A Warped View of What’s Fit as Family Life

Lesbians must be pretty bad mothers. Even a convicted murderer who killed his first wife would make a better parent for a 12-year-old girl than her lesbian mother who had never broken the law.

That was the conclusion of a Florida appeals court in August. The girl’s father, John Ward, had served eight years for murdering his first wife and was now claiming custody of the offspring of his second marriage. There was no evidence of abuse of the child, who was well-adjusted and succeeding in school. All Ward had going for him was that his second wife Mary, who had obtained primary custody four years earlier after their divorce, was cohabiting openly in a lesbian relationship. That was enough for the court, and the kid was sent to live in a trailer with daddy the wife killer (now in his fourth marriage) who, by sole virtue of being a heterosexual, was deemed a better role model.

Ward, who had pumped 12 bullets into his first wife in a jealous rage, hailed the ruling in a written statement as a victory for every “child in this nation who may be faced with being raised in a household in which homosexual role modeling distorts and perverts societal norms that have been established and recognized from the beginning of civilization.” Since Ward admits to being functionally illiterate, it is doubtful that he wrote that statement.

But the presumption that a convicted murderer is a better parent than a law-abiding lesbian is consistent with the ideology of the anti-homosexual lobby that rallied to the killer’s defense. “While the father has significant flaws,” the Family Research Institute argued in an amicus brief, the child “is endangered the more time she spends with a mother who has chosen to live in an open homosexual relationship.”

That is the distorted logic endorsed by the trial judge, who announced that he wanted the child “to live in a non-lesbian world,” and was reaffirmed unanimously by the Florida appeals court.

Keep that case in mind as we turn to the brouhaha over a Hawaii judge’s decision last week, which held that same-sex parenting can be valid. The issue came up in the midst of Hawaii’s ongoing judicial review of the state’s ban on gay marriages. Last year, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that denying marriage certification to gay couples violated the state’s constitution, unless the state’s elected officials could demonstrate that such a ban “furthers compelling state interests and is narrowly drawn to avoid unnecessary abridgments of constitutional rights.”

State officials based most of their defense of the gay marriage ban on the grounds “that the state has a compelling interest in protecting the health and welfare of children,” and that married gays would be unfit parents. In the course of the trial, the judge took testimony from expert witnesses who discussed 40 scholarly studies that have been conducted of the experience of child-raising by gay couples, something in which the Florida court never expressed any interest.

After evaluating that evidence, Circuit Judge Kevin S.C. Chang ruled that the state had failed to make the case that same-sex marriages “will probably result in significant differences in the development or outcomes of children raised by gay or lesbian parents.” Indeed, even the state’s key expert witness “agreed in pertinent part, that gay and lesbian parents are doing a good job raising children and, most importantly, the kids are turning out just fine.” Chang concluded that available evidence indicates that allowing same-sex marriages would be helpful to children being raised by gay couples because “they may obtain certain protections and benefits that come with or become available as a result of marriage.” Those benefits include inheritance rights, income tax advantages and the social status derived from having married parents.

Only one of the state’s own witnesses dissented from the positive assessment of gay parenting, and the judge dismissed his “severe views,” because that “expert” admitted to having no use for recognized social science research and “believes that there is no scientific proof that evolution occurred.”

In the end, the best case against gay marriages rested upon what might most charitably be regarded as crackpot science, and it was rejected by one brave circuit court judge. Brave because, unlike President Clinton, who signed off on a denial of federal recognition for gay marriages without even glancing at the data, this judge had the independence to look at the evidence instead of the polls. If the Hawaii Supreme Court upholds Chang’s decision, which now seems likely, then gay marriages will be legally sanctioned in at least one state, and it’s about time.