Why same-sex marriage is bad for children

By Bryan Fischer

Dr. Tryce Hansen has captured in summary form the problems with same-sex marriage, and why it's bad for kids. Any society that truly cares about children will oppose the legalization of homosexual unions for that reason alone.

Sociologists have demonstrated over and over again that the optimal nurturing environment for young children is in a home where they are raised in a two-parent family headed by a man and a woman who are married to each other. All good public policy will facilitate this ideal and discourage the recognition of marriage counterfeits.

Fundamental to this is the conviction is that there are just two genders — male and female — and not five, as homosexual activists want us to believe.

Further, men and women are fundamentally different from each other, in every cell of their bodies, meaning that a father has a unique contribution to make to the lives of his children as does a mother. As Hansen points out, males tend to "embrace reason over emotion, rules over relationship, risk-taking over caution, and standards over compassion, while (females) generally embrace the reverse."

Opposite sex parenting gives children examples of both masculinity and femininity in action, and the complementary interaction of these qualities enables them to grow up with a healthy and balanced view of life and relationships.

Rules without relationship produce something rigid and clinical, while relationship without rules produces something chaotic and disordered. Children learn how to blend these qualities by growing up in a two-parent home, where each parent contributes something essential for a child's emotional and social growth.

Parents are not interchangeable parts which can be gender-shuffled without creating a deficit in the development of children.

As Hansen puts it, "Two women can both be good mothers, but neither can be a good father."

Children need the complementary balance of the kind of love both a mother and a father provide, the nurture and compassion of a mother combined with a father's love which calls a child to achievement in order to fulfill his God-given potential. Plus, children learn how to relate to both sexes later in life by relating to both a mom and a dad and observing the way in which they relate to each other.

Further, for a boy to become a man, he must at some point detach from his mother and identify with his father, who shows him what mature masculinity looks like and teaches him how to channel and control his aggressiveness and his sexual impulses. A father's strength and presence command a kind of respect a boy needs to learn self-restraint. It's no secret that boys without fathers are much more likely to become delinquent and wind up afoul of the law.

Girls need a father to protect them and to affirm their femininity. Girls without fathers tend toward promiscuity to satisfy their inborn hunger for male validation.

As Hansen says, fathers "restrain sons from acting out antisocially, and daughters from acting out sexually."

Additionally, same-sex marriage will only increase sexual confusion in children and encourage dangerous sexual experimentation among the nation's youth. Children growing up in homosexual households have been shown to be more likely to experiment sexually, and as same-sex unions (as well as cohabitation) become the norm, this will only become more pronounced, producing more heartache, more children born out of wedlock, and more sexually transmitted diseases.

Finally, Hansen points out that once we transgress the one-man, one-woman threshold as the definition of marriage, there is no logical place to stop. It is inevitable that restricting polygamy will soon be labeled a form of discrimination, along with attempts to restrain any other form of coupling. In fact, the homosexual activist who led the charge to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973 is now openly advocating the legitimacy of bestiality (as long, of course, as the animal "consents").

It's almost impossible to overestimate the kind of sexual confusion that young boys and girls will experience who grow up in these non-normative environments, a kind of confusion they will carry with them into the intimate relationships they will pursue as adults, a confusion which will then be passed on to their children. Generations will be damaged by the demolition of standards established by the Creator on the second page of the Scripture: "For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. (Gen. 2:24)."

Hansen concludes: "The accumulated wisdom of over 2,000 years has concluded that the ideal marital and parental configuration is composed of one man and one woman. Arrogantly disregarding such time-tested wisdom, and using children as guinea pigs in a radical experiment, is risky at best, and cataclysmic at worst.

Same-sex marriage definitely isn't in the best interest of children. And although we empathize with those homosexuals who long to be married and parent children, we mustn't allow our compassion for them to trump our compassion for children. In a contest between the desires of some homosexuals and the needs of all children, we can't allow the children to lose."

© Bryan Fischer