Bishop Harry Jackson has warned that
gay marriage will “destroy children.”
Jackson, a minister at the Hope
Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland, came to prominence fighting
against the District of Columbia's gay marriage law and last year's
effort to pass a similar law in Maryland.
In a Christian
Post op-ed, Jackson argued that legalizing marriage for
gay couples will create “broken relationships” within families
that will in turn “destroy children.”
“What does the internal aching so
many children have for their missing fathers have to do with how
marriage is legally defined? Advocates of redefining marriage
constantly scoff at the notion that their policy goals could have a
negative effect on anyone. 'How does the legal union of two
homosexual men affect your marriage?' they ask mockingly,” Jackson
wrote.
“And of course the debate has nothing
to do with my marriage or yours. It has to do with how future
generations of adults will approach the very idea of marriage and
parenthood. We already have nearly two decades of social
experimentation in Scandinavia to draw upon. And it tells us that
the broader the definition of marriage is the fewer adults bother
with it in the first place. Since legalizing registered partnerships
and gay marriage in Scandinavia, an overwhelming number of adults
have simply stopped bothering to get married in the first place.”
“As I have pointed out many times
before, words that mean everything, mean nothing. The looser we make
the definition of marriage, the fewer people will feel bound to its
obligations and constraints. And while broken relationships can hurt
adults, they can destroy children.”
However, the claim that legalizing gay
nuptials in Scandinavia led to matrimonial flight by heterosexuals
has been thoroughly
debunked.