Sharon G. sent in a link to this video supporting California’s Proposition 8, which would ban gay marriage:
Here is a link to the video, just in case at some point the embedding gets messed up (they had embedding disabled, but I got around it).
It has been a while since anything creeped me out this much. It’s the sing-song voices, combined with my discomfort at seeing kids used to express their parents’ political opinions (for other examples, see here, here, and here.
One thing I find interesting is that it claims to be about saving kids from being confused, according to the lyrics:
Oh my gosh, S.O.S., I’d be lost and darn confused, if my dad is a woman or my mom is a man…
Gay and lesbian couples can have kids whether they’re married or not, so I’m unclear how Prop 8 would save kids from the horror of having gay parents, unless the idea is that it would encourage more people to become gay or would lead to higher rates of parenthood among gay and lesbian couples once they had the legitimacy of a marriage license. And of course, many people argue that the children of gays and lesbians would benefit from having their parents’ relationships legitimized, both socially and legally, and there’s no evidence that children raised by gays and lesbians are “confused” about their parents’ roles, or their own sexual orientation, or that they are more likely to be gay than other children. I can’t help but think it might be a bit traumatizing, though, to see ads depicting your family as weird or immoral in mocking songs sung by other kids.
Here is another one I came across, which plays on fears that public schools might be spreading an agenda that will turn children gay (“I can marry a princess!”):
You might also bring up the implications of the way we think of the role of mother being automatically linked to a female, and father to a male, which in and of itself isn’t particularly noteworthy, until you start thinking about their use as verbs: “mothering” and “fathering.” Mothering, or “to mother,” is usually used to mean nurturing, caring for, loving, and so on. Fathering, or “to father,” is generally taken to mean being the biological father of, as though a father’s input ends once the woman is pregnant. It seems to me that part of the concern about people having a “woman for a dad” or a “man for a mom” is a discomfort with the idea of a blurring of the gender lines of parenting, specifically, the idea of men “mothering” children. Because we have a taboo against gender sameness, the idea of men engaging in (or even taking primary responsibility for) the types of nurturing activities we associate with women makes us uncomfortable. In that sense, concerns about “confusing” gender roles in gay marriages often indicate concerns about the perceived breakdown of traditional parenting roles in heterosexual marriages as well.
Thanks, Sharon G.!
