United Families International: It's Time to Strengthen Traditional Marriage

Feb 24, 2004 02:02 AM EST

Pro-family advocates are continuously fighting to ban legalizing same-sex marriage. Director of public policy for United Families International wrote in her commentary of San Francisco Chronicle that she supports marriage “as it is defined in our society, in our culture, in our religious history and in our laws.”

Marcia Barlows of United Families International asserted that the issue of same-sex marriage is not an an issue of love, rights or sexual preference and that love alone is not what the government is interested in while those are what the same-sex marriage advocates and gay couples speak of in defense of same-sex marriage.

Barlows imposed the question why did the government get in to the “marriage business,” and explained that it is because marriage is what brings benefits to society. She wrote, “A stable marriage between a man and a woman is the only relationship that has the biological potential to produce a child and then provide the best and most successful environment in which to rear the next generation. Successful societies have always understood this.”

In defense of what the same-sex marriage advocates don’t consider as important – having a mother and a father figure – she strongly emphasized it does matter and she further explained the serious possible consequences of motherlessness and fatherlessness as she was referring to the negative consequences of family and societal breakdowns that are already prevalent today due divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing.

Barlows wrote: “If we look at this list of negative consequences resulting from family breakdown and then examine the startling, well-documented statistics showing their negative impact on children, we can only draw one conclusion: Government can never create enough programs to compensate for fatherlessness/motherlessness and failure in marriage.”

She concluded by urging that it is time to focus on strengthening traditional marriage not on granting homosexual rights, as an answer to maintaining healthy society: “The weakened state of marriage today is not a call to further dismantle it by undermining it with notions of homosexual rights and same-sex marriage, but rather a call to strengthen traditional marriage.”