gooner said:Some other studies suggest otherwise.
Link?
Nevertheless, as gay couples avail of surrogacy, as soon as a child is born that is the last bit of motherhood that a child will have got. That's what is unjust and unfair. As a genetic parent is lost, everything should be done in ensuring a child's right to a mother and father. Children at the stage of birth can't speak up for this right and so it's left to this generation of adults who feel similarly to me to highlight this point. I make no apologies for it. While a same sex couple's love is equal, should it be fair that their wish in such a scenario be at the expense of the child's right? I don't think it should. I want my State and government to protect that right in every way possible. That won't be the case.
OK, so your argument is just that children of same-sex couples will have a parent of only one sex (they might have two mothers as well as two fathers). That is very different from your implied argument against not knowing both your biological parents, which was essentially the entire focus of the article you linked and spoke favorably of.
On absentee fathers from a child's birth, unplanned pregnancies, etc and single parents in the upbringing, circumstances of life mean it's not always the case that a child will be brought into the world and raised by his/her own mother and father. That's an accepted point. But never before has the State taken that right away.
The phrase “the State has taken that right away” is very misleading. The state is saying that it’s OK for same-sex couples to have children—no law against it. But the state has previously said that it’s OK—no law against it—for parents to live apart from their children, as long as they economically support them. If allowing same-sex marriage is taking away the right of a child to have two parents of different sex, so is allowing divorce and other broken families. My point is that you aren’t being consistent in opposing one and not the other. You’re basically arguing that same-sex marriages should be opposed on the grounds that they facilitate something that is already facilitated far more by conditions that are not illegal.
Divorce is not some random, unfortunate event that the state is powerless to control. It's a process that is specifically sanctioned by the state, in full awareness that it frequently has detrimental effects on children. The state--composed of voters like you--has decided that the benefits of allowing an incompatible couple to break apart outweigh the negative consequences to the children. In the same way, the state is deciding that the benefits of allowing a same-sex couple to marry outweigh the negative consequences of having two parents of the same sex. Negative consequences, I should add, that aren't nearly as severe as those accompanying many divorces, and which in fact bring with them other benefits that divorce does not.
You also have ignored my point that, as far as I know, the great majority of children of same-sex couples are adopted. Isn’t it better for a child to have two parents of any sex than to have no parents? And if the result of same-sex marriage is that the number of children removed from orphanhood greatly exceeds the number of children conceived by surrogacy, you're basically arguing that the rights of a relatively few children to have both a mother and a father are greater than the rights of a much greater number of children to have any parents at all.