Erwin Chemerinsky at SCOTUS Blog: “Reflections on a dialogue: Getting to marriage equality”

SCOTUSblog: Written by the University of California, Irvine’s Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, this is the final post in our online symposium on same-sex marriage. The whole symposium is available here . . . Brian Raum argued that it is based on the benefits of children having parents of different genders. He wrote: “Not only that, but mothers and fathers bring different gifts to the parenting table, and this complementarity is not fungible. Even the plaintiffs’ expert in Perry v. Brown agrees on this point. Dr. Michael Lamb, the ‘parenting expert’ who testified in that case, readily acknowledged in his book Fathers: Forgotten Contributors to Child Development that ‘[b]oth mothers and fathers play crucial and qualitatively different roles in the socialization of the child.’” But this totally misses the point, even if there were studies, and there are not, that children of heterosexual couples are somehow better off than those of same-sex couples. The issue (thankfully) is not whether to prohibit gay and lesbian couples, or even single parents, from having children. They will. The question is, once they do have children, will those children be better off with married or unmarried parents. A prohibition of same-sex marriage does absolutely nothing to increase the likelihood that children will have two parents who are of opposite sexes.