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given by Dr. Morse on May 2, 2011 in St. Paul, Minnesota
I am Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, founder and president of the Ruth Institute, a project of the National Organization for Marriage. My doctorate is in economics, from the University of Rochester, in NY. I have taught at Yale and George Mason Universities. I have had fellowships with the University of Chicago, Cornell Law School, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford. I have written two books on the social purpose and significance of marriage. I am the mother of an adopted child and a birth child. My husband and I were foster parents in San Diego County for three years.
I urge you to allow the citizens of MN the opportunity to vote on the proposed marriage amendment. Same sex marriage redefines marriage. Redefining marriage redefines parenthood. Redefining marriage affects the balance of power between the state and civil society. The citizens of MN have the right to make up their own minds about these important issues.
The essential public purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another. To see the importance of this purpose, we must take the perspective of the child: What is owed to the child? Unlike adults, the child does not need autonomy or independence. The child is entitled to a relationship with and care from both of the people who brought him into being. Therefore, the child has a legitimate interest in the stability of his parents’ union. But no child can defend these entitlements himself. Nor is it adequate to make restitution after these rights have been violated. The child’s rights to care and relationship must be supported pro-actively, before harm is done, for those rights to be protected at all.
Marriage is adult society’s institutional structure for protecting the legitimate interests of children. Without this public purpose, we would not need marriage as a distinct social institution.
We often hear the objection that some marriages don’t have children. This is perfectly true. However, every child has parents. Depriving a child of relationships with his or her parents is an injustice to the child, and should not be done without some compelling or unavoidable reason. The objection that some marriages don’t have children stands the rationale for marriage on its head. It views marriage strictly from the adult’s perspective, instead of from the child’s perspective.
Same sex couples and opposite sex couples are obviously different with respect to this essential public purpose of marriage. And treating different things differently is not discrimination. That is why, in the few cases where courts have found opposite sex marriage to be unlawful discrimination, they have had to come up with purposes for marriage that have nothing to do with procreation or attaching children to parents.
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