This past August, U.S. district judge Alan Kay upheld Hawaii’s marriage law, which states that marriage “shall be only between a man and a woman.”

He concluded that “Hawaii’s marriage laws are rationally related to legitimate government interests.” Those interests promote “the ideal that, wherever possible, children are raised by both father and mother.”

Maine’s current marriage law echoes this precept. Our state sees traditional marriage as a basic building block of society. Both child and society benefit from traditional marriage.

Where is the proof of this statement? In the 1990s, the results of a longitudinal study on the affects of disrupted families shattered the myth that children are not hurt by the dissolution of traditional marriage.

Sociologist David Popenoe spent his 30-year career studying families. His conclusion is unequivocal; the weight of evidence is decisive. Intact families with a father and mother are preferable to single parent and stepfamilies.

Studies on the effect of homosexual parenting on children also have reached some conclusions. Sociologist Mark Regnerus studied 3,000 respondents for the New Family Structures Study. Children of mothers or fathers who had a same-sex relationship looked “markedly different to children from biologically intact mother/father families.” They showed at-risk behaviors, such as substance abuse and suicide ideation, in 63 percent of outcomes.

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Regnerus concluded, these results “reveal children succeed more as adults when they spend their entire childhood with a married mother and father.”

Social change that dramatically weakens traditional marriage places new burdens on schools, courts, prisons and welfare systems. Homosexual marriage damages the social ecology and threatens to carry away the family in an irresistible undertow.

Kathryn Swegart

Rome


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