What Is Marriage For?

by E. J. Graff

  The complication here is how to define those adult men who abuse male children—but who, in their adult sexual lives, are heterosexual. “Straight” and “gay” are words for adult attractions to other adults (or, perhaps, adolescent attractions to movie stars). We all know that adult relationships can include anything from loving consent to coercion to rape. But “straight” and “gay” are terms inadequate for discussing sexual abuse of children who cannot reasonably consent. Some men have a sexual fixation on adolescents or children—and those men, who may or may not distinguish between girls and boys, are a separate category. Other men seem disturbingly willing to abuse the children of their wives, girlfriends, sisters, or sisters-in-law—again, often without distinguishing between boys and girls. For instance, in one study of 175 Massachusetts men who were imprisoned for child sexual assault (and therefore arguably more likely to be gay, since male/boy abuse arouses more social fury), none had relationships solely with men. Just under half were exclusively “fixated,” to use the researchers’ term, on children; another 40 percent were heterosexually paired men who also molested children; the rest were men whose adult involvements were primarily with women and occasionally with men, and who also molested children. In other words, pedophiles are their own category. Whether stepfathers, priests, married soccer coaches, or the creep next door, pedophiles are less likely than men with a strong adult sexual identity (whether straight or gay) to distinguish between boys and girls. Men willing to marry other men would be more likely to have a strong adult sexual identity—and would be, arguably, less likely than other men to abuse the children in their care.

  Perhaps the fear of gay fathers is a sign of our current fear of unsupervised fathers in general—a fear that would have been incomprehensible to our ancestors, who believed women morally incapable of raising kids. But just because XY is a big risk factor for child abuse—in the most methodologically sound studies, roughly 20 percent of adult women report having been sexually abused as children, about half the time by men in their families—our society doesn’t insist that all men stay away from all kids. Why should only gay men be blamed for the sins of some men—men who do not mainly behave or identify as gay—and thus be barred from being parents?

  The fact that stepfathers abuse their wives’ children significantly more often than do bio-fathers has been taken as evidence that children need their biological fathers—which would rule out adoption by any man, including gay men. But when you look closely at the evidence, you discover that what children need is not bio-parents, but parents who get involved while the children are still infants. Significantly, American war babies born while their bio-dads were away in World War II did badly when their dads came home—just as badly as today’s divorced kids do under stepfather-rule. An extensive study found that returning dads were far less fond of these wartime firstborns, disliking these strange children who came between them and their wives. The vets criticized their warbabies far more often and were far nastier disciplinarians toward them—scolding, threatening, slapping, and spanking—than the very same men were with their later children. Once those fathers had children born while they were home, they softened up, babying them and referring to them as “their” children. In other words, toward their warbabies these men acted like stepfathers—since they’d been grafted in too late to feel like “real” fathers. On the other hand, DI and adopting fathers who do get that early bonding are no more likely to abuse than are bio-dads.

  Biology, in other words, is not what makes fatherhood: involvement is. What seems to turn grownups into parents is the chance to hold, nuzzle, soothe, and agonize over those wrinkled, milk-and-poop-fragrant bundles while they’re still tiny and cuddly. How could it be otherwise? Even evolutionary biologists don’t believe men have some mysterious psychic sense that instructs them a child is biologically theirs, any more than infants have some psychic sensor for their bio-parents: being around each other is how we know who’s “ours.” And since it’s not a biological link but intimate and early involvement that softens men into fathers, it would be best to treat gay men like other parents—and to get them close to their future children as soon as possible in the kids’ lives.

  The related fear about having two dads is that a child would miss out on a mom’s essential nurturing. But the father-researchers and custody-researchers both find that mom’s monopoly on kindness and caring is a myth. A good father behaves very much like a good mother—with kindness, attention, affection, and nurturing that affects the child in more or less the same ways, regardless of the parent’s sex. As one Yale psychiatrist says, “We know for certain that men can be competent, capable, creative caretakers of newborns. . . . The research . . . says it over and over again, in data from many different disciplines.” My own earliest, delighted memories are of my father (I was a daddy’s girl) waking me so we could have breakfast, cuddle, and watch “Cap’n Roo” before he went off to teach his morning classes. One pair of dads I know reports that bringing their son to preschool perfectly clean and well-behaved, day after day, has first amazed and then infuriated some of the moms, as they realize that their husbands can do things they’ve simply refused to. Our culture may have assigned babies mainly to moms, but dads are fully qualified for the tasks.

  In fact, many pro-father and pro-family writers insist that men need to have children in order to grow up, to leave behind their profligate or violent or otherwise wayward youths. “Under the magic of family responsibility, even the painted doll often grows into a woman and the callow stripling into a man,” wrote moralist and eugenicist Paul Popenoe in 1929. Or as his son David Popenoe writes in less dated language, “[Y]oung men say that they gave up certain deviant or socially irresponsible patterns of life only when they . . . felt the need to set a good example for their children. . . . [M]en found that fatherhood promoted male maturity, especially the ability of men to integrate their own feelings and to understand others’ sympathetically.” In other words, who has time to stay out cruising the strip joints, drinking and brawling and trying to score, when your little one needs new mittens, when he won’t go to bed until you read him Goodnight Moon, when he thinks you’re the greatest thing on earth?

  Is it right to expose children to prejudice? Another objection is often posed to lesbians or gay men who plan families: is it fair to let children be stigmatized by their parents’ homosexuality?

  Most studies of lesbians’ and gay men’s children don’t find the kids scarred by teasing or ostracism; the kids hardly report any at all, and—so long as they’re strong in the usual ways—they get along fine with other children. Sometimes, in fact, adult children of women who’d divorced and then come out as lesbian spoke more proudly about their families—especially when their mothers had been easy and open about being gay—than did the children raised by divorced heterosexual moms. Is that because having a happy and proud mother makes for a happy and confident child, or having a stepmom is nicer than having a stepdad (the lesbians’ children in this study all got along better with their stepmoms than the straight women’s kids did with their stepdads), or that being in a minority forces forward your family loyalties?

  But there’s a larger, more important idea at stake. Could anyone but Pharaoh imagine suggesting that, say, Jews should not have children because someone might scrawl a swastika on their notebooks? As the only Jewish child in a semi-rural Bible Belt school, I suffered annual agonies over whether to sing the Christmas carols in music class or sit through class prayers that were not mine. Should I not have been born? Hardly. Because my parents had no qualms about being Jews, I was left with a ferocious pride in my family and culture. Kids from any minority group know that such tests can leave scars—and can also incise pride, self-reliance, and strength. When people of different races wanted to marry, the outcry about their children’s psychological well-being—how would they identify? wouldn’t they be outcasts, belonging nowhere?—was really a cover for the speakers’ own biases. So are the fears about prejudices toward ch
ildren with two parents of one sex. It’s every parent’s job to teach children to handle ridicule and disrespect, whether from being called fatso, four eyes, nigger, or faggot. And it’s all our jobs to go to bat for those children. From elementary to high schools, words like “gay” and “faggot” are among today’s most common insults—and are unfortunately permitted by many teachers and adults. People who worry about the effects of stigma on children of lesbians and gay men have a moral duty to intervene, as they do when the playground’s insult of choice is any other slur on humanity. Truly concerned adults can help erase the stigma—by making it possible for those children’s parents to marry.

  But the deepest objection to same-sex parents is the same one seen throughout history. Whenever a previously forbidden family arrangement starts to look reasonable, those who still recoil—and can’t find a rational argument—thump their chests about “the children,” projecting anxieties onto a cultural ideal so pure and shiny we can’t squint past it to see the particular facts. Medieval Christians accused Jews of slaughtering a Christian child as their annual Passover sacrifice—as if Jews were interested in reenacting Easter—and used that as a reason to go on a spring pogrom. Protestants called Catholic priests babykillers. Late nineteenth-century reformers insisted that unloving couplings produced defective and retarded children, or quoted Shakespeare that a “dull, stale, tired bed” would create a “tribe of fops.” People opposed to interracial marriage “scientifically” explained that “The offspring of these unnatural connections are generally sickly, effeminate, and . . . inferior to the full blooded of either race in physical development and strength.” It’s the same old charge: if you disobey me, you and your children will wither and die, and civilization itself will collapse.

  Of course, the impulse to save children is humanity at its best. But we have to be cautious when noble sentiments are invoked on behalf of bigotry—especially when it means restricting dissenting or unconventional parents from raising children as they believe right. From Mennonites to survivalists, a pluralist society allows people to raise their children in freedom. Only totalitarians want some central authority to decide precisely which values and models every parent offers. When there’s no neglect or abuse, do we really want to have one ideology intervene, via the state, in individual decisions to create families?

  There is no one standard of success by which every child should be measured, and those who think there is do not take into account the real, messy, exhausting, invigorating plurality of human life through history. Even investigating the psychological “best interests of the child” is a wonderful luxury compared to the concerns most societies have had for their children—fears of famine and drought, epidemics and plagues, pogroms and murders, invasions and civil wars. Given the basics—food, shelter, clothing, education, encouragement, and a sense of belonging—children grow up successfully in an unbelievable variety of circumstances. How could the human race have otherwise survived?

  So what do children need to be protected from? Given Western democracies’ bedrock belief in pluralism, family choice will not go away. The question then is: how will society deal with it? Will we try to define it under the rug, leaving an unsightly lump? Or will we legally recognize the families that actually exist—and truly protect those children?

  Because make no mistake, those children do need protection—not from any special homosexual threat, but from the same things that all children need protection from: hunger, cold, disruption, instability, and poverty. Which, not incidentally, is the goal of much marriage law. Any state’s marriage laws includes scores of statues allowing spouses to handle each other’s property “as if they were sole.” That’s critical for parents, since it lets them build their children a single shelter from their two incomes, benefits, tax returns, pensions, health insurance, and more. Imagine raising your children without marriage’s protections: knowing that if your spouse died in a car crash, you’d be taxed heavily for inheriting his or her “half” of the house, refused his or her pension benefits, your custody challenged by the grandparents. Imagine being refused the ability to govern your child’s schooling or visit her hospital bedside. That’s what most same-sex couples with kids face. Heather may have two mommies, but her legal mother—whether her biomom or the one officially granted adoption—better go quickly back to work, because the other’s healthcare insurance won’t cover Heather’s booster shots and tonsillitis.

  Legally recognizing those parents’ partnership offers more protection to that child than simple financial security. If, as child expert Anna Freud wrote, “a child can handle almost anything better than instability,” then today’s laws can be bad news for children with two moms or two dads. Today’s laws sometimes bar children from the parents who raised them—as can be the heartbreaking case when a lesbian bio-mom dies and grandparents legally kidnap the child from her other mother. In one such case, argued for years in Florida courts, the girl plaintively told judges that “for Christmas I don’t really want a present. All I want is to live with Neenie [her other mother].” That particular girl finally got to go home. Not every child does.

  Some states and countries do allow two parents of the same sex to share legal custody. As one Ontario judge wrote in 1995, “When one reflects on the seemingly limitless parade of neglected, abandoned and abused children who appear before our courts in protection cases daily, all of whom have been in the care of heterosexual parents in a ‘traditional’ family structure, the suggestion that it might not ever be in the best interests of these children to be raised by loving, caring, and committed parents who might happen to be lesbian or gay, is nothing short of ludicrous.” Not all states or judges agree, finding same-sex parenting to be unnatural—just as, not so long ago, some judges refused to fully recognize adoption statutes or DI fatherhood, believing those innovations to be unnatural.

  But even if every jurisdiction allowed both moms or both dads to be legal parents, the children would still need the extra protection of their parents’ marriage. Because there’s another thing to protect children from: a household that falls apart. One expert in adult sexuality, Pepper Schwartz, has testified that marriage’s very public nature—the gifts and celebrations of its ceremonies, the hurdles of its divorce laws, the formal involvement of extended families—does help couples stay together when their relationship is tough. And so she argues that letting same-sex couples marry would be better for the kids. Any legal zipper that holds parents together during those difficult early years when time, sleep, sanity, and commitment can be seriously strained is arguably better for the kids (unless you’ve reached the point of all-out war).

  But though everyone has high hopes, not every marriage (legally recognized or not) works out for the best. Many breakups—most, one fervently hopes—put the kids first and work hard to ensure they’re not ripped away from either parent. Not all do. A very depressing way to measure the lesbian baby boom is the recent wave of no-holds-barred, teeth-bared, mom v. mom custody battles, just as nasty as any to be found in heterosexual splits—but without divorce courts to adjudicate. Sometimes the biomom tries to pretend that the woman who held her hand during labor, who patiently sliced grapes into bits small enough for a toddler, who may even have voluntarily paid child support after moving out—that this mom was just a babysitter or a family friend that the “real” mom temporarily let into the family. And whenever a parent gets angry enough to shut his or her ex off from the child, twisting the law to destroy their shared family, things can be nasty—especially for the kids. What ought to count legally for these families is precisely what counts in defining rights and responsibilities in heterosexual DI or adoptive parenting: Did they together plan for and consent to the pregnancy or adoption? Were they both involved in the child’s daily life from the start? To decide such larger questions, it would help if courts could ask a simple one: Were the pair married, signaling a desire to share their lives (and, not incidentally, childrearing)? Marriage—with its hard-won history of custod
y rules—would simplify those children’s lives.

  There’s one last question to be asked about children and same-sex marriage: Is the option of same-sex marriage good or bad for kids? That question gets many people nervous, because in some minds it invokes the myth that gay people “recruit” by going after youngsters. That libel is why childrearing has been a subject many lesbians and gay men prefer not to raise. And yet the very existence of same-sex marriage would send a message to young people—a good one. It would offer visible evidence that there’s nothing wrong with being gay, that “sodomy” is a sin only in the eyes of the beholder. Some commentators would much rather see outré urban queers throwing drunken kisses off bar floats than have two nice married girls move in next door, with or without papoose, demonstrating to every neighborhood kid that a good marriage is defined from the inside out. Which is not to say every child with lesbian neighbors will grow up to be lesbian, any more than every neighbor of heterosexuals will become one herself. But perhaps those children will learn a basic and important lesson about our society: that we get to choose our life course based on our inner gyroscopes, and must respect others’ choices. Whether for girls or boys who come of age with the sudden realization that they’re falling in love with another girl or boy, or for those who find in themselves a heterosexual attraction, the possibility of same-sex marriage offers a lesson good for any child: One’s own heart counts.

  FOUR:

  Kin

  Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.

  —Genesis 2:24

  What, would you like to marry your sister! What is the matter with you anyway? Don’t you want a brother-in-law? Don’t you realize that if you marry another man’s sister and another man marries your sister, you will have at least two brothers-in-law, while if you marry your own sister you will have none? With whom will you hunt, with whom will you garden, whom will you go to visit?