Freedom to Marry Week: Day 2

The conversation between my then-boyfriend/now-husband to get married started with, "Hey, you know what would be funny?..." (We got married on Leap Day, February 29, 1996, and decided to do it less than three weeks before.) What precipitated the discussion was the thought that we might want kids someday. Not right away, but eventually, perhaps, and we wanted to settle into marriage before making any big changes. For a few years, the decision whether to have kids was "no," until eventually it was a resounding "eh, why not?"

While I realize this is embarrassingly old-fashion of me, I do think it is ideal if parents are legally bound to each other before they take steps to expand their families. I don't think it's mandatory, I don't think kids of parents who aren't married suffer any more than kids whose parents are, and I don't think kids of single parents are more or less effed up than kids in two-parent households.

What I do think, though, is that marriage offers kids a myriad of legal protections that they aren't guaranteed otherwise, including access to health care, parental family and medical leave, and the right to a legal relationship with both parents.

This legal protection of the relationship between parents and children is one of the reasons marriage equality is so important. Not allowing same-sex couples to marry is discriminatory and just wrong. This is self-evident. But equally important is kids' right to have their parents' divorce happen in a legally structured way, outside of the parents' flawed, human, and often destructive impulses.