Two Canadian cases currently in the news show how very complicated things get when the State – backed by ideological radicals – decides that the family is whether it wants it to be.
One case involves a man who wants his polygamous ‘marriage’ recognised under Canadian law. The second involves a sperm donor who sought, and got, more access to his child. His child is being raised by a lesbian couple. One of the women is the child’s natural mother.
The man in the first case is using Canadian recognition of same-sex ‘marriage’ to argue his cause. He says that if marriage can be redefined to encompass two people of the same sex, why can’t it be redefined to include more than two people?
This is a hard one for supporters of gay marriage to answer. If they say the pairing of human beings is natural, then why can’t supporters of traditional marriage say the pairing of a man and a woman is also natural? But if they continue to assert that marriage is a purely social construct – that is, it is whatever we say it is – then why not reconstruct it to include more than two people? We await their answer.
The other case, involving the sperm donor, shows what happens when you decide that the natural parents of a child need not be the people who actually raise the child. (In adoption this happens by circumstance, not design).
Once we permitted fertility clinics to receive egg and sperm from donors so as to enable infertile people to have children, we embarked down the road of deliberately separating children from their natural parents. (Note that in many cases fertility clinics use the egg and the sperm of the couples attempting to conceive. This is a different matter altogether).
In this particular case, a homosexual man donated his sperm to a lesbian couple who wanted a child. They agreed to give him access to his child, but later tried to restrict this. He fought them in court and regained his access. The child now has effectively three parents. Some argue that in such cases the birth cert should be altered to reflect this ‘reality’.
This makes things complicated, to put it mildly. Surely it is much better to stick with the number of parents that arises naturally; two. It is also surely much better to base marriage on this naturally arising unit of man, woman and child. Once you break away from this, marriage does indeed become a social construct and it can be defined in whatever way we like, much to the detriment of children.
Canada is already very far down this road. Ireland, alas, is on the same road, although not so far gone. Yet.
