Don’t consider me too demanding if I ask you once again to set great store by holy books and read them as much as you can. This spiritual reading is as necessary to you as the air you breathe.

When we equate same-sex relationships with marriage, it further undermines our understanding of family by wrongly implying that biological connectivity of children with their parents and siblings is not important. In addition, it mistakenly says that having both a mother and a father is an unnecessary and superfluous duplication. Contrary to everything we intuitively and sociologically know about effective parenting, it adds further confusion by saying that mothers can ‘father’ just as well as men, and that fathers can ‘mother’ just as well as women.

Let me remind you of the essential public purpose of marriage. Marriage attaches mothers and fathers to their children, and to one another. Once you replace that essential public purpose with inessential, even frivolous private purposes, marriage will not be able to do its job. But children will still need secure attachments to their mothers and fathers, a need which will go unfulfilled. […] Are you really prepared to accept responsibility for the consequences of detaching legal parenthood from the natural moorings of biology? Do you really want a world in which children may have three or four legal parents? Are you ready for contract parenting, in which adults parcel out parental responsibilities amongst themselves? Should the state insist that children never care about their origins? Ready or not, these are the consequences of redefining marriage and parenthood as genderless institutions. […] The only argument you have is so-called “equality.” You have taken a venerable American concept and twisted it out of recognition. Equality used to mean limiting the power of the state to make irrelevant distinctions among citizens. In your hands, equality has become a battering ram for smashing every aspect of social life that has any hint of sexual differentiation. No more mothers and fathers, only Parent 1 and Parent 2.