By now you’re probably aware that the defenders of California’s Proposition 8 have argued before the Supreme Court that the law is necessary to support “responsible procreation. In fact, that seems to be their primary justification for Prop 8. You may also have noticed that a lot of people – Supreme Court justices included – have pointed out a number of flaws in this argument, but I’d like to take it at face value for a moment.
What you may not have known (I certainly didn’t) is that the responsible procreation defense is actually an established legal argument that largely boils down to: It’s in the state’s best interest to encourage couples to form stable relationships in which to raise children, thus the legal benefits bestowed on married couples. This has some decent face validity, but in the case of Prop 8 this goal is being twisted to mean: Heterosexual people breed accidentally and can’t be trusted to provide a stable home for kids without financial incentives. If you’re hetero and feeling offended, let me normalize that emotion for you; I’m offended too. The argument goes further and suggests that, since gay people pretty much never accidentally have children, they don’t need to be encouraged to provide stable homes.
Except that gay people do have children. And they are doing so with increasing frequency. Just Google “gayby boom” and you’ll find a wealth of stories, research articles, and blog posts about the increasing number of children being born to and/or raised by gay and lesbian parents. Researchers at the Williams Institute of UCLA estimate that 6 million people in the US have an LGBT parent. They also estimate that 20% of same-sex couples are raising children under the age of 18 (roughly 220,000 kids if you’re curious).
So, yeah. Kids. Plenty of them. Now let’s consider relationship stability since that’s the other part of the responsible procreation argument. Since same-sex couples purportedly don’t need the financial benefits bestowed by marriage, it must be that they’re significantly less prone to separation or divorce, right? Wrong. Evidence from the Williams Institute, the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, and other sources, seems to suggest that lesbigay couples are not significantly less likely to separate than heterosexual couples. Bear in mind, the numbers are fuzzy since most states don’t allow gay marriage and thus we have no really comparable way to track gay relationships and separation. Also of note, conservatives have often cited the supposed instability of gay relationships as a reason to prevent them from adopting, fostering, bearing, or otherwise raising children.
Let’s review: We want to encourage “responsible procreation” by incentivizing couples to form stable relationships in which to raise children. Lesbigay and hetero couples are both having children and both dissolve their relationships at roughly the same rate. So tell me again why Proposition 8 is needed to protect incentives for one type of family and not the other?
