Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of

unchanging truth for the Colston Center.

I'm John Stone Street.

Back in 2013, Amy Davidson Sorkin covered for the New Yorker the Supreme Court hearings over California's

Proposition 8.

Now as shocking as it sounds today, there was this brief moment in California history when

voters there had amended the state constitution to legally define

marriage as only the union between a man and a woman. In one of her articles

Sorkin described how Charles Cooper, a lawyer on behalf of Propate, had argued

that the government had a duty to protect marriage

because it had a duty to protect children.

Sorkin found this argument, as she put it baffling.

She argued in fact that if the state really wanted to protect children it should affirm same sex marriage after all don't some gay and lesbian people have children before they enter a same sex arrangement and most importantly she added the state had many other compelling reasons to affirm so-called same-sex marriage,

reasons that had, as she put it, nothing at all to do with children.

Well, today, 11 years later, there's another lawsuit before the courts, this one brought by a gay couple who alleges that, quote, New York's definition of infertility discriminates against same-sex couples.

According to a description in an article for the Guardian, one of the men

previously worked for New York City whose health insurance plan included coverage

for in vitro fertilization for heterosexual relationships.

In their lawsuits, the men employ a new definition of infertility that was issued in

October 2023 by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine.

It defines infertility as, and I quote, a disease

condition or status that necessitates medical intervention including donor gamete.

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