Save Our Children: Overcoming the Narrative that Gays and Lesbians are Harmful to Children

Abstract

This paper will address why the courts were a better avenue to begin the fight for marriage equality because of the strong and widely-held that gay people are somehow harmful to children, an argument that has regularly been used during the state initiative process banning marriage rights for same-sex couples. The paper will detail a theory called the paradigm, developed by Professor Walter Fisher, that helps explain why gay rights opponents were successful in the political process while gay rights proponents were more successful in the courts.Fisher’s paradigm presumes that all humans are storytellers and communicate mostly through stories. People evaluate the stories they hear based on their own experiences, views of morality, and values. Fisher labels this evaluative process narrative rationality. He believes that only experts have the skills and abilities to use logic and reason, so most lay people make judgments based on culture, biography, and life experiences. Walter Fisher’s paradigm provides insight on how a that gay people are harmful to children was developed in the early gay rights battles and was subsequently strengthened through the HIV/AIDS crisis, the rise of the Moral Majority, the Catholic Church molestation scandal, and the debate about the Boy Scouts’ ban on gay members.To show how the paradigm operates in practice, the paper examines California’s Proposition 8, a state constitutional amendment that banned same-sex marriage. The paper compares how the voters and courts treated arguments about Proposition 8 differently. Because voters generally base their decisions on their own values and experiences instead of reason and logic, gay rights opponents successfully used the that same-sex marriage will harm children during the initiative campaign even though no reliable evidence supported their claim. Meanwhile, gay right proponents successfully debunked this using an extensive trial in federal court, a place where the predominate method of evaluating arguments is through logic and reason.The paper concludes with a discussion on how same-sex marriages have changed American culture. With more states providing for marriage equality, same-sex couples have become more visible in society. By being more visible, same-sex couples are helping to develop a new about gay people that is much more positive and runs counter to the decades-old that gay people are harmful to children. In fact, people are now seeing the harm that same-sex marriage bans have on children with same-sex parents, a point made by Justice Kennedy in his recent opinion holding the federal Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional.