The recent issue of Salvo Magazine (available here on their website) features an interview with Maggie Gallagher, in which she touches on her personal experience, what brought her into the marriage debate, and why it is so important. A few excepts:
On her experience as a single mother:
What I learned is perfectly obvious: it’s extremely challenging for the mothers. There’s no way that, as a single mother, you can compete on an equal footing with married men or childless women in the workplace. The demands on you as a mother are extremely challenging because you don’t have the same support network. And you have enormous financial as well as emotional obligations.
You can certainly be a good enough mother to raise a decent, loving, and good human being. Lots of single mothers do that. But you can’t possibly do as good a job as two parents–a mom and a dad working together. And even if you’re a great single mom, your children are going to suffer losses because their father’s not there for them.
On what she would say to Christians who oppose gay marriage, but have difficulty with discussing it:
I tell people it’s very simple, really. Marriage is the union of husband and wife for a reason. These are the unions that make new lives and connect children to their mother and father. Same-sex unions are not marriages. That’s the problem. The problem is not that we want to ban gay people from doing anything. This is not the kind of union that can fulfill, under any circumstances, these purposes of marriage. They don’t do what marriages are designed to do. When a man and a woman join in a marital union, that act protects children, because it means they will not be creating fatherless children across multiple households.
If two guys in a union are a marriage, then marriage is not about bringing mothers and fathers together for children anymore.
On supporters of traditional marriage being labeled “bigots”:
There are too many of us to stigmatize unless we agree with their opinion of us that we’re hateful and bigoted for saying marriage is the union of a husband and a wife. And if they can get us to just be quiet and shut up and stop standing up for the biblical understanding of marriage, then they will succeed in creating a society where we’ll have to be ashamed of Genesis.
Don’t give up Maggie. As a member of the generation that fought for the equal rights amendment for women, I have now lived long enough to know Phyllis Schlafly fought the right battle against it. You are fighting the right battle to preserve traditional marriage. Though I am a devout secularist, I have also lived long enough to understand that traditional marriage matters. With the 1969 passage of No Fault in California by an all male legislature, marriage began its downward descent into what we have today – not serial monogamy but a virulent form of polygamy characterized by abandonment. By comparison, polygamy in the Musim world where I live and work, is both kinder and gentler. It should be no surprise that female and child poverty will continue to increase, we the taxpayers will continue to subsidize this form of polygamy. Gay marriage will further undermine any opportunity governments might have to restore equality between men and women. Traditional marriage is still the only institution where men and women share equally in the extraordinary costs and challenges of raising the next generation. With single motherhood, these costs are borne by women and only women.