Homosexual Marriage, Parenting, and Adoption - Gilles BerneimWhat we hear: “Homosexuals are victims of discrimination. They must have the right to marry, the same as heterosexuals.”
What we often neglect to say: From the fact that people love each other it does not follow necessarily that they have the right to be married, whether they be heterosexual or homosexual. For example, a man cannot marry a woman who is already married, even if they love each other. Likewise, a woman cannot be married to two men on the grounds that she loves both of them and that both want to be her husband. A father cannot marry his daughter, even if their love is uniquely paternal and filial.
Of course, we understand the wish of people who are in love that their love be recognized. Still, there are strict rules defining what kinds of unions can be recognized as marriages and what kinds cannot. Thus “marriage for everyone” is only a slogan, since after the authorization of homosexual marriage the law would maintain forms of inequality and discrimination that would continue to apply to those who love each other but to whom marriage is not available.
The argument for marriage for all conceals a split between two existing visions of marriage. According to one worldview, which I share with a great number of people, both believers and nonbelievers, marriage is not only the recognition of a loving attachment. It is the institution that articulates the union between man and woman as part of the succession of generations. It is the establishment of a family—that is, a social cell that creates a set of parent–child relations among its members. Beyond the common life of two individuals, it organizes the life of a community consisting of descendants and ancestors. So understood, marriage is a fundamental act in the construction and the stability of individuals as well as of society.
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What we hear: “What is most important is love. A homosexual couple can give much love to a child, sometimes even more than a heterosexual couple.”
What we often neglect to say: To love a child is one thing; to love a child with a love that provides the necessary structure is another. There can be no doubt that homosexuals have the same capacity to love a child and to convey this love as do heterosexuals, but the role of parents extends beyond the love they feel for their children. To reduce the parental bond to its affective and educative aspects is to overlook the fact that the parent–child bond is a psychological vector of fundamental importance for the child’s sense of identity.
All the affection in the world will not suffice to produce the basic psychological structures that address the child’s need to know where he comes from. For the child establishes his own identity only by a process of differentiation, which presupposes that he knows whom he resembles. Thus he needs to know that he issues from the love and the union between a man, his father, and a woman, his mother, thanks to the sexual difference between them. Even adopted children know that they originate from the love and the desire of their parents, even when these are not their biological parents.
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“Homosexual parenting” is not parenting. The term itself was invented to mitigate the impossibility of homosexuals’ being parents. This new foundation, invented to promote the legal option of giving a child two “parents” of the same sex, is part of a fiction. Neither marriage nor parenthood has ever been based on the sexuality of individuals but rather on sex itself—that is, on the anthropological distinction between man and woman.
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What we hear: “Homosexuals are victims of discrimination. Just like heterosexuals, they must have the right to have children.”
What we often neglect to say: The right to a child does not exist. The desire to have a child in no way establishes the right to have a child, neither for heterosexuals nor for homosexuals. The wishes of an infertile heterosexual couple may not be honored if conditions are not optimal. For example, one may judge that a young and healthy couple is better suited to have a child than an older couple in fragile health. If a right to a child for homosexual couples were recognized, then all heterosexual couples denied children would feel themselves victims of discrimination in one way or another and would have grounds for claiming the same right.
There is no question of denying the suffering experienced by homosexual couples owing to their infertility—a suffering they share with heterosexual couples who cannot procreate. Such homosexual couples now demand that their suffering be recognized and alleviated. But no one has the right to be relieved of suffering at another’s expense, particularly when this is to the disadvantage of the weak and innocent. Their suffering is not a sufficient reason to give them the right to adopt.
