“What will we tell the children?”

by David Benjamin

“The objects of which Paris folks are fond– literature, art, medicine, and adultery.” — Mark Twain 

MADISON, Wis.—During one of my Paris sojourns a few years ago, I was visibly perplexed (Hotlips said to me, “You look perplexed. What’s gong on?”) by a big demonstration in Paris over a proposed French law allowing same-sex marriage. My perplexity peaked at a paragraph that said Catholic, Jewish and Islamic leaders had united in vehement opposed to the legislation. The bishops, rabbis and mullahs on the march all agreed that monsieurs marrying monsieurs and girls marrying girls—rather than shacking up surreptitiously together as they had been doing for centuries—is an unsavory practice certain to instill “moral confusion” in French people.

My immediate reaction was “Whoa there! Frenchmen worried about ‘moral confusion’?” In a country whose national motto might well read, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Makin’ Whoopee”? In a nation that has produced characters like the Marquis de Sade, Arthur de Gobineau, Marshal Pétain, Brigitte Bardot and, lately, Dominique Pelicot.

Who? Yes, M. Pelicot drugged Mme. Pelicot into a stupor and raped her for decades—on film—and invited more than fifty of his male friends, neighbors and casual acquaintances to partake of his unconscious wife—on film?

Paris is a city that has regularly staged morally dubious events like the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the Reign of Terror, the Dreyfus Affair and the rounding up of children to be sent to Hitler’s death camps. Historian Andrew Hussey recalls that “The ‘Fete des Fous,’ an orgiastic four-day saturnalia that took place in the cathedral [of Notre Dame], often ending in murder and group sex, was tolerated into the sixteenth century as an echo of antique religious rites …”

Given this history, if France’s religious leaders haven’t come to accept a pretty much institutional atmosphere of “moral confusion” by now, they’re doomed to spend their lives in a perpetual state of surprise.

I mean, really. Doesn’t the name Maurice Papon ring a bell?

Shortly after the great ecclesiastical protest against it, France legalized same-sex marriage. That hardly ended the controversy. The priests, rebbes and ayatollahs are still grumbling. Here in the U.S.A. and in benighted pockets throughout the world, battles over marriage equality continue to smolder and flare. In Uganda, even mentioning it could get you executed. Among the arguments against the official tolerance of intra-gender romance is that it triggers “moral confusion” and begs the Big Question: “What will we tell the children?”

Ostensibly, this is a prudent concern, especially in an era when conscientious parents seem to be constantly crouched down, explaining stuff—most of which needs no explanation—to kids. When I was a kid, of course, the customary answer to “What will we tell the children?” was “Nothing. What the brats don’t know can’t hurt ’em.” This was fine with me, even when my parents split up, because their divorce made sense. By the time I hit kindergarten, Mom and Dad had long since ceased to hug and kiss, opting instead for epic, all-night fights at least once a week, often involving breakage, usually on school days.

Nobody had to tell my big sister, kid brother and me anything. We’d seen it coming. Our “moral confusion” only arose later, courtesy of the Catholic Church, which insisted that Mom and Dad had to stay married forever, even if they hated each other and terrorized their children. If not for the intervention of our saintly pastor, Father Mulligan, the diocese would have excommunicated Mom forever from the sacraments for walking out on Dad, one of the bravest moral decisions of her life. Father Mulligan not only connived to keep Mom in the Vatican’s good graces, he counseled her patiently and gently for months to assuage her guilt over the mortal sin of divorce and the stigma of single parenthood.

Much later, I had a divorce of my own and was living with my second wife in a small town in Massachusetts. My kids from my first marriage spent most weekends with us. Even today, all grown up, these two offspring are a little confused—and resentful. When it happened, I tried to explain the divorce, but I wasn’t very convincing. They had not seen it coming. There had been no fighting. The marriage ended not with a bang but a whisper, and my kids never truly understood why their parents were apart.

Coincidentally, our next-door neighbors in those days were Eugene and Marty, a gay couple who thought my children were a hoot. The kids ran in and out of their house all the time. Eugene and Marty, who had been together for years, were outgoing, funny and generous, with a refrigerator full of stuff my kids liked. They were our favorite neighbors. Neither my son nor daughter ever asked why two men were living together in such obvious intimacy. The kids would have been puzzled to learn that the household next-door was, at the time, illegal in a dozen states.

The moral of the juxtaposition is, I guess, this. Kids can be confused—or at least perplexed—by grownups who drift apart quietly, inarticulately and irreparably, but not so much by a couple of happy queers in love.

When two people who love each other move in together and get married, children aren’t confused about what’s going on, morally or otherwise. Kids understand love. Every baby’s first experience in life is being loved, overwhelmingly and unconditionally. Kids know that where there is love—in any arrangement of genders—there is warmth, friendliness, laughter and safety.

Rather than asking, “What will we tell the children?” about marriage equality, gender dysphoria and other variations on sexual identity, perhaps the Christian, Jewish and Muslim moralists-in chief of France, America, and everywhere else—especially Uganda—should wonder, “What will the children tell us?”

Maybe we should shut up and listen. Maybe the message we’d get is that most of the pious instruction we inflict on children goes in one ear and out the other, particularly if the kids are intuitive enough to sniff out cant and hypocrisy. Maybe we’d remember that the example we set, in our actions, errors, solutions and perseverance, forms their real moral education. Maybe we’d learn that “moral confusion” is the human condition, from which no child can be—or ought to be—protected. Maybe we’d notice that moral confusion, far from being the enemy of faith, is its lifeblood.