Tuesday, August 16, 2005

They Come and They Go

Can anyone tell me what happened to Left to Right a blog of academics, a favorite pointed out to me by Neil? It used to post all the time with really provocative thoughts on various issues. Now it rarely has anything, and besides things like comments turned off and a rotating cast of characters, it posts things like this:


Marital rights generally go hand-in-hand with parental rights. Any legal acknowledgement that the children of same-sex marriages have a third, biological parent would stigmatize those marriages, as leading to less than full-fledged parenthood. Equality between homosexual and heterosexual marriages may therefore require us to deny that donor-conceived children have both a mother and a father, thereby expunging the children's connection to half of their biological past.
Such an arrangement violates a right enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states: “The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and. as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents”.

My worry is that a purely affectional conception of marriage will tend to favor a purely affectional conception of parenthood. And I think that denying the importance of biological parenthood leads us to violate fundamental rights of children.



[If same sex-parental couples acknowledged the biological parents] homosexual marriage would be, by its very nature, marriage that can lead only to qualified parenthood -- qualified, that is, by the legally recognized parenthood of donors or birth parents. Maytbe same-sex couples would be willing to accept a form of marriage that is second-class in this respect -- but I doubt it.


That’s all he has to say on the issue? That it comes down to treating same-sex parents like we already treat adoptive parents, which he thinks could lead to the wrong image of parental relationships? And he believes there’s no other factors to consider really. Is this some sort of Swiftian parody that I am missing?

1 Comments:

At 2:32 PM, Blogger Neil Sinhababu said...

Yeah, I really wasn't a big fan of that one. Mostly I just read L2R for Liz Anderson's stuff.

 

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