Five Reasons why Margaret Somerville is Wrong about Same-Sex Marriage and the Rights of Children

In written work and a lecture at the 2008 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences that was co-sponsored by the Canadian Philosophical Association, Margaret Somerville has claimed that allowing same-sex marriage is unethical because doing so violates the inherently procreative function of marriage and thereby undermines the rights and duties that exist between children and their biological parents. In my paper, I offer five reasons for thinking that Somerville’s argument for this conclusion is unpersuasive. In each case her argument either begs important questions about same-sex marriage or else relies on insufficient evidence to justify excluding a vulnerable minority group from participating in a state-sponsored social institution

Argument (complex analysis) · Function (biology) · Institution · Political science · Same sex · Sociology · State (computer science) · Gender Studies · Law · Medicine · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Reproductive Health and Technologies