8 Things to Know about the “Voices of Children” Brief

• Politics and Law • marriage equality, milestone, queerspawn, u.s. supreme court

Voices of ChildrenLast Friday, the voices of children with same-sex parents were sent to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Family Equality Council, COLAGE, and Kentucky teen Kinsey Morrison filed a “friend of the court” brief in support of marriage equality and highlighting the impact of inequality on children and young adults raised by same-sex couples.

  1. Kinsey Morrison, who heads the brief along with the two organizations, is an 18-year-old freshman at Stanford University. She and her two younger sisters were raised in Goshen, Kentucky, by their two moms, who have been together more than 20 years. Here’s the terrific op-ed she wrote about growing up with two moms, which the brief cites; here’s the video she and her sisters made about why their moms should be able to marry.
  2. The brief’s argument has four main points:
    • Families headed by same-sex parents deserve no less protection than other families deserve.
    • The availability of marriage for same-sex couples has benefitted [sic] tens of thousands of children in the United States, and has harmed no one.
    • Exclusion from marriage stigmatizes and de-legitimizes same-sex-parented families and deprives them of the equal protection of the law.
    • Exclusion from marriage informs LGBT youth that their government considers them, and any committed relationships they may form, to be inherently inferior to those of their heterosexual peers.
  3. The brief reiterates what we all know: “All of the leading national child welfare and social service organizations agree that lesbian, gay, and bisexual parents do just as well as heterosexual parents at raising happy, healthy, and well-adjusted children. There is no serious dispute on this issue among social scientists and mental health professionals.”
  4. At the same time, it asserts that we’re not perfect, and that’s okay: “But this is not to say that same-sex parents have ‘earned’ the right to marriage through exemplary behavior. . . . The point is not that families headed by same-sex parents are perfect. . . . The point is that these families deserve to be treated equally under the law.”
  5. Perfect or not, the brief says it’s not even a question of who’s better (as I’ve stressed many times before): “The question before the Court is not what kinds of families are best. The belief some hold that the best childrearing is performed by different-sex, biological, married parents is beside the point. More than 18,000 children in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee are being raised by same-sex parents. The question is whether there is a legal basis for depriving these children of the protections and security that the Sixth Circuit and Respondents offer as the very reason marriage exists.” [My emphasis.]
  6. The brief also discusses the impact of marriage inequality on LGBT youth, and the damage it can cause to their sense of self-worth and place in society.
  7. Here’s the bottom line: “No family has ever been strengthened, and no child has ever been made safer or more secure, by denying same-sex couples the right to marry.”
  8. The conclusion is worth reading in full:

Respondents say that marriage provides a stable family structure for children. If this is true, it is true for all children — not just children being raised by parents of different sexes. And if society benefits when the state encourages adults to form, and raise children within, committed relationships, it suffers when the state tells LGBT youth — the next generation of LGBT parents — that the families they may build are beneath the law’s notice.

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