Australian homosexual couples enjoy the same legal rights as heterosexual couples but there is still a (very ugly) battle raging over the last conceptual distinction between gay and straight unions: the term “marriage.” The Land Down Under is set for a nation-wide postal vote on whether or not to redefine the most child-friendly institution in history.
Them Before Us believes that there is no distinction in the value or dignity of those who identify as gay vs straight. In fact, some of our most passionate ambassadors and supporters are gay. Despite the difference in our sexual orientation, we all understand that:
- Government’s interest in marriage is children, not adult feelings. Therefore when you redefine marriage into an institution where husbands and wives are optional, mothers and fathers become legally optional as well.
- While gay men can be wonderful fathers, they cannot be mothers. And while lesbians can be fantastic mothers, they cannot be fathers. Children require and desire both.
- Something wondrous takes place when a man and a woman raise their children together, knowledge many have gained by growing up outside of such a union.
- The married mother/father household is critical to a thriving society, because that family structure alone protects a child’s rights and stacks the deck in their favor in terms of their physical, mental and emotional health.
Our rejection of gay marriage has nothing to do with animus or phobia and everything to do with respecting the stories of kids who grew up, often intentionally, without their mother or father. Many suffered silently and we will not sit by and allow adults to legislate away their rights, which is exactly what’s at stake in the Australian plebiscite.
Children need to take center stage in this, and every, discussion on family structure. So the questions is, what is the best way to help kids who are growing up in same-sex households or with an LGBT parent? Upon reviewing research on the diminished outcomes of children with same-sex parents, one Australian gay marriage supporter remarked, “Children are very observant and will know when their gay parents are being treated unfairly by their local communities. Surely, this has to be a major factor in emotional problems in children of gay couples? Legalising same-sex marriages might be able to change this.”
We would argue that he is mistaken.
While it’s true that children with same-sex parents are at increased risk for emotional problems, when they share their stories very few cite “social intolerance” as the root of their pain. When allowed to be honest (often via anonymity), most reveal that they are just like all other children… who struggle when they are missing a parent.
You need not take our word for it. These kids have spoken for themselves.
Father’s Day sucks, and my mom thinks its society when really it’s just her. I love her but yeesh. She talks about genders like they don’t matter when raising kids. If they don’t why does she wants me to spend so much time with her guy friends so I can have a father-figure? (JK as if her guy friends love me or relate to me as much as they love and relate with their actual children. Yeah right) … I want to know who my dad is, and a donor # and some basic layout isn’t going to cut it. I need to KNOW him. I need to bond with him and do daddy-daughter things. He’s half of who I am… We’re flesh and blood. He’s literally IN my DNA. Why don’t people get that? If he and my mom were a couple, he’d be my dad. But when my mom is gay and asked him not to be there, he’s just my ‘donor’? Really? Where is my say in this?
I am the daughter (not biological) of two moms. I love them both sooo sooo much but there is not a day that goes by that i didn’t wish i had a dad. it is very hard for kids like me that are different. no matter how accepting society is. i have men in my life my moms’ friends but it is not the same. I love my parents but I don’t agree with the fact that I will never know half of my biology or my siblings. I will never do that to a child.
I am also an atheist raised by a gay couple. “homosexual parents are just as capable of raising children as straight parents are” Now I don’t believe that’s true, not even for a second. You can disagree with me. I use to believe that my childhood had nothing to do with my mental illness as a teen, now I know that it was the direct cause of how it began for me. I had experience childhood trauma and repressed it from not really having a mother and being putting odd family structure of having two dad which I think is worse than having two moms tbh I felt abandoned.
Think of your own life, or the kids you know who have lost a parent to divorce, abandonment, sperm-donation or death. Do they miss their parent? Do fatherless kids crave male attention? Do they lie awake at night wondering where their mother is? Do they ask themselves if their father left because of them? If you don’t know the answer to those questions, you’ve lived a blessed life. For the rest of you… we get it.
Children innately long for their mother and father; it’s not something that society teaches them to want. Whether it’s a child whose parents have divorced, an adopted child wondering about her birth mother, or a boy with two moms who wishes he wasn’t the only guy in the house, the proper response to such pain is “I’m so sorry. You’ve lost something that you were made for. That’s why it hurts.”
But in some same-sex headed households these children are told that it’s normal to have “two moms” or “two dads,” a message that’s reinforced because many are growing up in overwhelmingly LGBT communities. Yet, the desire for their missing parent is relentless, not because they’re told to want it, but because they are kids and they’re made for it.
You can’t make a child stop longing for their missing father or mother with words. Telling these kids that “you don’t need a dad” or “love makes a family” is the equivalent of gas-lighting them, and it virtually ensures that they’ll feel either guilty or crazy when their craving for a dad (or mom) resurfaces:
Growing up, I wanted a father…. I felt it within me that I was missing a father before I could even articulate what a father was. I knew that I loved both of my parents, but I could not place my finger on what it is I was missing inside myself. When I hit school I started to realize through observing other children and their loving bonds with their fathers that I was missing out on something special. I was lied to throughout school; I was told I didn’t have a father. . .it was very difficult for me to affirm a stable identity because of this. And my behavioral and emotional stability suffered greatly because of it… –Millie Fontana
I grew up surrounded by women who said they didn’t need or want a man. Yet, as a little girl, I so desperately wanted a daddy. It is a strange and confusing thing to walk around with this deep-down unquenchable ache for a father, for a man, in a community that says that men are unnecessary. There were times I felt so angry with my dad for not being there for me, and then times I felt angry with myself for even wanting a father to begin with. –Heather Barwick
All my moms want is to have a baby, and have a biological family like everyone else. So I always thought what a terrible bitch (yes bitch) I am to destroy their happiness too, because I wished I just had a dad in my life and not a donor fake uncle. You have no idea how lonely and guilty I feel about this, but maybe you do? I feel like a bad child, especially when I look on TV and I see the good kids of gay parents say they have the perfect family and they don’t need a mom or dad…
Redefining marriage in the US has lead to a predictable development: there is no longer any legal or political institution in the US which recognizes that a child should be raised by their mother and father. In other words, a child’s need for a mother and a father has been legally usurped by the desires of adults. These kids will get no validation from their own government to the tune of, “You’re right to feel this way. You deserve a mom.” Our laws and institutions tell them that their feelings are wrong. Legally, this is what they’ll hear: “You don’t need a mother and you certainly don’t have a right to one.”
In short, our laws are lying to children.
The kids quoted above know that something important, something they deserve, is missing in their lives. The question is, will our family policies reflect their innate longings… or ignore them?
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Polski
I find it had to believe your comment that Australian same sex couples have the same legal rights as hetrosexual couples when this is blantently not so. A quick check on human rights.com.au can explain the current discrepancies in our system. Could you provide some references to back up your opening statement in the above article. Regards.
Sorry, but is that all you got out of this article. This article is about kid’s rights, or perhaps their rights aren’t important to you?
A quick check on humanrights.com.au reveals a 10 yo article that explains the then discrepancies in our system, which many gay rights activists go to great lengths to point out. They overlook the information on that same website that shows that most or all of these ‘discrepancies’ have been dealt with so that gay couples now have the same legal rights as married couples.
Perhaps Sue Carter should be providing references first before demanding this of someone else who has actually done some homework.
As someone actually living in Australia as a heterosexual ‘no” voter, I can say that gay people have far more rights and protections in this country right now than heterosexual people opposed to gay marriage do. Gay activists now have impunity to vilify those against same sex marriage and are called hateful bigots and even most recently, we are now apparently child murderers. But if we “no” voters try to respectfully put our own perspectives across we even get a dressing down by the federal leader of the opposition who says we have a freedom to hurt, speak rubbish, are hateful and homophobic – all this from a man who will very likely be the next Prime Minister of Australia.
Perhaps the most serious issue I have here in Australia with same sex marriage is the “Safe Schools” program. Originally supposed to be an anti-bullying program it has instead become a radical sexual fluidity and LGBT indoctrination program for young children. The course material is beyond despicable and in my view constitutes child abuse or – at best – an officially government sanctioned sexual grooming program targeted at our most vulnerable young people. It shouldn’t be taught to anyone, let alone younger school age children. Yet a recent TV ad that only scraped the tip of the iceberg (where a male child was told he could happily wear a dress to school if he so wished – that is about as mild as the program gets) was shot down in flames by the gay lobby. But our main argument here is that if same sex marriage is made law, it will give the green light for these programs to become permanent, embedded in our culture and universally mainstream, despite the fact that parents are up in arms about them and some state governments have even dropped the program. Mark my words – that stay of execution won’t last long if gay marriage is made law.
The fact is that in this country, if we are against same sex marriage we either have to shut our mouths and not say anything at all or go along with it and just pretend we are all on board with it. This is not just in our privates lives, but in our working lives as well. Employees of large corporations have to tow the gay agenda line and despite what senior management in these companies claim, the pressure is always there to conform.
Even BBC World News – the supposedly impartial and highly respected broadcaster –
produced 10 minutes of complete and utter rubbish on Wednesday 30th August in relation to what is happening here in Australia. Rather than actually checking the facts, they produced absolute drivel – all clearly supporting and biased towards the “yes” campaign and not even questioning the ridiculous notion, for example, that the “no” campaign is better funded than the “yes” campaign. What complete and utter rubbish – the opposite is true. The “no” campaign is a tiny minnow in an ocean of large billion dollar corporations, state and local governments an even a CEO who made more than $14,000,000 AUD last year – all who are funding the “no” campaign – the governments of course using tax payer’s money to do this.
Having lived in this country for over 50 years, I am absolutely disgusted by the behaviour of same sex activists, politicians and the leaders of large corporations. They are all personally responsible – each and every one of them – for the mess we are in now and the far greater mess we will be in when same sex marriage becomes legal. God forbid what this country will be like a generation or two down the track when the socially-destructive forces unleashed by the gay marriage agenda come home to roost. And it makes me shudder to think that when I myself will be at a most vulnerable age – in my late 80s and early 90s – the country will actually be run by people who – as vulnerable children – were indoctrinated into this new, radical-left, socialist culture where the concept of male and female biological parents being the best way forward is considered to be a hateful, outdated, bigoted and indeed a murderous concept.
Yep, welcome to Australia. And if you read any differently to what I’ve written above, then you’ve read wrong.
Relax, John. I live in a US state that’s had SSM for 15 years. None of what you have said has come to pass. My 2 boys still like girls and dress like boys, I’m still a man married to my wife. The only difference is, we just don’t think its a big deal seeing 2 guys holding hands or 2 women raising children. Its all good.
Cheerios, I’m wondering at your remarks telling John to relax…, that in itself is condescending and assuming. I can’t see anywhere that he thinks it’s a big deal that two guys holding hands or two women raising children!
What is, is the impact on children, parental rights in having a say in what they are being taught in the Safe Schools program.
I have close friends who are both in same sex relationships and wanted the same legal rights for them but in looking more into this have found that here in Australia they already have those rights so what is the agenda? To even ask that is bordering on dangerous here and only brings the score even bullying on so I have kept my thoughts to myself and kept researching the issues which will impact us if the Marriage Act is changed.
You state that nothing has changed in America but everything I am reading on this subject says otherwise.
At the end of the day it is our children and their basic rights which will be most impacted from what I am seeing and I feel they are the ones who don’t have a say in legislation which will impact on them greatly.
Hi Cheerios,
I live in Australia with no SSM. I don’t have a problem with 2 guys holding hands or 2 women raising children.
SSM doesn’t really have anything to do with that.
Your absolutely right jon, its a slippery slope,and its blatantly indoctrinating and corrupting kids/pre teens by design,and sadly people are one of 3 things when it comes to this very serious- 1. well meaning but ignorant to the evil destructive culturally damaging intent/power of indoctrination/propaganda..2.agree with people like you and myself yet are scared ito submission because as you said anything short of unconditionally agreeing to 100 percent of any and eveyr isngle pro LGBT policy/agenda makes one a “bigot/sexiststransphobe’ etc etc….and 3. the kind of people who are truly dispicable and evil and literally get off on corrupting and destrocying family units and children …..so peopl sayinmg”relax man your reaching and worrying over nothing its no big deal” -are totaly dead wrong and the evidence is overwhelming especially in Europe but more and more in America to we have”drag queen story time’for pre schoolers for fucks sake….and many adults think there is nothing wrong with letting 6-7 year olds”identify”as the opposte sex and destrying there bodies/minds with hormone therapy and even full on genital mutilation……im really just sick of it and most people I know-who are in the ignorant/misinformed/clueless about propaganda but well meaning category-sadly just dont get it, and every single thing you said will com to pass if America/Europe/Australia do not get groups and they are very owerfull groups like the LGBT the hell out of school cariculums and academia period…..its very evil whats happening and it will lead to anything goes…inclding the mainstreaming /social acceptance or”tolerance’ of pedophilia as many leftists mdia outlets like Buzzfeed/Huff post,and Salon are already advocating for little by little in plain site. I dont hate gay or adults who have gender dysphoria who are”transgender” but what i do findevil and disgusting are people/groups gay or straight or LGBt whatever who want to corrupt/brainwash/indoctrinate children at youngr and younger ages….and if people even now still cant see the incredible harm its causing then god help them ther to far gone and they will never wake up to this agenda,and it is a hardcore destrctive agenda under the facade of being about”tolerance”…The old saying the devil comes as an angel of light is a fair analogy here really whether ones religious or not,thats basically whats going on here in a nutshell…evil/immorality/normalization of child abuse/pedophillia/brainwashing 6 year olds that theres 50 genders/ biology isnt real,truth is subjective,morality is subjective, and all this hardcore propaganda and indoctrination,but all done under the cover of “equality’tolerance” etc….truly evil.
Love this blog as a resource and will be sharing this.
This is getting rediculous honestly, there is a reason why there is a women and a man, they reproduce, two men and two women are not the same as a women and a man period!!!I don’t agree with same sex having babies and I never will, keep some things traditional, you can not convince me that it’s normal!’ Can not convince me that gay men asking sister to be surrogate is normal either how messy is that !! Be gay live your life and be happy but leave the baby making to the men and women seriously
Okay. I get the thing about wanting children to have a mother and a father. It’s an argumentum ad lapidem fallacy, but it’s what your used to. You’re forgetting that gay people already have kids. You’re not changing family situations by letting gay people get married.
This isn’t an especially convincing argument against gay marriage because of that.
Children are better with same sex parents than being stuck in an orphanage. My partner and I adopted our son and daughter and they both see their biological mothers all the time. So what’s the problem? They don’t have an issue with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPYt6X91yN8