Heather Barwick’s testimonial against faux marriage is particularly powerful. While having been raised by two lesbians, she’s no bitter child rebelling against a parent. In fact, she expresses deep love for the women who nurtured her, and she used to support faux marriage herself. But after tying the knot and witnessing the love her husband lavishes on their four children, she came to a realization: There is no substitute for having a mother and a father raise a child.
In a heartfelt piece at the Federalist March 17, she relates her experiences and thoughts:
Do you remember that book, “Heather Has Two Mommies”? That was my life. My mom, her partner, and I lived in a cozy little house in the ‘burbs of a very liberal and open-minded area. Her partner treated me as if I was her own daughter. Along with my mom’s partner, I also inherited her tight-knit community of gay and lesbian friends. Or maybe they inherited me?
… I’m writing to you [the homosexual community] because I’m letting myself out of the closet: I don’t support gay marriage. But it might not be for the reasons that you think.
It’s not because you’re gay. I love you, so much. It’s because of the nature of the same-sex relationship itself.
Barwick then says she supported faux marriage into her 20s, but her husband and children allowed her to “see the beauty and wisdom in traditional marriage and parenting.” She said that faux-marriage advocates deny a father or mother to children while claiming that denial is irrelevant. But she says this isn’t true and has a message for homosexuals: “A lot of us, a lot of your kids, are hurting. My father’s absence created a huge hole in me, and I ached every day for a dad…. [A]nother mom could never have replaced the father I lost.” And while Barwick says that the women in her life claimed to not want a man, she “desperately” craved a father, a desire she calls “unquenchable.”
Perhaps mindful of homosexuality activists’ citing of unhappy marriages (meaning, a man and woman) and the many divorces, Barwick acknowledges that adults raising children can have a variety of problems — but being same-sex is near the top of the list. She writes that “by and large, the best and most successful family structure is one in which kids are being raised by both their mother and father.”
Then there is the money line:
“Gay marriage doesn’t just redefine marriage, but also parenting,” writes Barwick.
Many other children of same-sex couples have made this point as well. One of them is California State University English professor Robert Oscar Lopez, who, like Barwick, was raised by two lesbians; unlike Barwick, he’s bolder in his denunciations, likening the giving of children to same-sex couples to trading flesh, to slavery. Another is an academic, feminist, and children’s rights activist who writes as “Rivka Edelman.” That’s a pseudonym, mind you. And the reason she tries to hide her identity illustrates why many children of same-sex couples are afraid to speak up — and what may lie ahead for Barwick.
Both Lopez and Edelman have been targeted for destruction by the homosexuality lobby. After Edelman had an Oct. 2014 article published in Public Discourse, a homosexuality activist sent the site’s editor a tweet stating, “The only good anti-LGBT bigot is a dead anti-LGBT bigot.” For Lopez’s part, GLAAD besmirched him as an “exporter of hate” and created what essentially is a mug shot of the professor. And both these individuals — along with other homosexuality agenda opponents — have been targeted with an organized campaign that uses lies and character assassination to destroy their reputations and careers (I wrote about their stories here).
While Barwick’s article is so disarming that it may be difficult to give her the “full treatment,” the targeting, whose first step Edelman says is when “they call the individual a liar,” has already begun. For example, Yahoo! Parenting’s Beth Greefield quotes Gabriel Blau, executive director of the Family Equality Council (who she says “is raising a 7-year-old son with his husband”) as stating, “I think it’s disingenuous to say you don’t support LGBT rights and that your concern is children.” She also quotes “LGBT family-rights educator” Abigail Garner. After rendering some magnanimous sounding words such as “I sympathize with Heather’s pain” and “We are all entitled to our personal narratives,” Garner said, “but I strongly disagree with Heather’s contrived attempt to offer her personal story as a case for blocking other families’ access to marriage rights.” Of course, calling Barwick “disingenuous” and her story “contrived” are just slightly euphemistic ways of saying she’s a liar.
But observers might consider this projection, as the arguments of faux-marriage activists are thoroughly disingenuous themselves. Consider how Blau also spoke of “marriage equality” and “denying a huge swath of American citizens our civil rights.” But what is “marriage equality” and of what “civil rights” is he speaking?
All adult Americans already have a right to marry, meaning, to enter into a conjugal union with a member of the opposite sex. Of course, homosexuality activists say they don’t subscribe to that definition of marriage. Yet they offer no firm alternative definition; they don’t make it a point to say, for example, that marriage is the “union between any two adults.” Doing so would set boundaries — which by definition exclude what lies beyond them — thereby rendering these activists “discriminatory,” “exclusionary,” and “bigoted,” just as they accuse traditionalists of being. They would then lose that oh-so effective debate-stifling rhetorical hammer. This brings us to the crux of the matter:
How can you determine if there is a right to a thing if you don’t know exactly what that thing is?
What is “marriage”?
This is why marriage defenders give homosexuality activists too much credit when saying they’re trying to “redefine” marriage. They’re doing nothing of the sort.
They are “undefining” it.
This puts the lie to the claim that their efforts won’t lead to the acceptance of other conceptions of “marriage” (e.g., polygamy), as they refuse to even try to establish their own firm boundaries. And an “undefinition” excludes nothing.
At this point homosexuality activists may counter that they don’t need to redefine anything because faux marriage is an entity unto itself, a different institution altogether. But then the equality-under-the-law argument collapses. For the 14th Amendment guarantees such equality to people — not institutions. And then we’re right back where we started, where we should be: People with same-sex attraction, just as other people do, have a legal right to the institution of marriage.
This is, by the way, what courts should recognize. They cannot work with “undefinitions,” nor is it their place to redefine marriage. And the only consistent, hard and fast, time-tested definition they have to work with involves the union of a man and woman in matrimony. Thus, when ruling in favor of marriage destroyers they have either been anthropomorphizing institutions or have been saying there is a right — to they know not what.
Heather Barwick now knows what’s what, though — inspired to change, it would appear, by the strong emotions experienced through having a beautiful family. If only reason were so effective.
