3/25/2013

Will someone please think of the children?

Actually, Dr. Popcak has:


Regardless of the side you fall on, we all owe it to children to commit ourselves to asking the hard question, what is genuinely BEST for children. Not, “what can they get by with?” or “what’s good enough?” The question must be, “What is best?” That is what must define the terms of the conversation because children deserve our best. We can make exceptions from there, but the exceptions prove the rule, not the other way around.

We can say, for example, “breast is best” because we know the research supports that. At the same time, we make allowances for bottle feeding,because some kind of nutrition is better than nothing, but we do not say that bottle is best or even as good as breast milk because we know it is not true. In the same way, we ought to be able to say that a two-parent, heterosexual, married family is best for children because all the data shows that is true. We can make exceptions for other family forms because life requires it of us, but we should not be pressured to say or forced to pretend that alternative family forms are as good as traditional, heterosexual married households. It is simply not true and to say otherwise is politics, sentiment and folly, not fact. Our children deserve better than that.

He is joined by the citizens of Paris.

Lest anyone should think this is just about same-sex couples, there is also the general failure on the part of everyone to comprehend what marriage is all about, according to William May:

“Children are not being protected through marriages. Instead, society has come to regard marriage as the public recognition of a relationship rather than it’s original intent: to unite a man and women with each other and to any children born from them. The couple becomes irreplaceable to each other and irreplaceable to their children just as their children are irreplaceable to them,” he says.

FirstThings brings home what's at stake:

But it is not so. Just as the mystery of marital union overcomes the male/female difference, so does the mystery of Christ’s love of his Church overcome the difference between God and creature. The Righteous Judge is judged in our place. As we die in his death by way of baptism, we participate in his resurrection, the fullness of life toward which the natural fertility of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman points. And though we may stumble again and again, though we may deny him, opening up a chasm infinitely greater than the differences between men and women, Christ’s love is strong enough to secure our union with him. Though we may be unable to cleave to him, he cleaves to us.

Our society seems determined to redefine marriage. To a great degree that’s already completed. Contraception has largely removed fertility from the sexual unions of men and women. No-fault divorce has allowed the vagaries of our affective unions to control the meaning of marriage rather than love’s desire to achieve a union from which we cannot withdraw ourselves. Now we’re poised to jettison the male/female difference that makes marriage a natural sign of a supernatural grace: the miracle of human fertility and its power of new life, and the miracle of a lasting peace in the war between the sexes.

These developments bode ill. Our society will have greater difficulty seeing flashes of eternity in sexual desire and in emotional unions between lovers—a disenchantment very much to be regretted. And the natural sign of God’s love will lose some of its power. Without the male/female difference, there’s no natural mystery to illuminate the supernatural mystery of God’s offer of matrimony to us in Christ.

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