ECUSA: CONSERVATIVES AND LIBERALS DUKE IT OUT ON RADIO

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

It's been six months since Gene Robinson was confirmed as the first openly gay bishop of the Episcopal Church.

Since then, conservatives have threatened to punish the national church by withholding their money.

Today, the treasurer of the church told officials that was an empty threat.

Pledges for next year are only slightly down from last year, yet conservatives say the church has no idea of the problems that it may face.

NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty reports.

Kurt Barnes, the treasurer of the Episcopal Church, describes himself as a conservative man, not one prone to, quote, "gilding the lily."

He's keenly aware of the controversy that's been roiling the church since it recognized gay unions and consecrated Gene Robinson, a gay priest, to be bishop of New Hampshire.

Given all this, Barnes says he's pleased that he's received commitments from more than three-quarters of the bishops, and so far, their pledges to the national church are down only 7 percent.

Mr. KURT BARNES (Treasurer, Episcopal Church): The impact is what I would describe as insignificant.

Barnes is recommending that the dioceses cut their spending by 5 to 10 percent.

Jim Naughton, a spokesman for the Diocese of Washington, DC, says this isn't cause for rejoicing, but it's not the predicted apocalypse, either.

Mr. JIM NAUGHTON (Spokesman, Episcopal Diocese of Washington, DC): The narrative line since General Convention has been, Oh, watch out.

The Episcopal Church is taking in water.

The Episcopal Church is going down.'

And that's definitely not happening.

So it's hard to disentangle an intelligent analysis of where we stand now from the sort of what amounts to the kind of ecclesiastical version of trash talking that's coming from the other side, you know, this sort of, You're going down.

You're going down.'

Reverend DON ARMSTRONG (Rector, Grace Episcopal Church, Colorado Springs): I think what you're getting from the national church is a spin.

Don Armstrong is rector of the 2,400-member Grace Episcopal Church in Colorado Springs.

He says the bishops, most of whom voted for gay unions and Gene Robinson, have an interest in creating the impression that there has been no financial impact.

And, he says, they'll go to great lengths to do so.

For example, angry conservative parishioners in Colorado have withheld some $350,000 from their diocese, he says, but the bishop is eating that loss locally and giving the same amount as last year to the national church.

Armstrong says the bishops can't do that for long.

Rev. ARMSTRONG: As we move into 2004 and their monthly income decreases, they're going to be faced with the reality that they don't have the money in the bank to write the checks.

Kendall Harmon, an official of the Diocese of South Carolina, says the situation will only grow more acute with time.

Parishioners, entire churches and even two dioceses, Pittsburgh and Dallas, are directing their money away from the national church toward other ministries.

A new network of conservative churches is being formed, and Harmon says that will no doubt attract money that would otherwise go to the national church.

People are leaving the Episcopal Church altogether and taking their money with them.

In fact, Harmon says, entire churches are leaving the denomination to join a conservative offshoot of Anglicanism.

Mr. KENDALL HARMON (Diocese of South Carolina): Basically, the vast majority of a parish just left from St. John's, Melbourne, and went to the Anglican Mission in America.

So in that diocese, most of the pledge from that parish to the Diocese of Central Florida is going to go down.

So as the year progresses, you're going to start to see these figures work themselves through the system more.

Jim Naughton in Washington, DC, notes that a couple of conservative churches in the DC area have decided to withhold their money from the diocese.

But others who are happy about recognizing gay unions and a gay bishop are making up the shortfall.

Mr. NAUGHTON: Many people in those parishes have said, `Fine.

If you're not going to give to the diocese, we're going to give directly to the diocese.'

So this idea that people are voting with their pocketbooks, that goes both ways.

And so in this war of words and finances, when there's way too much smoke to figure out who's left standing, both sides are claiming victory.

CULTURE WARS: TOP 10 ARGUMENTS AGAINST SAME SEX MARRIAGE

A large and growing body of social scientific evidence indicates that the intact, married family is best for children.

In particular, see work by David Popenoe, Linda Waite, Maggie Gallagher, Sara McLanahan, David Blankenhorn, Paul Amato, and Alan Booth.

This statement from Sara McLahanan, a sociologist at Princeton University, is representative: “If we were asked to design a system for making sure that children’s basic needs were met, we would probably come up with something quite similar to the two-parent ideal.

Such a design, in theory, would not only ensure that children had access to the time and money of two adults, it also would provide a system of checks and balances that promoted quality parenting.

The fact that both parents have a biological connection to the child would increase the likelihood that the parents would identify with the child and be willing to sacrifice for that child, and it would reduce the likelihood that either parent would abuse the child.”

McLanahan and family scholars like her are not arguing that parents in other family forms are necessarily bad.

But she is making the point, backed up by countless studies, that the ideal place for children to grow up—on average—is in a married, intact family where children have access to a mother and a father who share a biological tie (and, hence, a deep sense of kinship) to them.

This empirical reality lends support to the idea that our society should do more to reinforce the norm that every child should have the opportunity to grow up in an intact, married family and, failing that, an adoptive family headed by a married couple that offers a child the benefit of a mother and a father.

Children hunger for their biological parents.

SS couples using IVF or surrogate mothers deliberately create a class of children who will live apart from their mother or father.

Yale Child Study Center psychiatrist Kyle Pruett reports that children of IVF often ask their single or lesbian mothers about their fathers, asking their mothers questions like the following: “Mommy, what did you do with my daddy?”

“Can I write him a letter?”

“Has he ever seen me?”

“Didn’t you like him?

Didn’t he like me?”

Elizabeth Marquardt reports that children of divorce often report similar feelings about their non-custodial parent, usually the father.

The work of these scholars suggest that children hunger for their biological parents and that we should not deliberately create a class of children, through IVF or surrogacy, who live apart from their mother or father.

(Adoption is a different matter insofar as adoptive children have already come into the world and need to live apart from their biological parents, usually because they are unable to care for them or because they are no longer living.)

Children need fathers.

If SSM becomes common, the majority of SS couples with children would probably be lesbians.

This means that we would have yet more children being raised apart from fathers.

Among other things, we know that fathers excel in reducing antisocial behavior/delinquency in boys and sexual activity in girls.

What is fascinating is that fathers exercise a unique social and biological influence on their children.

For instance, a recent study of father absence on girls found that girls who grew up apart from their biological father were much more likely to experience early puberty and a teen pregnancy than girls who spent their entire childhood in an intact family.

This study, along with David Popenoe’s work, suggests that a father’s pheromones influence the biological development of his daughter, that a strong marriage provides a model for girls of what to look for in a man, and gives them the confidence to resist the sexual entreaties of their boyfriends.

Children need mothers.

Although gay men are less likely to have children than lesbians, there will be and are gay men raising children.

There will be even more if SSM is legalized.

These households deny children a mother.

Among other things, mothers excel in providing children with emotional security and in reading the physical and emotional cues of infants.

Obviously, they also give their daughters unique counsel as they confront the physical, emotional, and social challenges associated with puberty and adolescence.

Stanford psychologist Eleanor Maccoby summarizes much of this literature in her book The Two Sexes.

See also Steven Rhoads’s book, which comes out in the fall.

Inadequate evidence on SS couple parenting.

A number of leading professional associations have asserted that there are “no effects” of SS couple parenting on children.

But the research in this area is quite preliminary; most of the studies are done by advocates and most suffer from serious methodological problems.

Sociologist Steven Nock of the University of Virginia, who is agnostic on SSM, offered this review of the literature on gay parenting as an expert witness for a Canadian Court considering SSM: “Through this analysis I draw my conclusions that 1) all of the articles I reviewed contained at least one fatal flaw of design or execution; and 2) not a single one of those studies was conducted according to general accepted standards of scientific research.”

This is not exactly the kind of social scientific evidence you would want to launch a major family experiment.

Children raised in SS homes experience gender and sexual disorders.

Although the evidence on child outcomes is sketchy (see above), what evidence is available does raise two red flags.

Specifically, a number of studies suggest children raised in lesbian homes are more likely to experience gender and sexual disorders.

Judith Stacey—an advocate for SSM and a sociologist—reviewed the literature on child outcomes and found the following: “lesbian parenting may free daughters and sons from a broad but uneven range of traditional gender prescriptions.”

Her conclusion here is based on studies that show that sons of lesbians are less masculine and that daughters of lesbians are more masculine.

She also found that a “significantly greater proportion of young adult children raised by lesbian mothers than those raised by heterosexual mothers… reported having a homoerotic relationship.”

Stacey also observes that children of lesbians are more likely to report homoerotic attractions.

Her review must be view judiciously, given the methodological flaws detailed by Professor Nock in the literature as a whole.

Nevertheless, these studies give some credence to conservative concerns about the effects of SS couple parenting.

Vive la difference.

If SSM is institutionalized, our society would take yet another step down the road of de-gendering marriage.

There would me more use of gender-neutral language like “partners” and—more importantly—more social/cultural pressures to neuter our thinking and our behaviors in marriage.

But marriages typically thrive when spouses specialize in gender-typical ways and are attentive to the gendered needs and aspirations of their husband or wife.

For instance, women are happier when their husband earns the lion’s share of the household income.

Likewise, couples are less likely to divorce when the wife concentrates on childrearing and the husband concentrates on breadwinning, as University of Virginia Psychologist Mavis Hetherington admits.

Sexual fidelity.

One of the biggest threats that SSM poses to marriage is that it would probably undercut the norm of sexual fidelity in marriage.

In the first edition of his book in defense of marriage, Virtually Normal, Andrew Sullivan wrote: “There is more likely to be greater understanding of the need for extramarital outlets between two men than between a man and a woman.”

This line of thinking, of course, were it incorporated into marriage and telegraphed to the public in sitcoms, magazines, and other mass media, would do enormous harm to the norm of sexual fidelity in marriage.

One recent study of civil unions and marriages in Vermont suggests this is a very real concern.

More than 79 percent of heterosexual married men and women, along with lesbians in civil unions, reported that they strongly valued sexual fidelity.

Only about 50 percent of gay men in civil unions valued sexual fidelity.

Marriage, procreation, and the fertility implosion.

Traditionally, marriage and procreation have been tightly connected to one another.

Indeed, from a sociological perspective, the primary purpose that marriage serves is to secure a mother and father for each child who is born into a society.

Now, however, many Westerners see marriage in primarily emotional terms.

Among other things, the danger with this mentality is that it fosters an anti-natalist mindset that fuels population decline, which in turn puts tremendous social, political, and economic strains on the larger society.

SSM would only further undercut the procreative norm long associated with marriage insofar as it establishes that there is no necessary link between procreation and marriage.

This was spelled out in the Goodridge decision in Massachusetts, where the majority opinion dismissed the procreative meaning of marriage.

It is no accident that the countries that have legalized or are considering legalizing SSM have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world.

For instance, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Canada have birthrates that hover around 1.6 children per woman—well below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1.

For the sake of the children.

The divorce and sexual revolutions of the last four decades has seriously undercut the norm that couples should get and stay married if they intend to have children, are expecting a child, or already have children.

Political scientist James Q. Wilson reports that the introduction of no-fault divorce further destabilized marriage by weakening the legal and cultural meaning of the marriage contract.

George Akerlof, a Nobel laureate and an economist, found that the widespread availability of contraception and abortion in the 1960s and 1970s, and the sexual revolution they enabled, made it easier for men to abandon women they got pregnant, since they could always blame their girlfriends for not using contraception or procuring an abortion.

It is plausible to suspect that SSM would have similar consequences for marriage, that is, it would further destabilize the norm that adults should sacrifice to get and stay married for the sake of their children.

Why?

SSM would institutionalize the idea that children do not need both their mother and their father.

This would be particularly important for men, who are more likely to abandon their children.

SSM would make it even easier than it already is for men to rationalize their abandonment of their children.

After all, they could tell themselves, our society, which affirms lesbian couples raising children, believes that children do not need a father.

So, they might tell themselves, I do not need to marry or stay married to the mother of my children.

Women & marriage domesticate men.

Men who are married earn more, work harder, drink less, live longer, spend more time attending religious services, and are more sexually faithful.

They also see their testosterone levels drop, especially when they have children in the home.

If the distinctive sexual patterns of “committed” gay couples are any indication (see above), it is unlikely that SSM would domesticate men in the way that heterosexual marriage does.

It is also extremely unlikely that the biological effects of heterosexual marriage on men would also be found in SSM.

Thus, gay activists like Andrew Sullivan who argue that gay marriage will domesticate gay men are—in all likelihood—clinging to a foolish hope.

This foolish hope does not justify yet another effort to meddle with marriage.