Defending Marriage: Debate-Tested Sound Bites

Helpful, debate-tested sound bites for defenders of natural marriage and the family.

Here is a collection of lines and arguments that Focus on the Family has learned work best in the many public debates we have done on the issue of the same-sex family. These sound bites have also been tested by focus groups and rated very strongly.

Four Key Points

1. Same-sex families always deny children either their mother or father.
2. Same-sex family is a vast, untested social experiment with children.
3. Where does it stop? How do we say "no" to group marriage?
4. Schools will be forced to teach that the homosexual family is normal. Churches will be legally pressured to perform same-sex ceremonies.

These points and others are elaborated in the sound bites below:

Marriage Is Always About the Next Generation

• A loving and compassionate society always comes to the aid of motherless and fatherless families.
• A loving and compassionate society never intentionally creates motherless or fatherless families, which is exactly what every same-sex home does.
• The same-sex family is not driven by the needs of children, but rather by the radical wishes of a small group of adults.
• No child development theory says children need two parents of the same gender, but rather that children need their mothers and fathers.

A Vast Social Experiment Inflicted on Children

• No society, at any time, has ever raised a generation of children in same-sex families.
• Same-sex “marriage” will subject generations of children to the status of lab rats in (name of debate opponent’s) vast, untested social experiment.

But we know how the experiment will turn out:

• America has raised millions of children in fatherless families for three decades and that experiment was a stunning failure by every measure! We know how damaging it is to raise children in intentionally fatherless families. Let’s not create more child-suffering to satisfy adult desire.

Thousands of published social science, psychological and medical studies show that children living in fatherless families, on average, suffer dramatically in every important measure of well-being. These children suffer from much higher levels of physical and mental illness, educational failure, poverty, substance abuse, criminal behavior, loneliness, as well as physical and sexual abuse.1 Children living apart from both biological parents are eight times more likely to die of maltreatment than children living with their mother and father.2

Lessons From the World's Most Famous Lesbian Mom

Rosie O’Donnell shared this story in an ABC Primetime Live interview with Diane Sawyer:

Six-year-old Parker asks his mother, Rosie: “Mommy, why can’t I have a daddy?” Rosie answers: “Because I’m the kind of mommy who wants another mommy.”3

• The two most dangerous words for a parent to utter together: “I” and “want.”
• Parker has never asked, “Momma, why can’t we have all the rights and protections of marriage?” You see, such things only matter to adults. But he has said, “Momma, why can’t I have a daddy?”
• What matters for children in marriage is whether their mothers are married to their fathers.

How Your Same-sex Family Will Harm My Family

• If this were just about your family, there would be no real danger. But same-sex “marriage” advocates are not seeking marriage for you alone, but rather demanding me — and all of us — to radically change our understanding of family. And that will do great damage.
• Your same-sex family will teach my little boys and girls that husband/wife and mother/father are merely optional for the family and therefore, meaningless.
• And I will never allow my (grand) children to be taught that their gender doesn’t matter for the family. Their masculinity and femininity matter far too much, as does everyone’s in this auditorium.

Full Acceptance Will Be Mandatory

• My civil rights to object to homosexuality as an idea will be gone.
• Same-sex relationships and homes are tolerated in society today. Our nation has no existing problem where same-sex couples are evicted from their neighborhoods because of how they live. Americans tolerate such relationships.
• But this is not about mere tolerance. Instead it is about forcing everyone to fully accept these unnatural families.
• Only months after legalizing same-sex “marriage” in Canada, activists there successfully passed C-250, a bill criminalizing public statements against homosexuality, punishable by up to two years in prison! Say the wrong thing; go to jail. The same will happen here.
• Every public school in the nation would be forced to teach that same-sex “marriage” and homosexuality are perfectly normal –- Heather has Two Mommies in K-12. Pictures in text books will be changed to show same-sex couples as normal.
• Your church will be legally pressured to perform same-sex weddings. When courts — as happened in Massachusetts — find same-sex “marriage” to be a constitutional and fundamental human right, the ACLU will successfully argue that the government is underwriting discrimination by offering tax exemptions to churches and synagogues that only honor natural marriage.
• Gay and lesbian people have a right to form meaningful relationships. They don’t have a right to redefine marriage for all of us.

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