birthright.
This is Julaine Appling with Wisconsin Family Council reminding you the prophet Hosea said, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”
