A post by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore at AlterNet: this one is so stereotypical it's almost a caricature, old-style PC-leftist queer polemic. I haven't seen anything this self-absorbed in about twenty years. Longer.The gist of the argument: Why are you wasting time on gay marriage when all the causes I've managed to collect on my wish list haven't been taken care of yet? And there doesn't seem to be much actual reasoning involved.
Piece O' Crap.
On the other side of the issue, this piece by Greta Cristina goes into the reasons why "marriage" is important, and why civil unions and domestic partnerships aren't good enough. Another example of those who are discussing what marriage really means.
She is not the first commentator to discuss this aspect of it. Andrew Sullivan has, in a round-about way and on a purely personal level; it was an integral part of the reasoning of both the Massachusetts and California courts' decisions; I've discussed it before; and Dan Blatt has discussed it, in what I consider somewhat cursory fashion, while decrying the fact that no one else has, which is obviously not the case: those are only the few I remember specifically.
Cristina lays it out pretty concisely and almost elegantly. Marriage has a social weight that domestic partnerships and civil unions don't have, and probably never will have. (My own thought is that within twenty or thirty years, those will be historical curiosities, no more than that -- about the time that our kids' kids are starting to think about it.) There was, in fact, an NYT article that went into the question pretty thoroughly some years back, and said much the same things that Cristina has said.
It's a life stage that we have been denied. I think that even those who consider themselves "liberal" and "tolerant" still see us as children (hell -- I know they do) because we haven't "settled down," which is another thing that marriage denotes: you've grown up and become a member in full of the community, taking your place with the other adults. (I also see a feedback loop there, in the realm of self-fulfilling prophecies: treat us like kids, we'll act like kids.)
In a post at Bilerico Project, Alex Blaze tackles the "legitimacy" question, based on comments from a previous post by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, which is just as knee-jerk intolerant as the one noted at the beginning of this commentary. The commenters, and Blaze, actually do show some careful thought, but few even touch on the social context. (Full Disclosure: I have a degree in psychology coupled with an extensive reading background in anthropology and sociology. Looking at social context and legitimacy in certain institutions is almost a reflex with me. I have to remember, sometimes, that not everyone has that background.)
That said, what becomes important to remember in discussions of "what marriage means" and "legitimacy" is that social status (and this is not to mean rank, but rather one's functional place in the group) as at least a partial definition is one of the givens of any human society. (Please spare the me cries of outrage at being defined by others -- if you're not getting it, stop and think about it for a minute.) I really wish I could remember when I read that NYT article, because it went into some good detail on that very issue: "married"means that members of the group, the society, automatically see you and your spouse as a social unit, they know where you fit, and it increases their comfort level and their ability to deal with you as part of the group. You have an additional layer of context, which serves to make social interactions smoother.
In our society, in which formal marriage arrangements are the norm (as opposed to, say, medieval Europe, where the wealthy were most likely to be married in a ceremony, while the poor just moved in together and declared themselves married), the social and the legal are at this point inextricably intertwined. I'm always amused at the "libertarians" who say "get government out of the marriage business." As if. The government's in it, the government's going to stay in it, and that's perfectly justifiable: among its more numinous aspects, marriage is still a contract, and the government has a legitimate interest in seeing that contracts are adhered to.
And, when it boils down to it, that's really all that needs to be said about what marriage means in a social context. What marriage means to each couple is for them to decide.
2 comments:
Great post.
I think a lot of the problem is that we interlace the social/cultural context and institution of marriage with the legal institution. While it may be faster and easier to assume that marriage means for everyone (that people want their spouses to make medical decisions for them if they can't, that people want to have their visa tied to the whim of their spouse, etc.), I don't think it's the best system legally. A survey a while ago (that I can't find right now) found that around 30% of Chicago married people did not want their legal spouses making medical decisions for them if they couldn't. Nancy Polikoff's recent book on marriage is a great read on this subject.
Mainly, I was talking about the legal definition of marriage, about the contract itself, and I do hope that it loses some of its cache (like getting rid of the link between health care and marriage by moving to a single-payer system). In my humble opinion, we can all get married right now in the cultural sense, just have a religious ceremony or a great, secular party. Some people won't recognize it, but there are lots of people who don't recognize legal gay marriages that are happening now anyway because they're bastards.
I'm thinking that separating the legal and cultural institutions is a better way of moving towards gay marriage (e.g. churches won't be forced to marry same-sex couples), along with attempts to expand the rights associated with it beyond marriage.
That said, Mattilda is a good person. I consider her a personal friend, and she makes some brilliant points on the subject. I'm glad that we have people like her pushing the edges of what we think is reasonable, even if we don't always agree.
Andrew "no fatties or femmes" Sullivan, on the other hand, well, I've never had the pleasure.
Alex -- thanks for responding, and you do bring up some interesting points.
I don't think it's possible to separate the legal and social aspects of marriage completely, or even mostly -- the law, like everything else, grows out of the social context. The history of equal rights for gays is a prime illustration. There's a synergy there that illustrates the feedback between public opinion and the law quite nicely.
Marriage itself has undergone radical transformations in the last 150 years, and has become a much more egalitarian institution. The legalities have struggled to keep pace, as usual, the law being one of the more conservative aspects of our society (which in my opinion is all to the good -- you can change the legal framework, but you should think about it very carefully).
As for the details -- medical decisions and the like: that 30% can do what everyone's been telling us to do for a generation or so -- draw up a medical power of attorney. The whole point here is that the law does not mandate that the spouse shall make those decisions, but gives the spouse the right to make those decisions. We seem to have a habit in this country of translating "may" into "must."
Some of your remarks illustrate the degree to which the right-wing mantras have worked their way into the dialogue: no one, for example, is seriously considering forcing churches to perform same-sex marriages (again, "may" does not equal "must"), not even those cynics on the right who use it as another scare tactic. (There are always, of course, the self-absorbed idiots who think that reality must fit their dreams, but there's no getting rid of them, I'm afraid. So let them sue their local Baptist church -- and get laughed out of court. Fortunately, they're not a dominant force.)
Yes, we can get "married" right now, and call ourselves "married," and probably persuade a lot of people to act as if it's true, but that route involves a lot of extra effort. I'm perfectly happy to get married legally (note to self: find husband) and avoid all the work of reminding everyone that I'm hitched. Don't forget that one of the key aspects of our society is that it's hierarchical, which seems to be a basic simian/hominid characteristic. Yes, we can make our own validations, and some of us are even successful at it, but for the group, validation comes from authority. It's not, of course, nearly so simple as that, what with multiple feedback loops and the tendency of some to make their own rules, but that's the basic thrust: the validation is automatic.
I don't doubt that Mattilda is a good person -- I'm always prepared to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, and I don't think that expressing opinions I don't agree with makes anyone a villain. However, I stand by my comments on the posts I referenced: they are prime examples of the worst of doctrinaire '70s Marxist queer politics. C'mon Alex, she says flat out that she doesn't agree with those who say that we should have the right to be married, and the reference to 1950s picket-fence images completely ignores the history of the past generation or two. What I see here is that same stale "Down with the patriarchy!" message that lost its relevance a good twenty years ago.
One of the big bad things that our critics on the right complain about in marriage, and perhaps the main thing that they'd like to do away with, is that marriage has, because of the increase in women's independent earning power and the ongoing shift in our perception of the relative power of men and women, become more and more egalitarian. And who better to finalize that shift than a bunch of gay men and lesbians? We come to marriage without those inherited ideas of appropriate roles within the relationship -- quite the contrary to Mattilda's take, we're the ones who will finally put the last nail in the coffin of the 1950s picket-fence paradigm. (I actually prefer something more rustic, myself, with vining roses.) Her statement that "Gay marriage does nothing to address the basic problems of inequality" is patently absurd: first off, why should it? Who really expects marriage to address universal health care, citizenship, and the like? (And, in actuality, it does, although obviously not to the degree that Mattilda would prefer.) In a more limited scope, as I noted above, same-sex marriage is ideally situated to address the problems of inequality in marriage, both as an institution limited to a select group and as a dynamic within individual marriages.
And to the argument that the marriage campaign takes resources away from (insert favorite cause here), Lord. Love. A. Duck. I have severe problems with that on several fronts, starting with "who gave you the authority to decide which cause is my cause?" and "why should I follow your agenda?" and going on from there. We can also, and with a lot more validity, look at it from the standpoint that same-sex marriage is one of those causes that is eroding the foundations of inequality.
I could go on to dissect her posts point by point, but I'm not going to, unless I have a spare morning soon, which doesn't seem likely. Her arguments aren't credible. We're just going to have to disagree on that score.
Again, thanks for your comments, and I hope you'll find time to comment further.
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