Children’s Rights

AN ARGUMENT AGAINST PLATONIC CONSANGUINEOUS MARRIAGE

P1. Platonic consanguineous marriage implies that it does not matter whether families (and children) are headed by a man and woman, two men, or two women

P2. Implying that it does not matter whether families (and therefore children) are headed by a man and woman, two men, or two women is to undermine children’s rights to be in a family headed by their mother and father 

C. Therefore platonic consanguineous marriage undermines children’s rights to be in a family headed by their mother and father


CONSERVATIVE COMMENTARY

This argument is also used against:

According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (the world’s most widely ratified human rights treaty in history):

The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and. as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.

https://www.unicef.org/child-rights-convention/convention-text#

Platonic consanguineous marriage undermines this right by implying that it does not matter whether families (and children) are headed by a mother and father, two mothers, or two fathers.

From Sherif Girgis, Robert P. George, & Ryan T. Anderson:

…to the extent that some continued to regard marriage as crucially linked to children, the message would be sent that a household of two women or two men is, as a rule, just as appropriate a context for childrearing, so that it does not matter (even as a rule) whether children are reared by both their mother and their father, or by a parent of each sex at all. On the other hand, to the extent that the connection between marriage and parenting is obscured more generally, as we think it would be eventually, no kind of arrangement would be proposed as an ideal.

Girgis, Sherif and George, Robert and Anderson, Ryan T., What is Marriage? (November 23, 2012). Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 245-287, Winter 2010, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1722155