In a moving piece over at the Esquire politics blog, Tom Junod describes how he has been led to support SSM by a new anti-SSM ideology that puts him, an adoptive parent in an infertile opposite-sex marriage, in the same position as same-sex couples.

That ideology can be found in “77 Non-Religious Reasons to Support Man/Woman Marriage,” a pamphlet produced by a subsidiary of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) called the Ruth Institute. Among the reasons: “Even though it is not always possible, children have the best life chances when they are raised by their  biological married parents.” And: “If the love between the adults were the only important factor, we would expect stepparents to be interchangeable with biological parents. But this is not generally true.”

The argument, presumably, is that SSM should be opposed because it undermines the preferential option the state should give procreative couples. Writes Junod:

The conservative movement that once minimized the difficulties of adoption because it provided an alternative to abortion is now both explicitly and implicitly denigrating adoption precisely because it provides an alternative to the perfect biological families said to have a patent on God’s purpose.

 While not every child has the benefit of being raised by his or her married biological mother and father from birth to adulthood, legalization of same-sex “marriage” would mean that, for the first time in history, society would be placing its highest stamp of official government approval on the deliberate creation of permanently motherless or fatherless households for children.