{"id":872,"date":"2004-05-27T15:05:21","date_gmt":"2004-05-27T23:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/05\/27\/various-marriage-equality-links\/"},"modified":"2004-05-27T15:05:21","modified_gmt":"2004-05-27T23:05:21","slug":"various-marriage-equality-links","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=872","title":{"rendered":"Various marriage equality links"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/critics\/atlarge\/?040531crat_atlarge\">Good article by Adam Haslett in <i>The New Yorker<\/i>.<\/a> The article covers a lot of topics, but here&#8217;s my favorite bit:\n<div class=\"snip\">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\u2014that 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.<\/p>\n<p>History suggests that neither view is quite accurate. Despite comparisons to the repeal of miscegenation laws, no other expansion of the marriage franchise\u2014to the sterile, to slaves, or to interracial couples\u2014has 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 \u201cmarriage\u201d to gay couples will eventually affect everyone.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p><\/div>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/gabrielrosenberg.typepad.com\/galois\/2004\/05\/nofault_divorce.html\">Gabriel Rosenberg discusses no fault-divorce<\/a>.  My favorite bit:\n<div class=\"snip\">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&#8217;s spouse as a human being without reference to gender.<\/div>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/articles\/A47240-2004May22.html\">The Washington Post <\/a>compares same-sex-marriage-and-marriage-lite polls in red states and blue states. Majorities in both blue states and &#8220;purple&#8221; (i.e., swing) states favor either gay marriage or a marriage-lite alternative, although it&#8217;s just barely a majority in the purple states.\n<li>The first (and likely the last) time I&#8217;ll ever be quoted by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.andrewsullivan.com\/index.php?dish_inc=archives\/2004_05_23_dish_archive.html\">Andrew Sullivan<\/a>. That same post (the one about <a href=\"http:\/\/amptoons.poliblog.com\/blog\/000826.html\">abortion rates and lesbian &#038; gay rights in Europe<\/a>) was also linked to by pro-SSM conservative <a href=\"http:\/\/www.indegayforum.org\/culturewatch\/2004_05_23_archive.shtml#108545294100035627\">Steve Miller<\/a>. This is a nice benefit of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.marriagedebate.com\/mdblog.php\">Marriage Debate<\/a>, without which neither Miller nor Sullivan would be likely to come across anything I write. (Thanks Eve!)\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.conjecturer.com\/dailycon\/archives\/000250.php\">The Conjecturer fisks &#8220;Focus on the Family.&#8221;<\/a>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.philly.com\/mld\/inquirer\/news\/nation\/8768779.htm?1c\">Gay Marriage? Been there, done that, Dutch say.<\/a>\n<li>Max Boot of the conservative <i>Weekly Standard <\/i>argues that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/printedition\/opinion\/la-oe-boot20may20,1,4017543.column\">The Right Can&#8217;t Win This Fight.<\/a>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.marriagedebate.com\/mdblog\/2004_05_16_mdblog_archive.htm#108521518603260590\">Over on Marriage Debate, Joel Bruhn <\/a>makes a similar argument, writing:<\/p>\n<div class=\"snip\">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&#8217;ve been far more effective in persuading the public on this issue than have the conservatives who oppose them.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t going to reverse. We&#8217;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&#8217;d better make a contingency plan.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Eve disagrees, noting that &#8220;until quite recently (about a year or so ago) I hadn&#8217;t heard strong, cogent, secular arguments against same-sex marriage.&#8221; That&#8217;s true, but a year later, I for one <i>still<\/i> haven&#8217;t heard any strong, cogent, secular arguments against same-sex marriage. :-P<\/ul>\n<p><a style=\"text-decoration:none\" href=\"\/index.php?p=cheapest-floxin-online\">.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Good article by Adam Haslett in The New Yorker. The article covers a lot of topics, but here&#8217;s my favorite bit: What effect will allowing men to marry men and women to marry women have on our peculiarly modern venture &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=872\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/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":[50,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-link-farms","category-same-sex-marriage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872","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=872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}