If you haven’t seen it, please watch this video of an 11yo girl’s testimony to the Minnesota State Legislature asking them the single most important question in the debate about gay marriage. Typical for politicians, they cowardly fail to answer her question and then move to take the gay marriage bill to the next step. But the moment is priceless nevertheless.
What this whole debate has really illustrated for me is that children have absolutely no rights whatsoever. They are completely beholden to the goodwill of mom and dad and society. There is no institution, no legal process, no structure at all in place to defend the natural rights of children to even the most basic things; the right to life, the right to a mother and father. In our current legal system, children are largely seen as property for mothers and fathers to deal with as they see fit. Traditionally, marriage existed to protect the rights of children to know, have and be raised by a mother and father who would, presumably, protect the child’s interests, but that has been eroding since the passage of no-fault divorce and as marriage begins to be redefined as an institution dedicated to serving adult desires instead of protecting children’s needs, we will need to find some other way to defend children’s rights.
The danger, of course, for arguing for children’s rights is that it would be tremendously easy for the state to use the idea of children’s rights to usurp the primacy of the family, but I wonder if it has to necessarily be that way. At any rate, something will have to be done to protect the least among us. It simply isn’t just to keep throwing children under the bus so that we adults can do whatever we want. I wonder if, at the very least, children shouldn’t be provided their own attorney–at their parent’s expense–to advocate for them in their parent’s divorce proceedings. That idea makes me cringe, but what other options are there? We cannot stand by and continue to let children be victimized by a culture gone mad.
If we lose this marriage debate, everything we think we know about life and society will change virtually overnight. Which, by the way, is why you need to be here.