July Beginner's Tournament: Same Sex Marriage should be recognized.

As requested by my opponent, no rebuttals in this round, so here are my main arguments: Premise: Marriage and procreation Marriage is far more to society than about romantic love. This can be seen in the fact that it is a relationship that requires legal recognition of the state. Therefore marriage is also about the maintaining of a family as well as a legal union. If such is the case, marriage is therefore strongly associated with procreation. Families are strongly maintained by married relationships, and are to a degree necessary for a financially stable family. This can be seen in the statistics below (done by heritage.org) on family income in relation to family structure. <img src= “http://www.heritage.org...; <img src=“http://peacemaker.net...; Therefore, an essential function to marriage is procreation and the establishment of families. (Assertion of this premise is necessary for my following arguments) 1. Children and Biological Parents. The most common demographic of same-sex couples are lesbian marriages, meaning that there are two mothers as parents. That being said, aside from adoption, the second-most common way of gaining children in same-sex families is through use of in-vitro fertilization. As a result, this creates a demographic of children whom are completely ignorant of their biological parents. However, unlike in a hetero-sexual family, it would not be possible for the child to live under the belief that their adopted parents are their biological parents. This leaves the child further distant from their parents, giving a negative psychological influence to the child as it would have on foster children or orphans. Addendum: Negative impact on Children (This one is more or less and extension of my previous argument) Children that grow up under Same-sex couples do so with the absence of a father or mother. For example, the absence of a father in a girl’s life can have negative repercussions due to the father’s social and biological influence. A 1999 Harvard study by David Popenoe has shown that the absence of a father in a girl’s life strongly correlates with early puberty and teen pregnancy. Furthermore, a similar impact can be said if a child were to grow up without a mother (in this case, if a child were to grow up under a male couple) given that mother naturally provides emotional security, such a role cannot be adequately replaced with another father. This can be seen in the graph below: <img src=“http://www.debate.org...; 2. Undermining Procreation and the facilitation of underpopoulation. As seen in my first premise, marriage is strongly connected to the concept of procreation, and marriage is to a degree necessary in an effective procreation (as argued in the premise). With the normalization of Same-sex marriage, this connection is strongly undermined, and is replaced by another mindset, that being marriage is seen on primarily emotional terms. The problem with this mentality is that it facilitates a strong anti-natalist mindset. In Western society, this is hugely unhealthy for the sustaining of the population. Ideally, in order for a population to healthily persist an average fertility rate of two children per family is required, one child to replace the father and another to replace the mother. However that only takes the assumption that every woman intends to bear children, and that every children survives to have more children. So the required fertility rate begins to fluctuate between countries. Here is a graph of the fertility rates of China, India and the United States: <img src=“http://www.china-profile.com...; As seen in the graph above, all of the aforementioned countries barely or completely fail to meet the ideal fertility rate. The normalization of Same-Sex marriage would breed an anti-natalist mentality towards marriage; as a result, it would greatly damage the already low fertility rates of the above mentioned countries, and hence facilitate underpopulation. Sources: 1. http://www.heritage.org... 2. http://peacemaker.net... 3. http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org... 4. http://www.frc.org... 5. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com... 6. http://www.china-profile.com...