The problem with that debate until now, as he sees it, is that “almost always, the main focus is ‘gay,’ not ‘marriage.’ ”
Mr. [David] Blankenhorn cites what he calls the “wafer-thin” definitions of marriage that increasingly turn up in court decisions and polemical articles about same-sex ties: “a unique expression of a private bond and profound love”; “a private arrangement between parties committed to love”; “the exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other.”
Some of this commitment talk sounds sweet, and some of it, like “committed, interdependent partnerships between consenting adults,” sounds more like a real estate transaction than a marriage. But for Mr. Blankenhorn, these definitions miss the point. He is amused, for instance, at their neo-Victorian avoidance of any mention of sex. Similarly, these definitions dodge any mention of children and parenthood. They emphasize marriage as private and too diverse (“unique”) to be pinned down.
On the contrary, Mr. Blankenhorn writes, marriage is a “social institution,” a set of shared understandings and public meanings that shape expectations and conduct. Marriage has evolved and, yes, may be “constantly evolving”; here Mr. Blankenhorn moves through biology, prehistory, history and anthropology, from ancient Mesopotamia to the Trobriand Islands. But marriage fundamentally involves sexual intercourse and the affiliation – emotionally, practically and legally – between any child created and both parents.
Read it all from the NY Times earlier in the summer, another in the hundreds of should-have-already-been-posted-but-haven’t-had-a-chance-to-get-to-it-yet posts–KSH.
This calls to mind a situation that has developed with a family member of one of our neighbors. He is in a committed gay “marriage†and he and his partner have recently adopted a newborn baby boy. They are both members of an ELCA Lutheran Church. So something new, to be put in the “law-of-unintended-consequences†file is the now apparent fact, that along with accepting gay-marriage, this particular church is now also compelled to accept gay-adoption. One of my professors, back when I was in college, pointed out something to me that I have never forgotten. What he said was, “Remember, every choice to do one thing is always a choice not to do something elseâ€. To say that gay-adoption is perfectly acceptable is equivalent to also saying that children do not need a mother and a father, but that any combination of caring adults is just as good. So it seems now, that the ELCA has taken a position that the traditional family unit is no longer an important or necessary building block for a properly functioning society.
wildiris: “To say that gay-adoption is perfectly acceptable is equivalent to also saying that children do not need a mother and a father, but that any combination of caring adults is just as good. ”
Not necessarily. To say that adoption by gay parents is perfectly acceptable is equivalent to also saying that the placement of a child in a loving home [i]regardless of the gender of the parents[/i] is preferable to the child being reared by an institution. I would think that you would give preference to a stable, caring adult family over an institution or the all-too-common [i]in[/i]stability of the fosterchild system (which, I would suggest, is also better than an orphanage).
“So it seems now, that the ELCA has taken a position that the traditional family unit is no longer an important or necessary building block for a properly functioning society.”
The official position of the entire ELCA is now to be imputed from a single case of adoption which the congregation did not initiate but may in practice tolerate?
Would it really be preferable for the congregation to reject the child, or to eject the adoptive parents?
I’m not certain that this single tolerated adoption within one single ELCA congregation speaks for the entire denomination, let alone in any official manner.