A few people – coincidentally all of them campaigned for Labour in the last general election – are seeking to put about the notion, by means of their commentary in the press, that those who support the law on marriage between two people of the same gender, and the adoption of children by such married couples, do so because they are somehow superior to everyone else and consequently either have no religious beliefs or are able to divorce them from secular necessity. Similarly, they write as though those who object to either such marriages or the adoption of children into them, or to both, must obviously do so for religious reasons because, unlike them, they are unable to divorce their religious beliefs from their secular concerns.
Yet that is simplistic in the extreme, and insulting besides. I no more care whether two people of the same gender marry each other than I do whether two people of different genders do so. It is a legally binding contract between two consenting adults and no different, in that respect, to a decision they might take to go into business together by means of a limited liability company. When you remove the religious rite and sacramental significance from the equation, that is all it boils down to, and at law, that is all it actually is. No amount of romantic talk can change that.
But once third-party minors are involved, then a civil union is no longer simply a contract between two consenting adults; it goes beyond that. Also, others have a direct interest in the matter – though it is not at all fashionable to say so – because when family role models change in society, they change for everybody. Families in which the legal parents of a child are two women or two men do not just affect that family or that child or its parents. They affect families in which the legal parents are the biological parents – a man and a woman – and not only because there is lots of explaining to do to children who grow up in this biological unit, but also because it is – let’s call a spade a spade, for heaven’s sake – a deliberate negation of biology.
Nobody, certainly not Martin Scicluna or Peter Apap Bologna, can accuse me of being religious or of allowing my Roman Catholic faith to over-ride my thinking mind (it has always been the other way round, from childhood). Yet I have really quite strong reservations about registering two women or two men as the legal parents of a child. I do so not because of religion, but because of biology and common sense. Ironically, it is exactly the same character traits which cause me to have not much time or patience for religious devotion which render me unable to accept the legal fiction of registering two women or two men as the biological parents of a child on a birth certificate or elsewhere at law. I have no truck with the irrational.
The point that people like Scicluna and Apap Bologna miss is that it is precisely the same rational mind which has difficulties with religion that has such great difficulties with registering two people of the same gender as the parents of a child.
There is only one reason why a child, whether born in or out of wedlock, has two parents – a man and a woman – registered on its birth certificate, and that reason is neither religion nor social convention. It is science. It has absolutely nothing to do with emotion and even less to do with love, either love for the child or love between the two adults in the child’s life. A child has two parents on its birth certificate because those two parents were necessary for its creation. One or both parents may be left off the birth certificate because they are unknown, but the boxes marked ‘name of mother’ and ‘name of father’ still record the fact that it was only possible for that child to exist in the first place because sperm met egg, either in a laboratory or in bed.
The registration of two women or two men as the parents of a child is therefore not only a legal fiction (i.e. a lie) but a scientific absurdity. It is, quite simply, not possible.
There are situations in which exceptions are made for the sake of the child. When a married woman has a child by a lover, the law assumes that child to be her husband’s. It is only the husband who can challenge the registration of the child as his, and then only within a very short time after the birth. The biological father can’t come along and say, hey, that child is mine and should be registered under my name – not unless the husband disowns it. The child’s birth certificate will be partially legal fiction, but at least it is not science fiction. It was still technically possible for the child to be the husband’s.
I wouldn’t find this half as offensive if Malta did not use birth certificates in substitution for adoption certificates, or if adoption were not, legally, parentage.
But divorcing the meaning of ‘birth parents’ from the reality of science while still insisting on two parents who could not possibly create a child in science is, frankly, absurd. Children have two parents on their birth certificate because they are, or they are pretending to be (as with adoption) the man and woman who conceived them. Once you have dispensed with that inconvenient bit of science, why insist on two parents at all? If we are going to have a birth certificate with two women on it, when two women can’t make a baby, why not have a birth certificate with three, four or five women on it – or a mix of men and women in varying numbers? After all, as we are told, science has absolutely nothing to do with it.
I apply the same argument to same-sex marriage. Just as I am indifferent to whether two men enter into a legally binding ‘marriage’ contract with each other, so I am indifferent to whether three of them do so in a marital ménage à trois. After all, there is not even the merest pretence that this is a unit for the procreation of children and their ‘legitimisation’ (the only reason marriage ever existed, because even property rights devolve from that). In fact, I simply can’t understand why the law does not immediately progress to allowing three men to marry each other, or four women for that matter.
Unfortunately, by insisting on an exact replication of the Marriage Act which governs marriage between a man and a woman, on the basis of reasons which are rooted in procreation and the legitimisation of children, those of unconventional sexuality and interests have shot themselves in the foot. There they had the perfect opportunity for a legal choice between monogamy, bigamy and polygamy – because nobody really gives a damn whether three men or four women enter into a contract with each other as long as they don’t try to fly in the face of science by claiming it’s exactly the same as a child-bearing unit. And they blew it.
Beware, too, of telling your children any of this ‘Tony has two mummies” nonsense. Lying to children is always a bad idea. This does not mean you have to be judgemental, which is a bad idea too. If my children were still young I would make a point of telling them the facts, in a non-judgemental, rational way. With the exception of Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy, and the occasional ordinary fairy and elf – all fun parts of early childhood - I never substituted fantasy or lies for scientific fact and reason, and this would have been no exception.
If any one of them had come home and told me that Tom has two mummies, I would have said, “No, Tom doesn’t have two mummies because having two mummies is biologically impossible. Babies can only be made by a mummy and a daddy. Tom has only one mummy and maybe she doesn’t even know who Tom’s daddy is, but Tom’s daddy exists because if he didn’t exist, then Tom wouldn’t exist either. Tom’s other mummy is just his real mummy’s close friend who lives with them, in the same way that your other friend John lives with his real mummy and her close friend who is not his daddy, and he goes to his real daddy on weekends because in this case, he knows who his daddy is.”
No way would I have gone down the irresponsible route of telling primary-school-age children that two women can produce a child. With children like mine, who knew through an endless and varied procession of pets that you don’t get babies unless you have a male and a female (hamsters being the most prolific example, to my endless distress), it would have been impossible anyway. They would probably have got into arguments in the classroom, even before the information reached me, with anyone who told them that he had been made by two mummies and that the reason he lives with two mummies is not because his parents are divorced or because he never knew his father, but because those two mummies actually gave birth to him as his biological parents.
In all of this, the people who claim to be so secular and rational are actually just as fixed in their views, and as irrational, as those who are devoutly religious. It’s just that they call their religion by a different name.
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