- Good article by Adam Haslett in The New Yorker. The article covers a lot of topics, but here’s my favorite bit:
What effect will allowing men to marry men and women to marry women have on our peculiarly modern venture of marriage? Proponents typically say that it will have hardly any—that there is no shortage of marriage licenses, and all that will happen is that more citizens and their children will have the benefits of existing family law. The opposition argues that one of the organizing institutions of our society will be imperilled.
History suggests that neither view is quite accurate. Despite comparisons to the repeal of miscegenation laws, no other expansion of the marriage franchise—to the sterile, to slaves, or to interracial couples—has required an alteration in the basic definition of the term: the union of a man and woman as husband and wife. To discount this as mere semantics misses what the definition points up: that marriage, through all its incarnations, has been a procedure that assigns people a new identity based on their gender. For centuries, it has been the ceremony that makes males into husbands and females into wives. Until very recently, this meant a lifetime commitment to both the security and the constriction of a well-defined social role. The symbolic danger that gay marriage poses to such an arrangement is obvious. It alters the public meaning of the word by further draining it of its power to reinforce traditional expectations of behavior. What does it mean to be a husband in a world where a man could have one of his own? This is up to each individual couple, one is tempted to say. Fair enough; but the words we use to describe our relationships are shared cultural property. There is no private language. In this sense, granting the word “marriage” to gay couples will eventually affect everyone.
The mistake is to consider the change in meaning particularly drastic. After all, undoing customary expectations for how a husband and wife behave toward each other has been one of the goals of the women’s movement since its inception. Rather than an abrupt departure, same-sex marriage is the culmination of a larger and ultimately more consequential change in the nature of marital relations between men and women.
Which is one of the reasons that the opposition to it is so fierce. It has come to symbolize what is, historically speaking, radical about contemporary marriage: the decline of the patriarchal legal structure and the rise of the goal of self-fulfillment. Gay marriage is unsettling, to many, not because it departs from modern meanings of matrimony but because it embodies them.
- Gabriel Rosenberg discusses no fault-divorce. My favorite bit:
Later in the forum (1:11:20) Wood was asked whether she would support an amendment for a uniform national policy on divorce. She said no, because divorce did not alter the definition of marriage. I disagree. Whether marriage is a lifetime commitment, or just a temporary arrangement seems to me to be a much bigger difference in the definition of marriage than viewing one’s spouse as a human being without reference to gender.
- The Washington Post compares same-sex-marriage-and-marriage-lite polls in red states and blue states. Majorities in both blue states and “purple” (i.e., swing) states favor either gay marriage or a marriage-lite alternative, although it’s just barely a majority in the purple states.
- The first (and likely the last) time I’ll ever be quoted by Andrew Sullivan. That same post (the one about abortion rates and lesbian & gay rights in Europe) was also linked to by pro-SSM conservative Steve Miller. This is a nice benefit of Marriage Debate, without which neither Miller nor Sullivan would be likely to come across anything I write. (Thanks Eve!)
- The Conjecturer fisks “Focus on the Family.”
- Gay Marriage? Been there, done that, Dutch say.
- Max Boot of the conservative Weekly Standard argues that The Right Can’t Win This Fight.
Over on Marriage Debate, Joel Bruhn makes a similar argument, writing:
Gays in this country mostly do NOT agree with us here, and being citizens, taxpayers, and voters, are fully entitled to lobby accordingly. And they’ve been far more effective in persuading the public on this issue than have the conservatives who oppose them.Others have correctly noted that it is mostly judges, and not voters, who have been giving gay-marriage advocates their latest victories, but I see that point as basically irrelevant here. Gay marriage has seen popular support rising steadily for many years now, and this trend isn’t going to reverse. We’re already past the point where a federal marriage amendment could find sufficient support to be passed, and momentum is on their side, so we’d better make a contingency plan.
Eve disagrees, noting that “until quite recently (about a year or so ago) I hadn’t heard strong, cogent, secular arguments against same-sex marriage.” That’s true, but a year later, I for one still haven’t heard any strong, cogent, secular arguments against same-sex marriage. :-P
More “supporting legal immigration” news: At least two Oregon nonprofits – and I suspect, many similar ones across the country…
Haslett pulls a quick semantic trick of his own by declaring man and woman turns into husband and wife. There’s an implied equality in that balance–but it’s not true. “Husband” is not an identity and never has been in the way that “wife” is.
I was a bit disturbed by The Conjecturer’s fisking of Focus on the Family. I’m very familiar with FOTF from my fundy days. I couldn’t stand it even then. It seems that in fisking FOTF, The Conjecturer thought it was okay to throw a few overgeneralized potshots at divorced families, especially single and divorced mothers without actually citing them by name. I knew my unease was warranted when I saw long-discredited “fatherlessness” statistics used to discredit FOTF’s doomsday wailing about gay marriage. FOTF has never been concerned about “motherlessness” in divorce. “Fatherlessness” is a different story entirely. If supporting gay marriage means bashing single and divorced moms to show that divorce is more of a threat to traditional marriage than gay marriage would ever be, I want no part of supporting gay marriage.
Obviously, Trish, supporting gay marriage does not require bashing single and divorced moms. And I have to admit, I didn’t read all of that – I just skimmed it. I linked it becaase I thought it was interesting to see someone from a relatively right-wing and definitely Christian perspective bashing FOTF.
In retrospect, linking it may have been a mistake.
“Obviously, Trish, supporting gay marriage does not require bashing single and divorced moms.”
Oh, I know it doesn’t. What’s bothering me is that I’ve seen the “attack divorce” angle used to defend gay marriage several times. I can’t remember exactly where because it was awhile ago. It does come up in the discussion, though. I think linking to the article was a good idea because it gives a chance to bring up how single and divorced parents (esp. moms) and divorcees in general have been slapped around a bit in the arguments defending gay marriage. You know women file for the most divorces. I support gay marriage, and it’s a good idea to stand up to these ridiculous doomsday arguments from the religious right/traditional marriage crowd. However, I think that some people who are using the “divorce is more of a threat to traditional marriage than gay marriage” angle have to be careful that they don’t rake another group over the coals in the process – in particular, mothers who choose to divorce and raise their children on their own and single mothers. They get bashed enough as it is.
I’m not even sure that divorce is really a threat to traditional marriage. People are still getting married. The way I see it, bad marriages are a threat to marriage. More people are leaving bad marriages because they can, and people are waiting longer to marry so that they may establish themselves in life first – and so that they avoid bad marriages.
Well, there’s two versions of the “attack divorce” argument though. One is serious, in that they seriously believe that divorce is a problem and that the law needs to go after that right. But the vast majority of people I have heard use that argument don’t mean it–they are drawing attention to the lie that is the “protecting traditional marriage” argument and trying to force their opponents to admit that their real reasons are usually plain ol’ homophobia.
Most of us supporters are pointing out an inconsistency in a particular anti-SSM argument, not bashing single parents. We’re saying that, using SSM opponents’ definition of both “bad” and “family” (as far as I’m concerned, a same-sex parent and his or her child is a family), divorce is in fact worse than SSM–literally, divorce breaks a family apart, and marriage creates one. Since most SSM opponents aren’t interested in banning divorce, their position makes no sense.
I don’t think it implies a value judgement at all. It seems to me that, aside from abuse, most choices parents make for their families won’t lead to disaster. The rest of us should just stay out of it. We already do for heterosexual couples.
There is no secular argument against same-sex marraige. The entire issue is religious in nature, making it technically outside of the government’s domain in the first place. Banning same-sex marraige would in effect be imposing a state religion, and none of us want that. It infringes upon our right as Americans to choose our own religion, by discriminating against those religions that are more tolerant of homosexuality.
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