Mary Bonauto
Civil Rights Project Director, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD)
Excerpted from The Glad Web Site, Aug. 15, 2003

Marriage is a major building block for strong families and communities. Weddings are an opportunity for friends, family and neighbors to come together to recognize a couple's lifelong commitment to one another. This occasion strengthens a couple's bond and marks their inclusion as a family into the communities of which they are a part.

But marriage is much more than that. First, it is a unique relationship — synonymous with “family” — so that if you are “married,” no one would dare challenge a person's right to be by his or her spouse's side. The word itself is one of the protections. Second, it is a gateway to hundreds of legal protections established by the state and over 1,000 by the federal government. Married couples can take for granted rights of hospital visitation, security for their children and rights of inheritance.

While gay and lesbian families can protect themselves in limited ways by creating wills, health-care proxies and co-parent adoptions, this does not come close to emulating the automatic protections and peace of mind that marriage confers. People cannot contract their way into changing pension laws, survivorship rights, worker's-compensation dependency protection or the tax system, to name just a few.

Marriage is also a social institution of the highest importance, the ultimate expression of love and commitment. While it remains exclusive to opposite-sex couples, gay men and lesbians will continue to fall short of the status of full citizenship, marking them and their children with a stamp of inferiority. Denying the security that marriage can bring only serves to weaken gay and lesbian families and the communities of which they are a part.

Far from undermining marriage, the struggle for full equality for gay and lesbian couples is an acknowledgement of the importance marriage has in society and the power it has over all our lives. Increasing access to marriage for adults in committed relationships will strengthen the institution, not weaken it. Marriage will not be destroyed by allowing same-sex couples to marry, just as it was not destroyed by women's equality within marriage or the repeal of interracial marriage bans.

In seeking the freedom to marry, gay and lesbian couples simply ask that their relationships be given the same respect under law accorded to others, so that they may obtain the security and protection their families need.

Ron Crews
President, Massachusetts Family Institute
Written for The CQ Researcher, August 2003

The push for legalizing homosexual “marriage” is based on at least three myths: that same-sex sexual behavior is genetic and unchangeable, that homosexual relationships are just like marriage between a man and a woman and that children raised by same-sex couples do just as well as those with a married mother and father. None of these myths is true.

The definition of marriage is based on the fact that all human beings from conception have, in every cell of their bodies, either XX chromosomes if they are female or XY chromosomes if they are male. Even a sex-change operation and hormone treatments cannot change those chromosomes.

These permanent distinctions make for a permanent definition of what it means to be married. This has been the legal, social, historical and theological definition of marriage throughout the ages.

On the other hand, sexual orientation, or same-sex attraction, can and does change. Jeffrey Satinover, psychiatrist and author of Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth, states that a major study, conducted for U.S. agencies tracking the AIDS epidemic found that 75 percent of boys who at age 16 think they are homosexual become permanently heterosexual by age 25 without any intervention. Furthermore, the average lifespan of those who practice homosexual sex is reduced by approximately 20 years, often leaving children orphaned.

Same-sex couples may look in some respects like a married couple, but they are missing the essential element. They may have children; but an orphanage has children. That does not make it a marriage. They may have long-term committed relationships. Parents and children, brothers and sisters and friends have long-term committed relationships. That does not make a marriage. Only the union of a woman and a man, with immutable XX and XY chromosomes in every cell of their bodies, representing the two halves of the human race, can make a marriage and produce the next generation.

That next generation needs a mother and a father. Every reputable social science study done to date has affirmed that children do best, by whatever measure is used, when they have a married mom and dad. Deliberately depriving a child of a mother or father is cruel and unfair.

Do people with same-sex attraction deserve to be treated with dignity? Absolutely! Do we need to change the definition of marriage to please them? Absolutely not!