The one argument in favor of marriage equality that conservatives refuse to acknowledge is that the children of same-sex couples would benefit if their parents could marry. This proved especially true in an interview that Thomas Peters, communications director for the National Organization for Marriage, gave on KABC’s McIntyre in the Morning the day the Supreme Court ruled against the Defense of Marriage Act.
Peters repeated his regular talking point that marriage should be exclusive to heterosexual couples because only they can biologically produce a child. When host Doug McIntyre pushed back, acknowledging that same-sex adoption has been legal in many states for quite some time, Peters abruptly ended the interview:
MCINTYRE: We’ve had gay adoption for a very long time, so we’ve had gay and lesbian couples adopting children or having children through surrogates for years. And now they want to codify those unions and marriage and for some reason we want to deny them that? If we’re talking about raising children in gay relationships, we’ve been doing that for years.
PETERS: I was led to believe this was a conversation about what the Court did today, and I have other interviews waiting. I’m happy to have a debate about marriage… but I simply see adoption as a separate issue. What we’ve done with adoption is not a reason to redefine marriage, and if you’ve actually looked at the individual states that have redefined marriage, one of the first things that happened is they forced Catholic and Lutheran adoption agencies… to shutter their doors. So we can talk about adoption until the cows come home, but right now I’m fighting very hard for the true definition of marriage at the Supreme Court and across the country and thank you very much for having us on your show.
Listen to it (via Jeremy Hooper at NOM Exposed):
Peters’ strawman about adoption agencies is of course wrong; those agencies voluntarily closed down because they wanted to both receive state funding and continue discriminating against same-sex couples. But Peters’ claim that the question wasn’t about the Supreme Court decision is also a farce, because Justice Kennedy specifically wrote about same-sex families in the Majority’s opinion.
In fact, some of Kennedy’s strongest language addressed how the Defense of Marriage Act “humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples,” making it more difficult for them “to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family.” Peters can’t have it both ways. If his position for marriage is about children, then he has to think about all children. Apparently he only cares about straight couples’ children, which shows his argument isn’t about children at all — it’s just about discriminating against the gay community.