Jon Huntsman's recent call in American Conservative for a right-wing endorsement of same-sex marriage is nothing new.  Saying nothing of children's rights to a mother and father, his clarion call is essentially an unwitting declaration of the rights of well-to-do gays to buy children without having to share their property or domestic lives with the opposite-sex parent of their legal charges.

For all the talk of being inclusive, same-sex marriage proponents are actually promoting the exclusion of one biological parent from the custody of their own children. In other words, a man's right to marry another man is actually a man's right to exclude the woman who bore his child from the household where the child grows up.

While utterly offensive to me, this is apparently perfectly legitimate reasoning to many readers who feel that adults have rights to children if they have the money or political clout to come into possession of them, while children have no rights to anything at all.

The most pertinent objections to such treatment of people as property ought to come, under normal circumstances, from the social-justice left, not the presumably libertarian-leaning right.  Neither libertarians nor the left can speak out to object, because they have been bought for thirty pieces of silver by the same gay elite that now feels entitled to buy out the right wing.

Is anyone interested in defending children's rights to a father and a mother?  Sadly, both left and right in the United States lag far behind the United Nations, even though our own Constitution has a firm basis in the Thirteenth Amendment to ban many of the parenting practices encouraged by same-sex marriage.  The Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1959, Article 7, states that wherever possible, children must be raised by their father and mother -- this is because of the long, ugly history of infants being bought and sold, going back to the slavery era and stretching into antiquity.  The International Convention of the Rights of the Child of 1989, Article 7, reinforces this right.

The Thirteenth Amendment of the United States states that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude" is to be permitted in the U.S. or its territories.  Stop and think what this means.  Minus involuntary servitude, "slavery" amounts historically to the buying, selling, and ownership of human life, including insemination, surrogacy, and commercial adoption -- all practices that made American slavery possible after Thomas Jefferson banned the Atlantic slave trade in 1807.

In no way is same-sex marriage an advancement.  It is rather a backward slide into long-discredited and terrifying abuses of procreation, resulting in the dehumanization of children.  Perhaps it might have been less alarming, had not gay parenting been so thoroughly intertwined -- at the behest of the proponents of same-sex marriage, mind you -- with the fight for full "marriage equality."  Because of the way the debate has played out in the United States, full marriage equality means that same-sex couples are entitled to children that they've acquired, inevitably, through financial exchange, and states have no way of prioritizing the natural pathway of human beings from conception into the custody of their fathers and mothers.  The latter pathway is the only way to produce new generations without resurrecting the ills of earlier centuries, when slavery was globally rampant and infants were often pirated or sold as chattel.

Same-sex marriage means that there will be separate domestic spaces reserved for all-female parenting arrangements, all-male parenting arrangements, and mixed-gender parenting arrangements.  The separateness of the domestic spaces will be the direct result of a specific constituency's adamant refusal to live with people of the opposite gender, making it a perfect form of segregation by sex.  This segregation is deemed legally "equal" even though the children thrown into such separate spaces have different cultural entitlements and enter their childhood homes with different statuses.

Children raised by the parents who conceived them enter life as free human beings, endowed with a paternal and maternal lineage.  Children raised by same-sex couples enter life as property acquired through money; moreover, they must be raised in a home that has excluded one of their biological parents on the basis of gender.  Even before we get into the complicated (and not terribly promising) indications of social-science research into same-sex parenting, these basic facts should make same-sex marriage a non-starter, in any conversation that takes children's rights seriously.

Why are so many conservatives like Jon Huntsman simply not taking children's rights seriously?  It boils down to money.  Kids are neither workers nor consumers in their own right; they own  nothing and therefore have no way to contribute to a financially minded right wing that markets itself increasingly as a more capitalist alternative to the Democrats.