When Advocacy Goes Only Dress Deep
The California Lawyer ran an opinion piece in their June 2010 issue, entitled Bridal Advocacy, by Molly McKay. Ms. McKay is an attorney and a lesbian who wears a wedding dress when she advocates for homosexual “marriage”. She wears a wedding dress because it “opens positive conversations with total strangers” who think she is about to get married. She never mentions how those conversations end once the total stranger finds out what is really going on.
As reasons for advocating homosexual “marriage”, Ms. McKay ticks off a litany of questionable abuses, which badly needs some parsing:
- “…[G]ay soldiers not being able to ask for a small delay in deployment to be with their dying partners”. If a heterosexual couple were not married, and many these days are not, they would not be allowed a delay in deployment either.
- “…[P]arents not allowed to see the children they raised after they broke up with the biological parent; Partners of parents with children, who are unrelated to the child either by biology or by adoption, are not legally parents and generally have no rights in custody cases (though there have been some changes over the last few years). This also holds true for the grandparents, who usually have no visitation rights in custody cases, as well as for heterosexual couples, whether or not they are married. In some recent cases, the partner with the child has been seeking to leave the homosexual relationship and no longer wants contact with the partner that is still engaged in that conduct.
- “…[D]istant family members excluding survivors from a long-term partner’s funeral and taking all of the couples joint assets”. If the assets were truly “joint” and titled in the name of both people, there would be no way the family could take them away. What this tells me is that these were assets that were in the name of one person – not both. That is simply careless and something that does not need to remedied by a change in the marriage laws. Estate planning would take care of those issues – something which even married couples need to do and, when they don’t, can have similar devastating financial consequences. Burial arrangements can also be specified in advance and isn’t a reason for changing the marriage laws. Excluding a long-term partner from a funeral is uncharitable to say the least, but we don’t know more about the situation or what the actual relationships – or lack of relationships – were.
- “…[P]artners being barred from their loved one’s hospital rooms.” Again, this is not something that requires a change in the marriage laws in order to remedy. All that is required is for one partner to sign a durable power of attorney for health care. This is something that every person should do, no matter their sexual identity or marital status.
More important than the fact that the reasons Ms. McKay gives for homosexual marriage are incredibly superficial and one-sided, Ms. McKay believes that no one could possibly disagree with her if they only knew homosexuals who have been denied marriage. But the problem here is that her argument is one from emotion and doesn’t take into account that there are other people involved. Or that people who know homosexuals and have them as family members might yet disagree.
Children are produced by a male and a female, by a mother and a father, and they have an innate desire to be attached to both parents. One of the primary purposes of marriage is to attach any children to their biological parents. Having a child by artificial insemination doesn’t obviate the fact that a male and female are required. Children who are adopted often want to know about their biological parents. Children created via gamete donation have this same desire, though they have even less legal rights in this regard. Nowhere in Ms. McKay’s piece on Bridal Advocacy, are the needs of children ever considered. Wearing a wedding dress may be a conversation opener and a cute gimmick, but as advocacy goes it takes little of the entire situation and people into account and, therefore, is only dress deep.
