Children and this wrong-headed idea of marriage

In the light of the Church of England’s current situation, let us ask ourselves about the societal purpose of marriage.

When you think about it, the State does not regulate or require an official record any other type of personal relationship, except marriage. You’re not required to register yourself with the authorities as someone’s friend, or even as someone’s sibling. The latter is just inferred from the fact that two children have been born to the same couple.

Certainly, there are a multitude of private and informal reasons for getting married. However, from time immemorial, the State’s societal reason for regulating and registering all marriage is the welfare of children. Marriage remains the most effective and least intrusive legal basis for automatic assignment of parental recognition to couples whose sexual union can be reasonably presumed to have produced the child.

From earliest times, marriage has bestowed this automatic joint (parental) responsibility on couples for the care, the protection, and the maintenance of children produced by their union; but without undue intrusion upon family privacy.

Even in Tudor times, Henry VIII’s Vicar-General, Thomas Cromwell, instituted mandatory parish registers to record all births and marriages. This policy ensured that, for children born to married couples, the couple’s automatic legal recognition as joint parents could be validly presumed.

However, the New York case of Q.M. vs. B.C. (2014) provides a relatively modern-day example of a same-sex married couple insisting that marriage equality means that a marriage partner who is unrelated to their spouse’s child should, nevertheless, be automatically presumed to be its lawful parent. It is this understanding of marriage ‘equality’ that undermines the child’s inalienable right to its identity and ancestry.

The court said: ‘Here, the respondents seek to rely on the presumption of legitimacy to establish Ms. S. as J.C.’s second mother, effectively extinguishing J.C.’s right to have a father.

Ms. C.’s credible and uncontradicted testimony at the hearing was that she did not have sexual relations with any man other than Mr. M. during the period of J.C.’s conception, and that Mr. M. is J.C.’s father. Thus, there is no dispute that Ms. S. is not, and could not possibly be, the second parent of this child. Moreover, Ms. S. reconciled with Ms. C. after Ms. C. discovered she was pregnant, and presumably after she had been told that the child was fathered by Mr. M.’

How is it ever right for ‘marriage equality’ to ‘trump’ a child’s right to know and be loved by its natural parent? In Scripture, we see how God-given wisdom led King Solomon to identify a child’s authentic natural parent and rule in favour of her custody – 1 Kings 3:16 – 28. In fact, it would be ungodly and perverse to permit a usurper to deny the child its natural willing and loving parent.

Yet, the case that I mentioned is, by no means, an isolated example. In fact, the International Lesbian and Gay Association provided the following as an amendment to the Proposed European Convention on Family Status.

Parental affiliation: Article 12 – Spouses and registered partners: ‘A person who is the spouse or registered partner of a child’s parent at the time of that child’s birth shall also be considered as a parent, **regardless of genetic connection**.’

In California, it is the advent of the same-sex marriage and parenting arrangements that has resulted in triple-parenthood laws. In turn, these laws have opened the door to greater state intrusion in far more splintered three-party (and more) child care arrangements and child custody arrangements than when biology, marriage, and adoption were the ‘bright-line indicators of who counts as a parent’.

It’s no wonder that, recently, a polyamorist (person oriented towards having multiple sexual partners) and his two same-sex partners have now become legally recognised as triple-parents of a surrogate child. As he explains in a Psychology Today article (February 2021):

‘But progressive courts have begun to recognize already existing realities (that three consenting adults are in a relationship and parenting) by making poly families legal parents. I, and my two partners, seem to be the first. In 2017, we were awarded triple parentage on the birth certificate of a child yet to be born by surrogacy (contrast: a kid testifying in court they want their third parent recognized). And in 2018, two women involved with a man achieved a similar result in a Canadian court. ‘This must be recognized as a reality and not as a detriment to the best interests of the child,’ said the judge in that case.’

I disagree strenuously with that judgement. On average, polyamorous relationships last five to eight years. After that, any child of poly parents will face years of splintered custody, as the courts seek to divide access between three (or more) legally recognised parents.

Nevertheless, that Pandora’s Box was opened with the advent of same-sex marriage, when marriage equality was interpreted to mean that the marriage’s contingency for natural parenthood should be automatically conferred without regard to any genetic connection to the child, and despite the availability of adoption.

Same-sex marriage advocates have demanded that this marital presumption of parenthood must also be conferred on couples whose sexual union could not reasonably be presumed to have produced the child. I would contend that, since adoption is available, parental responsibility should never be conferred presumptively on those whose union cannot reasonably be presumed to have produced the child.

Therefore, it is wrong for the Church to give into demands for this wrong-headed idea of ‘marriage equality’ that, as I’ve shown, flies in the face of the ‘real world’ facts of reproduction and the child’s right to its family heritage and ancestry.

David Shepherd is an active member of Beacon Community Church in Camberley and was formerly a Deanery Synod Representative in the Diocese of Guildford.