Love: Overrated?
Cnn has a story today about the dismay some Conservative activists feel over Mary Cheney’s pregnancy. The following quote struck me as quite funny:
Carrie Gordon Earll, a policy analyst for the conservative Christian ministry Focus on the Family, expressed empathy for the Cheney family but depicted the pregnancy as unwise.
“Just because you can conceive a child outside a one-woman, one-man marriage doesn’t mean it’s a good idea,” Earll said. “Love can’t replace a mother and a father.”
“Love can’t replace a mother and a father.” Tell that to the child raised by a loving grandparent, divorced mother or divorced father, aunt, uncle, foster parent, or adopted parent.
The absurd implication of what Earll says is that two-parent households are always better for the child than single-parent, loving households. Anyone raised in a two-parent household where one or both parents are abusive or psychologically distant will tell you, love is preferable simply to having two parents in the house.
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Considering how hard it is for lesbians and gays to have children, you’d think those children would be far better loved and taken care of than by some meth junkies who just happen to procreate.
Comment by Mel B. — Friday, 8 December 2006 @ 3:15 pm
I don’t think you’re implying the right thing from Earll’s statement. Love can’t replace having a mother and father. You suggest other things that (potentially) can, but love by itself isn’t one of them (presumably taken to mean “any one person’s love). Not that I’m not suggesting any one person’s love is not valuable or very helpful to a child, just that it is not the same (i.e. not equal, or does not replace) having a mother and a father. As probably any parent knows, there is a lot more that you provide to your child than just love.
I personally, and partly based on my own childhood, believe that having both a mother and father is invaluable. I didn’t have a good father, and didn’t have any father for a while. Through the relationships I have now, with my wife and with other men, I can see the differences in damaged pysches between people that grew up in healthy “normal” households and those that did not.
My reply shouldn’t equal your post in length, so I’ll end here: Earll isn’t suggesting that a abusive or pyschologically distant household is good for a child. He’s saying that the starting point should be a one-woman, one-man marriage, and that anything less (anything else) is not as good of a starting point. From a societal overview, not even just from a christian worldview, I agree. But regardless of our different opinions on the subject, I think you’ve constructed some straw-men instead of tackling the real issue we differ on.
Comment by Step — Friday, 8 December 2006 @ 3:56 pm
I was purposefully being absurd to prove a point, but Earll’s statement itself was a bit absurd, don’t you think? “Love can’t replace a mother and a father”…There were more logical ways to say it, as you have demonstrated. Assuming, of course, that Earll didn’t really mean it to begin with, or that she was taken out of context. The fact you make that assumption rather points to the absurdity of what she said. No one could seriously believe that!
However, if a person starts from the premise that non-traditional households are necessarily inferior to traditional households, that is the kind of corner you will paint yourself into.
Comment by Matthew — Friday, 8 December 2006 @ 4:17 pm
Earll’s statement certainly seems absurd on first brush, but I’m not so sure we can really take that as a given. Can love replace a doctor? Then why can we intuit or assume that love can replace a parent?
Comment by Step — Friday, 8 December 2006 @ 5:13 pm
Love is among the skills involved in parenting, no? I don’t need a doctor to love me. She doesn’t even need to have a pleasant bedside manner. Just fix my ailment.
It’s an illogical analogy.
There are a couple of assumptions in Earll’s statement, it seems: One, is that there’s a parent missing. And two, that the child will be loved. I don’t know if there’s anything wrong with having people to love you, well, as long as they aren’t teaching you to kill or something. So the second, that a parent is missing, is the real issue here. Is there a parent missing? Depends on your point of view. There will be, after all, two mothers. If there is a relationship with the father, (I don’t know if there is, but I’m just supposing here), there’d be an extended network of mothers and a father. Is this really much different than the network of step-parents many people in “normal” households deal with? Outside of the taunts from the schoolchildren? (And yes, we adults should all base our decisions upon avoiding taunts of children.)
I grew up in a two-parent, male-female household. From that I’ve learned that I’m only considered a decent human being as long as I don’t cause consternation for “the neighbors,” that a sexually active woman, in any context, possibly including marriage, is among the worst things there is, and that I’m not worth defending or listening to. Chromosomes didn’t teach me these things. I was being passed the fears and values of the individual people in my household.
Science is on Mary Cheney’s side. She’s likely psychologically stable, makes good money, has a steady relationship and shelter. This child has a much better starting point than many in two-parent heterosexual households.
Comment by Heather — Friday, 8 December 2006 @ 9:20 pm