By Originally posted June 25, 2014 by Jennifer Johnson.
Around March of 2013 I came across the words of a prominent LGBT activist named Masha Gessen:
I have three kids who have five parents, more or less, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have five parents legally… I would like to live in
a legal system that is capable of reflecting that reality, and I don’t think that’s compatible with the institution of marriage.
Imagine having five parents! Here’s what it means: it means going back and forth between all those households on a regular basis, never
having a single place to call home during your most tender and vulnerable years. It means having divided Christmases, other holidays, and birthdays–you
spend one with one parent, and another with the other parent, never spending a single holiday or birthday with both parents. Imagine having each of
your parents completely ignore the other half of you, the other half of your family, as if it did not even exist. Meanwhile, imagine each parent pouring
their energy into their new families and creating a unified home for their new children. These experiences give you the definite impression of being
something leftover, something not quite part of them. You live like that on a daily basis for 18+ years.
| As a child, would you choose a family structure advocated by Masha Gessen? Does this look fun? |
I don’t have to imagine, because I had five parents. I had five parents because my mom and dad divorced when I was about three; my
mom remarried once and my dad remarried twice. So I had a mom and two step-moms, and a dad and one step-dad. In this day and age children can already
have five parents. That’s how badly marriage has deteriorated already. The main difference between what Gessen advocates and my experience is that
my step parents were not legal parents; she advocates for all of the adults in her situation to be legal parents.
Having more than two legal parents will be a nightmare for a child. Of course, I am making the reasonable assumption that the legal parents
will not be living under the same roof, because there is no longer any societal accountability for adults to create a unified home for children. Thus,
adding additional legal parents will create more disruption for children’s daily lives, more chaos, more confusion, less unity. And why are we doing
this? So that adults can have the sexual partners they want.
Masha Gessen had a mom and a dad, so it appears that she benefitted from the socially conservative family structure--it
appears she was not raised under the family structure she advocates. That sounds about right. I’ve talked to many people who think deconstructing the
family in favor of adult sexual choice is a good thing… and these very same people lived under the socially conservative family structure with
their one mom who spent her life with their one dad, and they all lived together in their unified home. Since I lived under the family structure they
advocate, I will sometimes ask them: would you trade childhoods with me? They either say no or they don’t reply.
If what I had is so great, then why don’t they want it as children? Here’s my conclusion: they want it as adults but not as children.
They want the benefits of the socially conservative family structure when they are children. But as adults, they want sexual freedom, or at least they
want to appear “open minded” and “tolerant” about others sexual choices, even at the expense of children, even though they themselves would never want
to live under what they advocate. It’s a bizarre sort of a “win-win” for them, I guess.
It’s very painful for me to have conversations with these people. They don’t understand what they advocate, and they don’t seem to want to understand.