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If The Law Is a Teacher…

If the law is a teacher, both embodying and conveying particular moral stances, what would this proposed California law teach us?: Beaver had June and Ward. Ricky had Ozzie and Harriet. Mom and Dad, same-sex couples or blended families, California law is clear: No more than two legal parents per child. When adults fight over […]

If the law is a teacher, both embodying and conveying particular moral stances, what would this proposed California law teach us?:

Beaver had June and Ward.

Ricky had Ozzie and Harriet.

Mom and Dad, same-sex couples or blended families, California law is clear: No more than two legal parents per child.

When adults fight over parenthood, a judge must decide which two have that right and responsibility – but that could end soon.

State Sen. Mark Leno is pushing legislation to allow a child to have multiple parents.

“The bill brings California into the 21st century, recognizing that there are more than Ozzie and Harriet families today,” the San Francisco Democrat said.

Surrogate births, same-sex parenthood and assisted reproduction are changing society by creating new possibilities for nontraditional households and relationships.

Where did this idea come from? Says the story:

SB 1476 stemmed from an appellate court case last year involving a child’s biological mother, her same-sex partner, and a man who had an affair with the biological mother and impregnated her while she was separated temporarily from her female lover.

This is an attempt to accommodate the radical irregularities in modern childbearing practices (surrogacy, etc.). What would this law teach us? That there is no such thing as the natural family — that family is whatever we say it is. Or, as Barbara Bush witlessly put it to the GOP Convention in 1992, “However you define family, that’s what we mean by family values.” As the reader who e-mailed this story to me says:

The ultimate goal is to redefine the family in line with what Carle C. Zimmerman would have seen as the ultimate in atomistic families: a collection of unrelated people, adults and children, who just happen to live together and forge a voluntary relationship with each other for an unspecified length of time.

Picture the poor California child being shuttled from birth father/stepmother to birth mother/stepfather to previous stepmother from her birth father’s earlier marriage to her long-time stepfather’s parents (her stepgrandparents), all of whom have won the legal right to be considered her parents…

 

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