Where's the threat?

I've heard and read a lot of people saying that non-heterosexual marriages are a threat to the institution of marriage.  Some go so far as to say that homosexual relationships are a threat--though, again, exactly how and to what is never clear.

What complete utter horseshit.

When we're little kids, we know better.  We know that if another kid is nice, that kid is nice, and if he or she is not, he or she is not.  We don't worry about that other kid's sexuality, or the sexuality of the kid's parents.  It just doesn't occur to us.

Monday, walking back from the Art Institute of Chicago, we passed by Millennium Park and stopped for a bit to admire the lovely Crown Fountain.  The fountain is actually a pair of glass brick towers (I show one of them here) with a changing face on it.  In this photo, the face is smiling, and in the granite reflecting pool, children and grown-ups are playing. 

Here the face is blowing water at the crowd.

Standing there, watching and listening to the people playing, I saw happy kids running to their parents now and again, sometimes to splash the grown-ups, sometimes for reassurance, sometimes to take a sip of a drink.  Over the course of less than five minutes, most of the kids returned to heterosexual parents.  One little girl, though, dragged a friend to meet her dads.  The friend waved, smiled, and then introduced the two men to her parents, a man and a woman.  The kids returned to play.  Not twenty feet away and only a couple minutes later, another little girl told an even smaller boy that she had to check with her moms, ran to two women, whispered for a moment, in a louder voice promised to be careful, and ran back to play.

There was no threat.  There were only children and people who loved them. 

There is no threat, not here. 

Fear and stigmatize the parents who abuse their kids, but not those who, like the rest of us, love their children, do their best by their children, and try to live their lives as best they can. 

No matter what the sexuality or number of those parents.