Let’s forget for a moment about the upcoming referendum on same-sex marriage and consider instead the disastrous attitude of our Government and opposition parties towards marriage overall. Taoiseach Enda Kenny summed it up very well last week when he reduced what marriage is all about to two words, “I do”.
Enda Kenny, Frances Fitzgerald, Leo Varadkar, Micheal Martin have all decided that marriage is now to be understood simply as a way of recognizing the “profound commitment” (to borrow the term used by Brian Sheehan of Glen) that might exist between two adults of any sex. Children only come into the picture accidentally but marriage per se is seen as an adult-centred institution not a child-centred one.
This explains why the Children and Family Relationships Bill will permit cohabiting couples to adopt. If having married parents confers no advantage upon children, why not?
This attitude also explains why those of us who say the ideal for a child is to raised by their two married, biological parents are continually rebuffed by those with the opposite view. They simply don’t believe this is the ideal and therefore it is a matter of total indifference to them whether a child is raised by one man, one woman, two step-parents, a cohabiting couple, two men, two women, or the child’s married biological parents.
Based on this logic, our political establishment couldn’t care less whether 100 percent of children are born inside marriage or outside of marriage. They couldn’t care less whether 100 percent of children are being raised by their two married parents, or whether zero percent are.
This is the logic they must follow when they rebuff all claims that having a married mother and father is the ideal from the child’s point of view.
We must therefore ask the question, if this is their view, then in what way do they think marriage benefits society? Obviously they believe it’s good for any two people to be able to gain the added social status that belongs to marriage (such as that is these days), but why is marriage good for society, in their view?
Clearly they don’t think it is good for children, and that enormously reduces its potential benefit to society. They seem to think it is good for adults, but they can’t think it is all that good. For example, they must not think it adds any stability to a couple’s relationship. If they believed that, then surely they would take the view that this added stability would be good from the point of view of children and therefore the State would encourage parents to marry for the sake of children. But they’re not doing that, quite the contrary.
If the political class was led by the evidence, rather than ideology, it would have to believe that marriage is good for children and it would encourage marriage for their sake.
Here, for example, is what scholars Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill had to say on this score in their 2009 book,Creating an Opportunity Society:
“There is a growing consensus that having two married parents is the best environment for children. Marriage brings not only clear economic benefits but social benefits as well, enabling children to grow up to be more successful than they might otherwise be.”
Note that Sawhill is a supporter of same-sex marriage but she is still willing to say that marriage is advantageous for children.
However, in this country almost every proponent of same-sex marriage is insisting that marriage has nothing to do with children and confers no advantages upon them.
This total resistance to evidence is simply disastrous. The fact is that having married parents is advantageous for children and the refusal by our political establishment to see this is simply one more example of how the Irish State is failing children.