From Bruce Hafen, former Seventy in the LDS Church (kinda long, I don't agree with 100% of it, but adds to the conversation.)
"The fourth misconception is that there are no rational, non-religious reasons for opposing same-gender marriage. The Time magazine writer said the only “rational side” to the Church’s efforts in California was its fear of losing its tax-exempt status. He acknowledged no serious sociological or other argument for limiting marriage to a man and a woman. That description of the marriage debate is so limited that it invites a response. I therefore briefly offer a non-religious case against same-gender marriage.
First, the American public has always distinguished between what the law tolerates and what the law should endorse — a clear line between “passive toleration” and “active support” of homosexual conduct. [xxix] To tolerate behavior is to move it, legally, from being prohibited to being permitted, which we did in deciding not to prosecute homosexual behavior as criminal. However, we can tolerate or permit that behavior without also endorsing it — that is, promoting and encouraging that behavior, which we have historically done only when the behavior serves a significant public purpose.
Our society and our laws have long endorsed man-woman marriage with an honored priority, not just to support happy lovers, but because marriage is our most significant social institution — not merely a private project. This “public interest” or “social interest” separates the marriage contract from every other contract in society. We don’t invite guests and have receptions when people sign a business deal; but we do celebrate marriage as a publicly significant event. Why? Because the children of that marriage are the future society and they clearly thrive best when reared in a formal family with their own father and mother.
The New York Times, a few years ago, reported a “powerful consensus” in the social science research [***] that children do best when they live with their own mom and dad. The research clearly shows that, by every measure of child well-being — such as health, emotional stability, education, and avoiding crime, drugs, and abuse — children do far better in a two-parent, married heterosexual family. That ideal child-rearing environment is not always possible because of deaths, unavoidable divorces, and births outside wedlock. But giving policy priority to the natural family establishes the social goal that, whenever possible, every child has a right to grow up with his or her own mother and father in a legal marriage. That goal binds the father and mother to each other and to their children — and to society’s long-term interests. Civilization began when the culture required men to care about their women and their children. And society has the right to expect that kind of pattern from fathers and mothers — for the sake of the future society’s well being.
Recent experience in this country has threatened this pattern, not just because of same-gender marriage. The problem dates further back, because we have shifted, in America, from being a culture of marriage toward becoming a culture of divorce. Americans have more than doubled the divorce rate. We have the highest divorce rate in the world. We’ve also more than quintupled the rate of unwed births since the 1960s. Nearly 40% of all children born in the U.S. today are now born out of wedlock. [xxxi] These trends have inflicted untold damage upon the country’s children and families. That’s why President Hinckley said a few years ago, “The family is falling apart. Not only in America, but across the world.” [xxxii] He also said that family disintegration is “a matter of serious concern. I think it is my most serious concern.” [xxxiii] Why the concern? Because single-parent families are, with rare and admirable exceptions, generally not as good for children. Damaged children create a damaged society; and when enough families are dysfunctional, society itself becomes dysfunctional.
The new culture of divorce began with no-fault divorce in California in the late 1960s. That concept essentially gave any married individual the right to just walk away from a marriage as a matter of personal freedom, regardless of fault or social consequences. Both no-fault divorce and same-gender marriage allow personal adult rights to trump the best interests of society and children. The radical personal freedom theory on which the Massachusetts same-gender marriage case is based is actually the logical extension of the same individualistic legal concept that created no-fault divorce. Think about it. When the law upholds an individual’s right to END a marriage, regardless of social consequences (as happened with no-fault divorce), that same legal principle can be used to justify the individual’s right to START a marriage, regardless of social consequences (as happens with same-gender marriage).
Gay rights do not claim to satisfy society’s enormous interest in its children. On the contrary, in a key early Supreme Court opinion in 1986, Justice Harry Blackmun argued that the Constitution should protect gay sexual rights “not because they contribute to the general public welfare but because they form so central a part of an individual’s life,” including one’s “right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.” [xxxiv] The Court’s 2003 majority opinion striking down state criminal laws against same-gender sexual conduct accepted Justice Blackmun’s view, basing its rationale on the personal “autonomy” or freedom rights of consenting adults, not on any benefit of that conduct to society. [xxxv]
Now this contrast between adult rights and the rights of society and children introduces the most persuasive example I have seen of the secular case against same-gender marriage. France, which is not exactly the most conservative country in the world, rejected gay marriage in 2006, because its parliament concluded that these marriages run counter to the best interests of children and the future society. France was not ready, as a matter of conscious public policy choice, to throw out its babies with the bathwater of gay activism. They concluded that marriage should serve a child’s right to optimal personal development, rather than primarily serving adult interests that trump children’s interests.
The French parliament’s study of same-gender marriage centered on marriage as a social institution. Its report said marriage is inevitably built around children, and every country that has adopted same-gender marriage has soon afterward authorized adoption and surrogate gestation by same-gender couples. But, they concluded, France could “no longer systematically place [the] aspirations of adults ahead” of children’s needs and rights. [xxxvi] And if they allowed individual control of family forms to persist, France would “exhaust all possibility of expression of society’s stake in marriage.” I repeat, this was a secular argument, not a religious one. Indeed, in France, as Jacques Chirac said, secularism IS their religion.
Specifically, the French report focused on children’s need for identity and stability. Insofar as possible, it said, each child has the right to know and be cared for by — and be bonded to — his or her biological parents. Biological bonding combined with legal bonding inherently creates the most lasting and stable adult-child relationships, which provides the emotional and legal security required for optimal child development. Occasional adoptions may be necessary in exceptional cases, but there are plenty of stable heterosexual married couples who wish to adopt all available adoptive children. The French report said that to accept a public policy that consciously places children with homosexual adults increases the risks to children who are already at risk because they feel identity confusion and abandonment by their biological parents. To ignore this need is to discriminate against these children. Adoption is about a child’s right to a regular family, not merely about an adult’s right to a child.
So France rejected same-gender marriage so that children “do not suffer as a result of situations imposed on them by adults. The interest of the child must outweigh the exercise of freedom by adults, whatever life choices are made by the parents.” This view takes marriage away from the private, adults-only world of gay and lesbian lifestyles and returns it to its original place as society’s primary social institution.
