This from the National Organization For Marriage‘s blog, linking to the Institute For America Values’ (the group headed by Prop 8 witness David Blankenhorn and that used to employ Maggie Gallagher) Family Scholars site:
Over at FamilyScholars.org, a researcher named Amber Lapp asked an Ohio waitress/manager “Why do we have marriage?”:
“I guess in a way to keep families together. Because if you think about it, if you have a guy and a girl who spend their lives together, or who intend to spend their lives together, if they don’t get married, and have children [while unmarried], it’s too easy of a getaway. . . Maybe it’s more to keep people—or families—together, instead of everybody have a momma and poppa over here and moms here, dads there, you’ve got four step-kids, four regular kids, you know? Yeah, it’d be complicated [without marriage], there’d be kids all over the frickin’ place. Next thing you know you’re dating a third cousin and you don’t even realize it because mom went with this person and dad went with this person and they both split and went with these people. So I think maybe it will, ummm, save a little bit of chaos….I just kind of pulled that out of nowhere…”
Although she might feel as if she just pulled this thought from nowhere, I suspect that much of it comes from personal experience: her brother does shared parenting with his ex-girlfriend, she dated men with children and had to deal with their babies’ mamas, and she had custody over her 15 year old niece when she herself was just 18.”
Why We Have Marriage [NOM]
And the gay line cook responded: “What the hell does any of this have to do with my committed union and the civil recognition thereof? Order up!”
