Letter: Many questions surround state’s marriage amendment

To the editor,

I would like to offer a perspective regarding the marriage amendment that will be on the November ballot. I will not give my opinion; rather I will save that for the day I vote.

First, I read many opinions about the benefits same sex couples do not have. Is that why heterosexual couples want to marry? Single parents are not given benefits if they don’t provide all the very personal information the county and state requires. I hear so much about couples marrying for love. Love can be defined in multiple ways. Parents feel love, children feel a different love, then teens and middle school students feel an entirely different kind of love. Grandchildren love their grandparents and best friends feel yet a different kind of love. For me love is not is the primary issue in making a choice. There is also the idea of children being brought up in same sex marriages. When a couple gets married they may know for certain that they want children or perhaps not. We all know couples that for whatever reason can’t have children yet that is what they envisioned before getting married, then other couples never envision children and before you know it the unexpected pregnancy happens, after the child is born their lives turn upside down. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I have heard parents say they could never imagine their lives without that child.

The question then becomes what is love, is it enough to hold a relationship together through all the good and bad that can happen in a lifetime? That really depends on the people and events they live through. Next, regarding children, who teaches a boy to be a man? So many young boys without fathers fill our prisons. Who teaches a girl to be a woman? Our society is full of young girls having babies before they finish school because they are either looking for love or think they found it and most of these girls become single parents. Why do these young people need to let their need for a sexual relationship come before their thoughts of a future? Who teaches a girl how to nurture, are they born that way? Are boys born to protect, it seems that since boys become physically stronger than females while girls become more and more feminine our differences are important in raising child or even interacting with a child in our society.

I would like to know who will pay for the help these children from those relationships, which do not have a man as a father or a woman as a mother to teach them such essential life visions, that our society requires and will be their world. These relationships will have problems if one parent or the other, each with their own value in teaching a child how to grow up conflict, with the world the child has to deal with daily. Usually beginning with school. A male parent gives children much different life lessons than a female parent for life. What happens to these children if they have only female influences or male influences as they grow up?

Kristi Mingo Nelson

Hastings

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