Reader's response to same-sex marriage options

Mirror of Justice reader and friend, Professor Scott FitzGibbon, has this observation to Rob’s recent May 28 posting on options regarding support and opposition to same-sex marriage proposals. Here is Scott’s response which I think enriches the debate:

Professor Vischer’s hypothetical eight-year-old, in his blog of May 28, will “absorb” a favorable attitude towards marriage, the argument goes, by visiting with children whose lesbian parents are married.

The apparent strength of this conclusion derives from the stipulation in the hypothetical that the lesbian parents she visits, and their children, are “happy” and the household environment is “loving.” Suppose the reverse and you get the reverse conclusion. Suppose the lesbian relationship to be troubled or unstable – and the literature suggests that will not infrequently be the case – and its presentation as a model of marriage will cast that institution in a poor light rather than a flattering one.

I doubt, anyway, that a kid who grows up to establish an opposite-sex relationship decides whether to marry her boyfriend  based on what she absorbed as a child from observing a lesbian couple down the road. Her own parents will be the strongest model. 

Further, it is surely not all a matter of what the child “absorbs.” The alternatives proposed in the hypothetical do not include anyone actually discussing anything with the kid. If her parents are Catholics, they might explain to her that, happy or not, same-sex couples cannot really be married, and that whether or not they are enjoying the relationship they are not on the road to true felicity, in  this world or the next.