September's children: does liberal neutrality fail gay and lesbian kids?

Abstract

From the standpoint of Rawlsian liberalism, it is argued that parents must be prohibited from curbing the development of a child's agency, including the development of a sense of justice and the ability to author a conception of the good. This paper addresses a case in which children's future agency, as well as their current welfare, is at stake and yet safeguarding that agency and welfare conflicts with another tenet of Rawlsian liberalism, neutrality. Parents who possess, as a part of a comprehensive religious or moral doctrine, a belief that homosexuality is immoral or in some other way inferior to heterosexuality may seek to instill such a belief in their children. For a child of non-heterosexual orientation, the resulting outcome can be devastating. This paper asks if, given the limitations imposed by neutrality, the needs of gay and lesbian minors in such households can be addressed. I examine parents' and children's liberties from Rawls' perspective and explore the plight of gay and lesbian children in hostile households. I consider the conflict as one between two of Rawls' basic liberties, liberty of conscience and freedom of the person, and conclude that only non-ideal theory can address that conflict.

Keywords:

• Rawls
• neutrality
• liberalism
• sexuality

Notes

† The title is an allusion to a song by the group, Rise Against, entitled “Make it Stop (September's Children),” which itself is an allusion to a rash of LGBT youth suicides in September 2010. More precisely, September 2010 merely marked a spike in media coverage of such suicides that, as the empirics discussed in this paper illustrate, have been common for quite some time and were not limited to a particular month in 2010.

1. See, for example, Kymlicka (1989), Raz (1986, Chapter Five), Waldron (1989), and Wall and Klosko (2003).

2. For more background information on subject of liberal neutrality, see Dworkin (1978) as well as, for Rawlsian neutrality specifically, Kymlicka (2002), pp. 217–19.

3. See, for example: English (1977), Pateman (1983, 1987), Okin (1987), and Cohen (1992).

4. Parents may otherwise oppose their children's non-heterosexual orientation on practical grounds – they may fear for their children's safety and happiness in a homophobic world. However, it seems reasonable to expect that, once they gain an understanding of sexual orientation, such parents will realize that change of orientation is not possible, that demanding change is itself hurtful, and that the best that they can do for their children is to give them acceptance.

5. It is possible that this question could also be extended to transgender children. Though I do not address them directly in this chapter, I think that their concerns often – though certainly not always – overlap with the concerns presented. The question of the liberties of transgender minors is certainly worth addressing in a separate, dedicated work that focuses specifically on the difficulties faced by such children.

6. Brennan and Noggle (2000, 54) take a similar approach to determining the needs of children.

7. Deigh (1983) is critical of the relationship that Rawls draws between shame and loss of self-esteem. Nonetheless, commensurate with my concern for the effect that parental disapprobation of their sexuality may have on children, Deigh writes,This suggests that we should conceive shame, not as a reaction to a loss, but as a reaction to a threat, specifically, the threat of demeaning treatment one would invite in giving the appearance of someone of lesser worth. Its analogues then are not grief and sorrow, but fear and shyness. Like fear, shame serves to protect one against and save one from unwanted exposure. (242)

In other words, shame may lead children to seek to attempt hide, deny, or subvert their sexual orientation out of fear of parental rejection as well as rejection from others.

8. Eyal (2005) argues that Rawls is mistaken in his description of self-respect as a primary good. He further argues that what Rawls describes as self-respect is, more accurately, closer to self-esteem than self-respect. Additionally, Doppelt (2009) denies that self-respect is a good that can or even should be distributed by a society. While these are both significant points of critique of Rawls’ theory, what is important for the purposes of this paper is that a person's view of himself or herself is degraded (either by a lowering of self-respect or self-esteem) when he or she perceives his or her non-heterosexual orientation as a failure to act virtuously.

9. It is perhaps possible that immutability is not a necessary component of our understanding of sexual orientation here. However, what is necessary is that sexual orientation cannot be altered on demand – parental or otherwise. Furthermore, it may be suggested that bisexual children who face parental condemnation of homosexuality could just choose to ignore the part of their sexual orientation that is condemned. However, bisexual people, while attracted to both genders, cannot necessarily choose the person(s) with whom they fall in love so such an ignoring may be more easily theorized than practised.

10. Engster (2010) argues in favor of public support of the “financial, temporal, and other costs of child rearing” (12). However, from the point of view that I advance in my paper, it is not clear that the public in a liberal state should support parents who are deliberately raising illiberal children, particularly if they are mistreating their homosexual children. While Engster argues with some persuasiveness that his public parenting model could help reduce abuse of children (256–257), it is not clear that helping to finance illiberal parenting will lead to any reduction of the abuse that I describe in the paper.