FIC Blog

My wife had an op-ed making the case against same-sex “marriage” in the Sunday Courant. An excerpt:

Inherently, when the state removes gender as a requirement for marriage, it institutionalizes and approves of the absence of a man for the prospective care and raising of families…

We have forgotten as a society that the state’s interest in marriage is not to validate mutual affection. If that were so, the state would issue friendship certificates or mutual-admiration badges. The purpose of licensing marriage is to encourage the most stable environments for raising well-adjusted future citizens. By licensing marriage without regard to gender, the state will present absentee fatherhood as an equally good alternative for raising children. It wasn’t long ago The New York Times reported that “from a child’s point of view, according to a growing body of social science research, the most supportive household is one with two biological parents in a low conflict marriage.”…

 I was a preschooler when Connecticut passed its laws permitting unilateral divorce; a teenager when it seemed no marriage was safe from separation. As a young adult, I observed young women, distanced from the protection of their fathers, fall into serial sexual relationships, promiscuity and single parenthood. As a mother, I weep for single parents and their children, struggling against the statistical undertow of violence, addiction and poverty.

Are gay people responsible for all this? Certainly not. But fatherless-ness is no small contributing factor. The state has a responsibility to promote fatherhood within marriage in every possible venue; not deinstitutionalize it, abrogate it or equalize it into something meaningless, so that a politically savvy few can more quickly gain wider acceptance for their adult affections.

You can read Leslie’s entire piece here.

Spazeboy offers local liberal blogdom’s response here (though the poor fellow had to cross-post it here in order to generate comments from his blogging brethren). And Tony Award-winning playwright (and actor) Harvey Fierstein publishes opposite Leslie in the Courant here. Fierstein seems to imply that same-sex “marriage” in Connecticut would change the federal tax status of same-sex couples (it wouldn’t), says he’s not asking for “society’s approval of [his] love life” (while many pro-SSM speakers at last week’s hearing said that is why they seek the bill’s passage) and gives the impression that SSM has had no repercussions in MA (ignoring the attacks on Catholic adoption services and David Parker’s parental rights).

Leslie focuses in her op-ed on the capacity of same-sex “marriage” to further erode societal support for fatherhood, noting how fatherlessness puts women and children at greater risk for various social ills.”Consider young men,” she writes, “Their societal conditioning to provide for children and their mothers is already weak.”

Her argument received unexpected (and, no doubt, unintended) support from a Helen Ubinas column that ran in the same day’s Courant:

Consider this an open invitation to NOW President Kim Gandy, who complained this week that the White House’s fatherhood initiatives are sexist.

Come to Hartford.

Let me show you around, give you a glimpse of what happens to families, to cities when men are MIA while their children grow up.

We could knock on a few doors – almost any one really; with more than half the households in Hartford led by women only, it shouldn’t take long to find a single mother and get a big dose of reality.

Chances are that woman and her children are living in squalor, with no health insurance and not enough food. In 2005, nearly 50 percent of families in Hartford led by women were living below the poverty level. To really understand what that means, consider this: The median income for married couples with children under 18 that year was about 71 grand. For a female head of household, it was about 26 grand…

At the Village for Families & Children in Hartford, which recently received funds for a fatherhood initiative program in Hartford, there are three parenting programs. Except for guest appearances by a few men, most clients are women.

You know why? Because men need to learn to show up.

Ubinas’ column can be read in its entirety here.