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May 18, 2006
Gay Marriage: An Incitement to Poor Argumentation
I have an automatic search engine in my consciousness that highlights anything in the media about gay marriage, and was keenly anticipating this week's episode of "Insight"http://news.sbs.com.au/insight/ on SBS - Australia's multicultural broadcaster. While I'm delighted to see such issues being broached in the media, I have to say that I was a little disappointed by the way the debate - if I can call it that - was handled. For example, one participant on the panel
I found this good summary of the (many) psychology-based studies that have been done on gay and lesbian parents, which highlights (I think) some of the implicit homophobia of the way the question is handled in public discourse and the media. I'm talking specifically about the paragraph that discusses the assumption that when courts express anxiety about the instability of these relationships, they might actually mean 'mental instability'. Which contention has been quite persuasively dismissed by the American Psychological Association and subsequent research (not cited in this brief survey).
This harks back to what I was saying that it's important when looking at these debates to examine how they're even being talked about, and at a more basic level, why the question is even being asked. Hence for example my assertion that making suitability for parenthood a criterion for either awarding or denying gay couples marital rights and/or adoption rights (and I believe these questions are quite intimately linked) is in itself a homophobic proposition, placing the burden of proof on gay parents, and in sense naturalising the idea that heterosexual parenting is somehow 'naturally' 'healthy'. Both these terms are problematic for reasons I won't go into here, but suffice to say that this view obscures if not discounting altogether the obvious fact that many straight couples abuse the privilege of parenthood. This abuse, however, is seen as an aberration from the natural way of things, which still means that straight parents are automatically good, and that courts, family services, etc, must prove that they are bad to remove children from damaging situations. Gay families, on the other hand, are asked to first of all prove their right to exist, and then argue a case for their abilities as good parents.
Posted by len at 12:14 PM | Comments (5)