[I’m guest-blogging on Family Scholars Blog for the next three months. No, really, I am. Really. Anyway, here’s my first post. It’s also cross-posted on “TADA”; the usual arguments against SSM should be expressed on FSB or on TADA, but not on “Alas.”
I thought quite a bit before deciding to accept the invitation to guest blog. In the end, I think the potential downsides are outweighed by the upside of being able to speak to an audience that would normally not read my writings. –Amp]
1. Thanks So Much, Lovely To Be Here.
Hi! This is neat — although I’ve been a blogger for a long time (soooo long!), I don’t think I’ve ever been promoted from commenter to guest blogger before.
I’d like to thank Family Scholars Blog for letting me use their platform for a few months. I think it shows that the folks running the show here are sincerely devoted to the ideal of civil debate. I’ll do my best to repay their trust in me by sneering at their arguments, questioning their intelligence, and maligning their motives at every opportunity. Er, wait, that can’t be right. Let me check my notes… oh, here it is. I’m going to repay their trust by trying to blog honestly, criticize substantively, and hopefully we’ll all end up modeling what civil debate should look like. There we go!
I plan to blog on many issues here over the next few months, but the one topic I expect to return to again and again is marriage equality. So let’s get started.
2. The Explosive Growth of support for Same-Sex Marriage
Same-sex marriage is a consistent loser in the voting booth, and most politicians still run from SSM like a mouse from the world’s biggest cat. So why do I say explosive growth? Because for same-sex marriage to be seriously discussed — and to consistently receive 30-40% support (and growing!) in the voting booth — represents an amazing increase in support for gay marriage within my lifetime.
SSM isn’t winning many votes, but the trends are on SSM’s side. This can’t be a cheerful graph for any opponent of marriage equality to consider:
From month to month, approval and disapproval of SSM goes up or down. But over the course of the last two decades, the trend overwhelmingly favors SSM (and the future looks even better when one looks at the results broken down by age group).
I’d love to believe that this trend is caused by the intelligence, eloquence and — let’s face it — wonderful grooming of me and thousands of other folks who have been arguing in favor of marriage equality. But alas, I really don’t think that’s what’s going on. The trend in favor of gay marriage began long before the arguments for gay marriage were well-developed or widely heard.
So what had happened before the late 1980s to bring this about?
The two strongest arguments against legal equality for same-sex couples — also called same-sex marriage, or SSM, and popularly called gay marriage — had to die out (or at least, be confined to deathbeds) before SSM could even be plausibly talked about.
3. The Argument That Gay People Are Morally Disgusting
The first argument that had to die, was the belief that homosexuality is morally disgusting. Until the gay rights movement ran this pernicious belief out of town, it was not possible to respectably discuss same sex marriage in mainstream American society, except as a boogieman. Indeed, same-sex love was formally criminalized, and many bars that catered to the lesbian and gay community routinely suffered police raids and abuse. Calling for same sex marriage would have been like calling for equal respect for rapists and murderers.
There are, of course, still too many Americans who think that homosexuality is inherently, morally disgusting, and that gay[*] people are simply sick. But that is no longer a respectable view in mainstream American politics. Even politicians who oppose SSM are at great pains to explain that they’ve got nothing at all against gay people.
When gay people were morally gross, opposition to SSM was the unspoken default position throughout society. No one needed to explain why gay couples shouldn’t be mixed with marriage, any more than we need to explain why we shouldn’t mix cake batter with cat hair. Gay marriage was almost unthinkable.
Once gay activists defeated the belief in the inherent immorality of being gay, however, all sorts of previously unthinkable thoughts began to be thunk. For most young Americans today, saying that being gay is immoral makes no more sense than saying the color blue is immoral.
4. Separate Spheres
The second argument that had to die was the ideology of separate spheres. To quote a tenth-grade classroom handout, separate spheres was “a set of ideas, originating in the early 19th century. These beliefs assigned to women and men distinctive and virtually opposite duties, functions, personal characteristics, and legitimate spheres of activity.”
If women had to raise the children, take care of the house, and feed the hubby while men had to go out, produce in the world and bring home the bacon, then it didn’t make any sense to say that two women or two men could get married. If two women get married, then who will earn the money? If two men get married, would they have to hire a woman to change the diapers and cook dinner?
Separate spheres wasn’t just an informal ideology (an ideology that, it should be mentioned, was never applied to poor women or to women of color in the same way, since it was mainly middle-class white women who were expected to be able to achieve “true womanhood”). It was also reflected in the economy and in law. When I was born, for example, newspaper “help wanted” ads were still divided into two sections — women’s jobs and men’s jobs. (The men’s jobs, generally speaking, came with higher pay and prestige).
Earlier than that, separate spheres in marriage were legally enforced with coverture laws. From wikipedia‘s description of coverture:
As it has been pithily expressed, husband and wife were one person as far as the law was concerned, and that person was the husband. A married woman could not own property, sign legal documents or enter into a contract, obtain an education against her husband’s wishes, or keep a salary for herself. If a wife was permitted to work, under the laws of coverture she was required to relinquish her wages to her husband.
But just as the gay rights movement destroyed the belief that gays were morally deficient, the women’s rights movement (later called feminism) gradually destroyed separate spheres ideology. Coverture laws were undone, in piecemeal fashion, by the Married Women’s Property Laws of the mid to late 19th century. Women entered the workplace in increasing numbers (helped along by World War 2), and laws against discrimination eliminated the most overt sexl discrimination in employment, although covert sex discrimination still goes on.
Meanwhile, the figure of the househusband began appearing in popular culture, in movies like Kramer vs Kramer and Mr. Mom, and TV shows like My Two Dads. The numbers of stay-at-home Dads, while small, nearly tripled from 1987 to 2007.
If women can work and men can raise children, then the other major argument against same-sex marriage stops making sense. Women and men aren’t confined to separate spheres; it’s not impossible for two women or two men to become a family and raise children.
Of course, a descendant of separate spheres ideology is still part of the SSM debate today. It’s common to hear SSM opponents argue that children need to be raised by a father and a mother. But the argument carries much less force, and makes less intuitive sense, than it did a century ago. And (as I’ll discuss in a future post), the social science does not support the belief that children raised by same-sex couples are harmed or deprived.
5. A Stool With One Leg
Consider the arguments against SSM to be a standard, three-legged stool.
One leg of the stool is the belief that gay people are too morally disgusting to be included in marriage or anything else decent. That leg has been cut off completely (at least, in mainstream discourse).
One leg is the belief that women are gruesomely harmed by having to interact with the world and earn a living, while men are morally and mentally incapable of taking care of home and children. This leg, if it is hanging on at all, is hanging on by a splinter.
A third leg remains. This is the leg that says that heterosexual marriages will, in some extremely hard to explain manner, be terribly harmed if same-sex couples can legally marry. And as even opponents of SSM sometimes admit, this leg of the stool is, for many Americans, neither simple nor intuitive.
Let’s face it — with only that third leg holding the stool up, the case against SSM is, well, wobbly. I don’t think it’ll bear a lot of weight for very long.
But my point is, the greatest barriers to SSM fell for reasons that had nothing to do with the SSM debate. The moral disgust for gay people was, itself, morally disgusting, and nearly everyone — even most prominent SSM opponents — agrees that our culture is much improved with this stool leg gone. Separate spheres ideology was sexist and unfair and grievously harmed many women, and virtually no one today wants a return to coverture or “male and female” want ads.
These two large and inescapable trends — gay rights, and women’s rights — were, nearly everyone agrees, of enormous benefit to society. Bringing SSM into mainstream debate was, frankly, sort of a side effect. But it’s a side effect I for one am very glad of.
[*] I’m using the term “gay” to include lesbians, gay men, and bisexual people of all sexes.
::applauds::
Sticking bisexuals in a footnote != being inclusive. “Gay” doesn’t mean “… and bisexual” to readers, even if it does to you.
I’m wholeheartedly tired of the way SSM supporters have consistently worded bisexuals out of the picture. Bisexual activist Robyn Ochs was one of the first women in Massachusetts to marry her same-sex partner, and the headline was “Lesbian couples wed.” Other bisexuals have been similarly misidentified in the media, and there’ve been controversies over marriage lawsuits only including gays and lesbians even when bisexuals wanted to take part, not to mention the less-than-inclusive language used by SSM supporters. Every press release, every news article, seems to be about “gays and lesbians”.
Every time something reminds me of Alas and I click over, I run into this kind of language within minutes, get sick of it, and leave. This time I didn’t even have to read more than one post. I don’t see why a progressive blog is so into the idea that some sexual orientations count, and some are afterthoughts.
Amp consulted me, a bisexual woman, about what terminology to use there. He preferred the term “queer,” but worried that using it in this context–in which the posts are being written primarily for an audience that’s hostile to queer people–it would encourage hostile people to appropriate and misuse the term queer.
I said the word “gay” worked best for me out of the available options–in context–and was something I (again, as a bisexual woman) perceived as inclusive.
Thanks, Mandolin. I should point out that not all of the audience at FSB is hostile to queer people; but there are some who are.
Tracy, on my next post I’ll experiment with some other terminology. Given my concern about using the term “queer” on FSB, what would you suggest?
fwiw I read the footnote as a simplification that was being made for a non-queer-friendly audience; I do think grouping all queers under the heading of ‘gay’ encourages the already pervasive tendency to put homosexual men front and centre of the queer movement, but in the context of moral abhorrence that’s where they always were. Most moral abhorrence rants totally ignore(d) the fact that queer women even exist. There’s probably still more hostility about men marrying men than about women marrying women.
I think grouping all queers under one heading can always lead to trouble, because IRL we’re not all treated the same, and heterosexism presents different risks to different subgroups. But for the purpose of learning exercises it cuts out a lot of potential digressions.
‘LGBT’ might work?
I’m with Mandolin. As a queer-identified bisexual person, I prefer gay (with the footnote) as the better option given the context of this post. But of course looking for options that are more inclusive but still unlikely to be misconstrued is even better.
When I lived in the UK I saw the term lesbigay fairly often. I think it says what you’re trying to say, and it is less alphabet soup-like than BLG, which looks like some kind of strange sandwich. On the other hand, most readers won’t have ever heard of it.
(Also, long-time reader finally delurking. Hi all!)
This is a great, straightforward post Amp. I really admire your ability to write for difficult audiences.
I was interested in the blog because of its name – I am a marriage and family therapist, and a scholar, so the idea of “family scholars” was intriguing. But looking at the blog, I feel uneasy – the sidebar on “American Values” was primarily responsible for that, and it was helped along by the rather negative tone of the few publications under their “mothers” heading compared to those under the “fathers” heading. But I can’t see a statement anywhere about what the blog is really about or for. Who is it, and what’s its intended audience?
I’m part of the Family Scholars audience, and I’ve been supporting marriage equity for 20 years.
I don’t know if it quite solves the dilemma of bisexuals feeling left out, but if we talk in terms of a person having the right to marry another person, irrespective of gender, I think that it’s more inclusive than talking about the right of one man to marry another man and the right of one woman to marry another woman.
Excellent post. Another factor influencing the rate of acceptance of same sex marriage, are the lives of those gay couples who have married. In California, in the 5 months of 2008 when gay marriage was legal, 18,000 gay couples married. In the 2 years since, they have talked to and had dinner with a lot of friends, family, neighbors, other parents at their kids’ schools, etc. Word is spreading to their peers and people of all ages. For those gay married couples with children, we see other families accepting their gay friends who have children as completely normal. The last leg is getting rather weathered or worn, with some big cracks in it.
Elusis, “Family Scholars Blog” is the house blog of the Institute for American Values. The Institute is headed by David Blankenhorn, who is (among many other things) arguably the leading intellectual voice of the anti-SSM-movement. (He is also the director of the more overtly anti-SSM iMAPP). He’s also very interested in fatherhood, and in thrift. Another major voice at the Institute for American Values is Elizabeth Marquardt, who has also spoken against SSM, but her recent focus has been on opposing the culture of divorce, and the practice of creating children via egg or sperm donation.
You can read their “about” page here, which is probably the best way to get an impression of them. One thing I find curious is their affiliated website IjtihadReason, which I haven’t looked at before today.
Welcome, Libractivist, and thanks for delurking! And welcome to Peter as well — nice to see you here. And welcome to Mike, too.
Libractivist, I like the word, but I worry about the exclusion of trans from lesbigay. Maybe I should just go with LGBT…
Mike, I agree; the more people know same-sex-couples and their families, the more support SSM will have.
Ah…I assumed from your footnote that you were specifically addressing sexual orientation here and not gender identity. Of course, if you’re also referring to gender identity then LGBT would be the way to go (and I definitely think that in that case simply using the word “gay” is too reductive.)
You could also go more along the lines of what Peter was saying and simply refer to same-sex partners, which is really what this is about: not the rights of LGBT people to get married (which they can do in het relationships), but the rights of people of the same sex to marry each other, regardless of orientation.
Mandolin, if you’re fine with the usage, that’s wonderful, but I hope you will keep in mind that many bisexuals aren’t. I founded the first bisexual group in my state, years ago, and local gay and lesbian organizations wouldn’t list our information (because, they told me, they were “gay and lesbian” organizations.) My girlfriend and I were turned away at the door of one meeting. “Gay” may be inclusive for you, but for many – as far as I can tell, most – people, it means “and not bisexual.”
If anyone would like some empirical data on this, try telling someone “He’s gay and married to a woman.” I feel safe in predicting that what you’ll get back is “Then he’s not gay, he’s bisexual” or “But why would you stay married to a woman if you’re gay?”, because for decades now “gay” has meant “gay men”. What it means to the speaker matters less than what it communicates to the reader.
In the US, “lesbigay” turned up briefly after the big push of bisexual activism in the early 90s, but quickly gave way to GLBT or LGBT with the wave of trans activism that followed. (GLBT used to be more common, but now LGBT has passed it up*.) The last time I ran into it was in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, and I immediately flipped back to the front to see when the book came out because I hadn’t heard “lesbigay” in years and it felt dated.
Despite the big push in the 90s for “queer” as an umbrella term, it isn’t in very wide usage now outside academia. That isn’t a slam on people who use “queer” themselves, just a note that it hasn’t caught on. (In addition to the concern about the response of straight audiences to “queer”, I want to point out that lots of LGBT people dislike it. I’m thinking in particular of a NGLTF poll from some years ago that found that the overwhelming majority of black LGBT people viewed “queer” very negatively.)
At this point in time, LGBT is the most commonly-used inclusive term for describing individual people (you can always define it the first time it’s used if your audience might not be familiar with it). Even CNN uses it, and you can’t get more mainstream than that. (For relationships, “same-sex partner,” “same-sex relationship” usually work best.)
“LGBT” might seem a little odd in the context of marriage equality – isn’t this a question of sexual orientation, and not gender identity? But it’s worth remembering that the current marriage laws don’t just affect trans people who are gay, lesbian, or bisexual – they also affect trans people who aren’t. Christie Lee Littleton and J’Noel Gardiner, for example, were trans women who’d married men, only to have the courts invalidate their marriages. (Just to be clear, I don’t think legalizing same-sex marriage is the right way to fix that particular problem – what Littleton and Gardner needed, what justice demanded, was for the legal system to recognize gender reassignment. My point is that the court decisions against them relied on a legal definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman.)
Finally, I want to point out that this isn’t just a question of preferred terminology. The idea that monosexuals have real relationships, and bisexuals don’t, is a major component of biphobia. When the same-sex marriage debate is presented as “Gays’ and lesbians’ relationships deserve the same dignity and protection as straight people’s,” that framing perpetuates biphobia.
* I think it’s because of the syllable structure, but that’s another story. And see how footnotes feel like incidental information that isn’t all that important and can safely be skimmed past?
I don’t prefer the usage of LGBT for this kind of writing (i.e. for hostile audiences) because of the dismissive reactions to it as “alphabet soup” and whatever other silly notions people have.
And frankly, Tracy, it doesn’t seem to be me who’s saying that all bisexual people have to feel the same way about the word–it seems to be you who’s claiming that, given your feeling that it was so offensive that it was evidence of why you don’t read Alas. Just saying, sometimes people of good faith who are part of your own group aren’t going to agree with you, and that’s not evidence of ignorance, just evidence of disagreement.
Perhaps I should be clearer about something, actually: I don’t really care whether “gay” was the best term to use here. Perhaps it wasn’t, and I gave bad advice. That’s cool; hearing people’s objections, I think it’s even probably the case, not because there’s something inherently wrong with the use of the word “gay” here, but because investment in other terms seems high.
My point is that the word “gay” can be used in non-ignorance and good faith and your implication otherwise is annoying.
I’m done responding to this now.
I am so, so, so, so, so, SO glad that that graph looks exactly like a penis. That made my day.
Mandolin: Totally agreed.
Libractivist: I usually do use “same-sex couples” when discussing SSM. For this one particular post — which was not just about same-sex couples, but also the way that the growth of LGBT rights made the SSM debate possible — I don’t think that would have worked.
Tracy: Thanks for your second post (which I found much more persuasive than your first post), and especially for your point as to why it’s necessary to say “LGBT” rather than “lesbigay” when talking about SSM.
On the whole, “queer” and “LGBT” seem like the best terms to use to me, from the perspective of making the most sense and being the most inclusive and accurate. (It’s true that there are LGBT who dislike “queer,” but I’ve also met LGBT who dislike “alphabet soup.” There is no universally approved of term.)
But I think (as Mandolin pointed out) the “best” terms may also be the least effective terms to use when the goal is to speak and be heard outside of our usual circles. Many readers, if they see terminology they’re not familiar with, become hostile and dismissive; so from that perspective, it’s usually best to use more familiar terms.
I think the use of the word “gay” in this post made sense. The point of the post seems to be to educate and persuade people who aren’t already on our side, and so it’s a good idea to use language that is as accessible as possible to the target audience, which “queer” probably isn’t. Terminology is important, and bi invisibility is frustrating, but for the purposes of this post, I think “gay” may have the best chance of being both short and non-alienating. The post is trying to discuss opposition to marriage equality*, not to get everyone to understand all the issues and complexities of the gay rights movement. Plus, some people are still offended by the use of “queer” and don’t think it’s been reclaimed yet.
That said, language and terminology issues are both important and interesting, and it would be cool if we could come up with a term that works for everyone.
*which, speaking of terminology, is the term I prefer to SSM, since it puts the focus on the equality aspect.
I think it’s worth noting that Elizabeth Marquardt has supported civil unions going back to when that was considered a progressive position.
Sam, you said what I was too timid to “point” out.
Elizabeth Marquardt has always been, as far as I can determine, an intellectually honest person whose experiences being raised by a ‘serial marrier’ have led her to be strongly in favor of intact families.
If Amp’s over at FSB I may take a look. I quit reading a while ago because I got very tired of Brad Wilcox’s belief that twisting facts, selectively stating the results of research and disappearing from a discussion when asked to support your points are all perfectly justified in the service of making sure women get the fuck back into the kitchen. That, and a couple of moderators who stopped applying the rules to IAV posters. Maybe they’ve gotten better?
I beg your pardon. I’ve never claimed that there is, or needs to be, a universal consensus. You may be inferring, but that doesn’t mean I’m implying. But please, if it makes you happy, put words in my mouth and announce that you’re done with me; the world needs more happiness.
While there may not be a perfect wording choice, there are better and worse ones. It sounds from the above comments as though Ampersand went to one individual bisexual he knew instead of looking at, or asking, how people have dealt with this in the past. I think if he’d e-mailed one of the bisexual activists who’s been prominent working on marriage equality, or posed the question in a bisexual activism forum, he would have seen that inclusive language is a high priority for a lot of people in the community – and even if he couldn’t find something that pleased everyone, he could have chosen from the available options based on what’s widely used in general, or needs the least explanation, or whatever seems best for this particular article. There are plenty of words that are more inclusive than “gay” and less marginalizing than that footnote.
Ironically, I’d been reading Axe Cop and glanced at the artist’s blog to find him berating a bisexual South Asian woman for her critique of Scott Pilgrim. There was a real sense of “I, a straight white man, have the authority to tell you, a bisexual South Asian woman, how to feel about this.” (The artist, Ethan Nicolle, later apologized and put a South Asian superheroine in the strip as an olive branch.) I vaguely remembered there was a straight white man with progressive politics who did a webcomic, and tried to Google it up – and the first thing I find is this post.
(Edited because I left out this part) I’d hoped for an antidote to that sense of “these people count more than those people,” but this post seems like a different flavor of it. I’m actually more bothered by the footnote than I would be by the same post without it, because while – as others have said elsewhere – it’s no fun to see same-sex marriage framed as a problem for gays and lesbians and not for us, I can at least tell myself that the author probably hasn’t thought of bisexuals at all. Here, the author is clearly aware of the problem, but still hasn’t used inclusive language. It reminds me of all the books I saw growing up that had a little sentence in the introduction that said “I’m going to use he and men, but when I do, that includes women, of course.” The issues at
Not sure what happened – the comment saved automatically while I was in mid-sentence and won’t seem to let me re-edit. I apologize for the rough wording of the edited section, since I would normally have re-read before posting.)
Anyway. The issues at stake are different, but continuing to use exclusive language while including a note saying it was meant inclusively isn’t the direction that non-sexist writing has gone. I think there are good reasons for that, and I don’t think it’s worth trying the next time there are calls for inclusive language.
Tracy, you stated in your last comment that “there are plenty of words that are more inclusive than ‘gay’ and less marginalizing than that footnote” and I’m sure that there must be. But even though Amp asked you directly what terminology you would suggest, the only thing you seem to have offered is “LGBT” which others have disagreed with as an effective term, and Lesbigay, which you yourself say is dated. I’m curious as to what these other words are that you think are more inclusive. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of any outside of what has been presented in the comments here, and if there are better words, I certainly want to start using them.
I prefer LGBT; trans people do have a stake in this discussion, as other commenters have pointed out. And I have strong doubts about preferring any term because it elides groups that are less palatable to gay-marriage fencesitters. That’s not good politics, or good rhetoric.
If there’s no single adequate word, then you just use more than one. Why not, “gay, lesbian, trans, and bisexual?” Or, “people in same-sex partnerships?” Elegant sentences are not as important as saying what you mean, it’s no more clumsy than, “men and women,” or, “gay and straight married couples.”
If there’s no single adequate word, then you just use more than one. Why not, “gay, lesbian, trans, and bisexual?” Or, “people in same-sex partnerships?” Elegant sentences are not as important as saying what you mean, it’s no more clumsy than, “men and women,” or, “gay and straight married couples.”
This. Absolutely!
And I definitely saw Amp making that effort in the OP…There’s always room to discuss terminology, particularly when talking about such a diverse group of people, and someone is always liable to be offended or left out. But I tend to give kudos to those who have put thought into the words they use to characterize a community to determine whether they’re the most appropriate and descriptive. Whether that turns out to be the usage that I would have chosen is not, in the end, the real issue.