{"id":11143,"date":"2010-09-09T17:06:01","date_gmt":"2010-09-10T00:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11143"},"modified":"2010-09-09T17:06:01","modified_gmt":"2010-09-10T00:06:01","slug":"the-justified-end-of-the-two-strongest-arguments-against-same-sex-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11143","title":{"rendered":"The Justified End Of The Two Strongest Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"

[I’m guest-blogging on Family Scholars Blog for the next three months. No, really, I am. Really. Anyway, here’s my first post<\/a>. It’s also cross-posted on “TADA”; the usual arguments against SSM should be expressed on FSB or on TADA, but not on “Alas.”<\/p>\n

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]<\/em><\/p>\n

1. Thanks So Much, Lovely To Be Here.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

2. The Explosive Growth of support for Same-Sex Marriage<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

SSM isn’t winning many votes, but the trends are on SSM’s side. This <\/a>can’t be a cheerful graph for any opponent of marriage equality to consider:<\/p>\n

\"American<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/a>).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

So what had happened before the late 1980s to bring this about?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

3. The Argument That Gay People Are Morally Disgusting<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> that they’ve got nothing at all against gay people.<\/p>\n

When gay people were morally gross, opposition to SSM was the unspoken default position throughout society. No one needed to explain <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

4. Separate Spheres<\/strong><\/p>\n

The second argument that had to die was the ideology of separate spheres. To quote a tenth-grade classroom handout<\/a>, 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.”<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

Earlier than that, separate spheres in marriage were legally enforced with coverture laws. From wikipedia<\/a>‘s description of coverture:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the figure of the househusband began appearing in popular culture, in movies like Kramer vs Kramer <\/em>and Mr. Mom<\/em>, and TV shows like My Two Dads<\/em>. The numbers of stay-at-home Dads, while small, nearly tripled<\/a> from 1987 to 2007.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

5. A Stool With One Leg<\/strong><\/p>\n

Consider the arguments against SSM to be a standard, three-legged stool.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

[*] I’m using the term “gay” to include lesbians, gay men, and bisexual people of all sexes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crossposted-on-tada","category-same-sex-marriage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11143\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}