Why same-sex marriage is bad for children

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.”

MEETING OF TEN COMMANDMENTS LEADERS WITH CITY ATTORNEY SCHEDULED FOR NEXT MONDAY

Brandi Swindell and I will be meeting with a Boise city attorney next Monday to discuss the city’s lien on our real and personal property, about which the city contacted us for the first time on June 23. T

he city has placed a lien on our private property in order to satisfy a judge’s award of over $10,000 in attorney’s fees as Ms. Swindell and I fought to protect the word of God and its display in Boise’s Julia Davis Park.

Ms. Swindell and I have been gratified by the many expressions of concern and the many generous gifts that have been made to the Keep the Commandments Coalition to enable us to meet this obligation.

If you are inclined to help us satisfy the city’s demand, you may make donations to:

I’ve written a summary of this controversy, which you may read on the Renew America website here:

If you value the work of the IVA in representing our values, please consider a gift to our work. You may do so here. Together we can make Idaho the friendliest place in the world to raise a family! Thank you!

Ø Controversy continues to swirl over the birth certificate Sen. Obama’s campaign has posted on his “Fight the Smears” website, which shows a number of evidences of forgery. There is no trace of the standard embossed seal, the authorizing signature is missing, and the certificate

number has been blacked out, making it impossible to trace. His father’s race is identified as “African,” although the official terms in use at the time by the state of Hawaii would have either been “Negro” or “black.” The circumstances of Obama’s birth are central to his qualification to run for the presidency, since the only way he can be a natural born citizen of the U.S. and thus eligible to serve as president is to have been born on U.S. soil. (His mother was a U.S. citizen, but under the law in place at the time, she had to have lived in the U.S. for at least five years since the age of 14 for her son to be considered a natural born citizen. She gave birth to Obama at age 18.) As Andy McCarthy says on National Review Online, “The Obama campaign appears to be stonewalling. Shouldn’t it be a fairly easy matter to prove he was born in Hawaii if he really was? Why wouldn’t Obama just end this quickly?” (Is There Legitimate Doubt About Obama's Eligibility to be President?; israelinsider: politics: Blogger admits Hawaii birth certificate forgery, subverting Obama claims; israelinsider: politics: Obama birth certificate "painter" ridicules claim that image proves authenticity)

Ø A battle may be brewing at the Republican National Convention between the party’s conservatives and the allies of Sen. John McCain over the party platform. McCain’s views on global warming, immigration, stem cell research and campaign finance are considerably to the left of the party’s grassroots and out of step with the majority of the party. The 100-page platform will have to be rewritten, since all but nine pages of the current platform mention George Bush by name, and the rewrite may give McCain an opportunity to radically change significant portions of it. (Conservatives Ready To Battle McCain on Convention Platform - washingtonpost.com)

Ø Sharia law continues to make stealthy but steady progress in the West. Now, believe it or not, two 7^th graders in the

U.K.

have been disciplined for refusing to kneel and pray to Allah during a religious studies class. Yep, you read you that right. The religion teacher at this British public school made the class wear Muslim headgear during the class, and then put prayer mats on the floor an

d told the class, “[W]e are now going to pray to Allah” - in Arabic, no less! For refusing to participate in the worship of a different god, two students were given in-school detention. This follows the statement of a leading British judge that contractual agreements can be made in England under sharia law rather than English law. “There is no reason,” said the judge, “why principles of sharia law or any other religious code should not be the basis for mediation or other forms of dispute resolution.” Meanwhile, police dogs there will now wear “Muslim bootees” when sniffing through Islamic properties for drugs and explosives, in order not to offend the religious sensibilities of Muslims. This comes just after British police actually apologized to Muslims for using a German shepherd puppy in a crime prevention poster. (Dogs are unclean in Muslim theology.) And young English children are going to be taught that it is racist to say “yuk” if they taste foreign food they don’t like. (Boys punished with detention for refusing to pray to Allah; Sniffer dogs to wear ‘Muslim’ bootees - Times Online; Toddlers who dislike spicy food racist, say report - Telegraph)

Ø Coming soon to an American neighborhood near you, according to the White House: freed Guantanamo Bay terrorists, walking around loose and free thanks to last month’s Supreme Court ruling granting them legal rights denied to our own soldiers. The Court ruled that these 270 suspected terrorists have the right to petition federal judges for immediate release. If an activist court system can tell the executive branch that terrorists who have never set foot on U.S. soil have the right to our legal system, there is nothing to prevent them from ordering their release into American neighborhoods. Said a White House spokesman, “It is a very real possibility that a dangerous detainee could be released into the United States as a result of this Supreme Court decision.” Some of these cases are expected to be decided by September. (FOXNews.com - White House: Guantanamo Terror Detainees Could Walk Free in U.S.)

Ø From the world of environmentalism: Environmentalists, who led the push for biofu

els, are now aghast at their own success. The deforestation of tropical forests to plant palm oil plantations for biofuels production is now threatening the survival of orangutans in Indonesia and Malaysia. In California, all 2009 models cars will have to feature a global warming label, telling consumers just how planet-destructive they are (on a scale of 1 to 10), based on their emissions. And British adults may soon be carrying a card showing how much in the way of “carbon allowances” they will be allowed to spend when buying gasoline. If they exceed their allowance, they will be required to purchase carbon credits from some more eco-sensitive Brit. (Study: Orangutans could face extinction in wild - msnbc.com; New Cars in California Must Display Global Warming Score | GreenBiz.com; Your Carbon Ration Card - WSJ.com)

Ø President Calvin Coolidge, in 1926, on the 150^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence:

“About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the wo

rld has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter.

“If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.

“Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”