As reported by Yahoo News, a young woman named Heather Barwick has come out against gay marriage. This in and of itself would not be particularly interesting-a lot of people retain outdated prejudices against gay marriage-except for the fact that Mrs. Barwick has every reason to know better.
She was raised by gay parents. Quite well apparently, as she states in her anti-gay marriage op-ed on The Federalist:
Either way, I still feel like gay people are my people. I’ve learned so much from you. You taught me how to be brave, especially when it is hard. You taught me empathy. You taught me how to listen. And how to dance. You taught me not be afraid of things that are different. And you taught me how to stand up for myself, even if that means I stand alone.
Mrs. Barwick goes on and on about how much she values her lesbian mother and her partner, even as she goes out of her way to bar families like her own from having the social, legal, and financial benefits of marriage.
My Gut Reaction: Why is it that certain fundamentalist Christians say 'I Love You' when they're about to do the most hateful things possible?
Analysis below the fold...
Heather Barwick represents something I suspect will emerge as a trend in years to come: disgruntled children of LGBT parents denouncing gay marriage either as a misguided resolution to their own issues or just out of spite. She is not the first case I have heard of where sons and daughters of gay couples have opted for this path. A recent article on Think Progress has detailed the cases of four such individuals who filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court against gay marriage.
As the Think Progress article makes clear, the reason behind these people's opposition to marriages for people like their parents is that they came from dysfunctional families. The gay parents in all four cases divorced or otherwise broke up. The experience, all too common for children of both straight and gay parents, apparently led Robert Oscar Lopez to compare gay adoption to slavery and Brittany Newmark Klein to rant against transgender people.
Heather Barwick doesn't even have the excuses of the above, however. Her main issue seems to have been the fact that she missed her father, whom she openly admits took no interest in her and made no attempt to stay in her life. As Barwick herself put it:
I grew up surrounded by women who said they didn’t need or want a man. Yet, as a little girl, I so desperately wanted a daddy. It is a strange and confusing thing to walk around with this deep-down unquenchable ache for a father, for a man, in a community that says that men are unnecessary. There were times I felt so angry with my dad for not being there for me, and then times I felt angry with myself for even wanting a father to begin with. There are parts of me that still grieve over that loss today.
Barwick's attempts to justify her stance are even more specious. She points out that children of divorced parents are allowed to challenge their parents over the divorce, while adopted children feel a sense of loss. She never bothers to consider the fact that there are no movements afoot, outside of extremist circles, to ban adoption or divorce. She is effectively spitting not only on the women who raised her, but on LGBT parents everywhere.
