More on the pedagogical impact of marriage law

Here are two more reader responses to the hypothetical about the lessons children will absorb from a loving and committed same-sex couple who are unable to marry. 

Jonathan Watson writes:

The argument seems to be that "homosexuals are going to raise children in happy environments, so you may as well have them be married so that your own children will not want to raise children outside of marriage if they encounter ."

1. As a commenter noted on the McArdle blog, children may also encounter unmarried heterosexual couples raising children, and are more likely to do so than encountering unmarried homosexual couples. What lesson will the child learn then, and why? If a child visits a friends house where a married heterosexual couple is unhappy, will the child then draw the lesson that marriage makes people unhappy? Given recent studies, it is much more likely that the child looks to his / her own parents for these sorts of lessons, and much less so other parents.

2. The hypothetical commits the fallacy of many questions. It assumes either that opponents of gay marriage do not know the parents of their children's playmates, or assumes that parents who are against gay marriage will have no problem with their child going to the home of a homosexual couple with a child.

3. The hypothetical is problematic insofar as its conclusion - gays ought to be allowed to be married - is based upon an effect of not allowing gay marriage. One cannot argue that something ought to be permitted by arguing backwards from the negative effects of not permitting it. One cannot argue for the good of abortion (to take an extreme case) by arguing that women who have abortions are financially better off in the future, or for a more controversial effect, that crime rates are lower because the poor who have abortions are aborting future criminals.

And Jeff Rowe writes:

While the hypothetical scenarios you've been posting, lately, are thought provoking, I'd suggest they might be too narrow in scope to capture the ultimate reality, as social phenomena, of what is being proposed in the same-sex marriage debates. I would agree that, in this case, #1 is preferable to #2, but if we're going to approach these questions in a comprehensive manner, we need to take a broader view. For example, at the same time as kids are getting the "loving couple" message from #1, what questions are they grappling with concerning the matter of sexuality in general? Adolescence and puberty confront kids with a wide variety of impulses and questions, so are they being helped or hindered as society broadens the landscape of "normality" when it comes to sexuality? I don't have an answer to this question, but it seems to merit asking.

Taking another step back from the personal, it also seems worth considering the potential stability of same-sex relationships. After all, we have plenty of evidence pointing to the detrimental impact of divorce on children, and I'd argue that anyone who has spent any time in a public school can see quite clearly that, far from being personal impacts, the ramifications of divorce are visible in both the percentage of resources being consumed by social problems stemming at least in part from the prevalence of divorce in society and, ultimately, in the quality of the education that all students are receiving. With this experience to guide us, then, it seems only reasonable that we should move cautiously and with careful consideration of the potential consequences of expanding the definition of what is arguably society's most important social structure.

At the very least, it seems ironic that, while we live in an age when research data emerging from the physical sciences are presented as beyond question when it comes to issues such as global warming, we seem more selective in our willingness to be guided by what we learn from the social sciences. Certainly, the social sciences are a bit fuzzier, so to speak, but that doesn't mean we can't learn from them and, more importantly, be guided by them as we consider codifying changes in the very fabric of society.

It's easy to sympathize with the desires of well-intended individuals. It's much more difficult, however, to determine whether what works in isolation will work for society as a whole. But that doesn't mean we don't have the responsibility to try.