There’s been a stunning transformation in arguments about marriage equality since the Prop 8 battle in 2008. The heart of the change? The role of children.
As I’ve written before, during the Proposition 8 battle in California, marriage equality opponents tried to scare people by saying that marriage equality would require that students learn about homosexuality in schools (as if that were a bad thing). Prop 8 passed, and same-sex couples were blocked from marriage. By 2013, however, the U.S. Supreme Court wrote in Windsor: “[DOMA] humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples…. [and] makes it even more difficult for the children to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives.” Variations of that argument have since been used in every other federal decision on marriage equality, bar one.
The exception is in the 6th Circuit, which ruled against marriage equality and thus precipitated its hearing before the Supreme Court. Now, as we wait for the Court to rule (which will happen either tomorrow or Monday), the Washington Post has also noted that “Gay rights activists have turned old arguments on their heads, putting the more than 210,000 American children being raised in same-sex-couple households at the core of their closing arguments.”
The article gives some space to the few children of same-sex parents who feel marriage equality harms children by cutting them off from a biological parent, and even that “some same-sex parenting can be a form of child abuse.” It does, however, present the counterargument that most of those who are unhappy with having same-sex parents are really unhappy about unrelated factors, “such as the trauma of their biological parents’ divorce.” Additionally, the article notes, many same-sex parents try to maintain their children’s sense of connection to their biological roots.
Much more will be written in the coming years, I’m sure, to further illuminate what drove the strategic shift in the role of children during the marriage equality struggle. For now, thank the children of the plaintiffs; the children of same-sex parents who contributed to the Voices of Children amicus brief to the Supreme Court; to our children who spoke out in public forums, in their classrooms, or on the playground to stand up for their families; and to all of our children simply for being themselves and showing by their mere existence that there is more than one way to be a family.
