David QuinnCampaign is using the traditional family to urge people to vote against the traditional family, writes David Quinn
The leaflet of the ‘Yes Equality’ campaign was pushed through my letter box the other day. It is a four page, A4 sized leaflet, entitled ‘Marriage and Family Matter’.
The leaflet shows a picture of an older couple, married for 55 years pleading for people to vote ‘yes’ so same-sex couples can have what they have.
It shows a remarkably hale and hearty looking 90-year-old woman with 14 children, 25 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren asking people to vote ‘yes’.
We see a picture of a married man and woman with their gay son. Two pictures show an extended family. Another one shows sports stars. Only one picture that I could see shows a lesbian couple with two teenage girls they have raised together.
The leaflet is interesting in that it is pitched straight at middle Ireland. But ironically, it is doing this by showing mostly traditional looking families in order to persuade ordinary, traditional-minded Irish people to effectively vote against the traditional family.
Frankly, I don’t like using that term ‘traditional’ at all. It has become too loaded a word. However, by the ‘traditional family’ I simply mean the family of mother, father and child and then the other generations of that same family, including the grandparents all tied together by the bonds of love, but also by the natural ties.
What the ‘yes’ campaign is asking us to reject is the idea that the natural ties, the biological ties, matter very much, and to reject entirely the idea that mothers and fathers matter.
Implications
I wonder to what extent some of the older voters this leaflet is pitched at, and who are thinking of voting ‘yes’ on May 22, fully understand the implications of what the ‘yes’ side are actually asking them to vote for?
Let’s recap what a ‘yes’ vote will mean. What we are being asked to change is Article 41 of the Constitution which is called simply, ‘The Family’. It’s not called ‘marriage’ at all. Marriage is mentioned in Article 41. It says the family is founded on marriage.
Marriage has always been understood as the union of a man and a woman and therefore the family is founded on the union of a man and a woman. This seems like pure common sense, a simple acceptance of the facts of life.
If we change Article 41 as the Government and the ‘yes’ side want, we will be saying the family is equally founded on the union of two men or two women.
Under our law, Article 41 gives a right to not only marry, but to have children. Therefore when two men or two women are allowed to marry they are also given a constitutionally-protected right to have children.
When two men have a child what is missing from the child’s life? The answer is obvious. A mother.
When two women have a child, what is missing from the child’s life? The answer is obvious: a father.
But something else is missing as well. At least one set of biological grandparents will also be missing.
So any grandparents who vote for same-sex marriage are voting at least one set of biological grandparents out of the lives of some children. I doubt very much that too many would vote for same-sex marriage if they knew it meant this.
Of course it will be claimed, rightly, that children can lose a mother or a father through circumstance. They might then also lose contact what their grandparents.
There is a world of difference, however, between losing a parent or grandparent by deliberate design, which is what same-sex marriage will allow, and losing a parent or grandparent by circumstance.
No child, and ultimately, therefore, no family can ever exist without the union of a man and a woman, male and female.
When a lesbian couple have a child, every single time that child can only come into existence with the assistance of a man, even if he is ‘merely’ the provider of sperm.
When a gay couple have a child, every single time that child can only come into existence with the assistance of a woman.
It’s ironic when you think of it. Same-sex couples still need the complementarity of male and female in order to have a child but then they reject the complementarity of male and female when it comes to raising children.
To put it another way, they know no child can exist without a mother and a father, but they reject the notion that a child ought to be raised by a mother and a father. They think having two parents of the same sex is just the same as having opposite sex parents.
A vote for same-sex marriage is a straight-out attack, therefore, on motherhood and fatherhood and on the biological ties.
The biological ties carry on through the generations. A child is related not only to his or her biological parents, but also to his or her biological grandparents.
But advocates of same-sex marriage think the biological ties can be severed without the child suffering in the slightest. They believe there are absolutely no consequences to doing this so long as the child is loved.
This is why it is so hypocritical of ‘Yes Equality’ to basically appeal to the traditional family in its leaflet in order to persuade voters to vote against the traditional family once and for all.
It would have been much more honest of them to show pictures of their real vision of the family, which is of genderless parenting and children deliberately separated from their biological families.