You Cannot Improve on God's Design for the Family

Children needing more than two parents?

This is the case being made by California State Senator Mark Leno, who says that for children to be really protected, the state must be able to assign legal parentage to more than the child's mother and father. How many more? As many as the adults in play desire. Biological parentage now bends to legal parentage simply because adults who want to create these experimental families have access to the court system. No children have asked for such thing. But Leno explains his bill is necessary because it "brings California into the 21st century, recognizing that there are more than Ozzie and Harriet families today."

Beside the "Ozzie and Harriet family" being a fictitious Hollywood creation, does the arrival of the 21st century demand we fundamentally change our collective and historic understanding of parenthood? Sociologically and anthropologically, no society anywhere has found an alternative to the gold-standard of parentage---a married mother and father---for providing the health, safety, educational and life-opportunities that thriving children require. Mountains of careful and diverse research consistently show that not a single one of these new "alternative family" forms emerging over the last 40 years have done so. But here we are, continuing to invent them all the same, all under the illusion of progress.

Theology of Family

 

So how should Christians who don't consider themselves "culture warriors" think about such developments? Does Christianity possess a theology of family and parenting that should guide our thinking?  Continue at Glenn T. Stanton