Via the perpetually exasperated and excellent Balloon Juice, the Weekly Standard is trying to make a point about gay marriage that I don’t think anyone understands but them.
It starts with the normal claims of non-bigotry, but then it starts getting weird.
When a gay man becomes a professor or a gay woman becomes a police officer, he or she performs the same job as a heterosexual. But there is a difference between a married couple and a same-sex couple in a long-term relationship. The difference is not in the nature of their relationship, not in the fact that lovemaking between men and women is, as the Catholics say, open to life. The difference is between the duties that marriage imposes on married people–not rights, but rather onerous obligations–which do not apply to same-sex love.
Vague onerous obligations of marriage that don’t apply to gays? Okay… well let’s just wait and see what point they’re trying to make here.
The role that marriage plays in kinship encompasses far more than arranging a happy home in which two hearts may beat as one–in fact marriage is actually pretty indifferent to that particular aim. Nor has marriage historically concerned itself with compelling the particular male and female who have created a child to live together and care for that child. It is not the “right to marry” that creates an enduring relationship between heterosexual lovers or a stable home for a child, but the more far-reaching kinship system that assigns every one of the vast array of marriage rules a set of duties and obligations to enforce. These duties and obligations impinge even on romantic marriage, and not always to its advantage. The obligations of kinship imposed on traditional marriage have nothing to do with the romantic ideals expressed in gay marriage.
Okay then, ignoring the fact the writer sounds like he just took an Anthropology Class in college (and no – the author is not an Anthropologist, just a magazine editor) and raced out to find a way to apply it to the gay marriage argument, what are these obligations?
The first is the most important: It is that marriage is concerned above all with female sexuality. The very existence of kinship depends on the protection of females from rape, degradation, and concubinage. This is why marriage between men and women has been necessary in virtually every society ever known. Marriage, whatever its particular manifestation in a particular culture or epoch, is essentially about who may and who may not have sexual access to a woman when she becomes an adult, and is also about how her adulthood–and sexual accessibility–is defined. [...]
[T]he duty of virginity can seem like a privilege, even a luxury, if you contrast it with the fate of child-prostitutes in brothels around the world. No wonder that weddings tend to be regarded as religious ceremonies in almost every culture: They celebrate the completion of a difficult task for the community as a whole.This most profound aspect of marriage–protecting and controlling the sexuality of the child-bearing sex–is its only true reason for being, and it has no equivalent in same-sex marriage. Virginity until marriage, arranged marriages, the special status of the sexuality of one partner but not the other (and her protection from the other sex)–these motivating forces for marriage do not apply to same-sex lovers.
Evidently traditional marriage’s obsession with virginity, in all its paternalistic sexism, is actually the entire reason people get married. Or at least he thinks it should be. And since gay people aren’t priggishly concerned with the virgin myth, their marriages don’t count? Oh and also astonishingly, he thinks that women under the expectation of keeping their virginity should be grateful, because they’re not, you know, child prostitutes.
Number Two!
Second, kinship modifies marriage by imposing a set of rules that determines not only whom one may marry (someone from the right clan or family, of the right age, with proper abilities, wealth, or an adjoining vineyard), but, more important, whom one may not marry. Incest prohibition and other kinship rules that dictate one’s few permissible and many impermissible sweethearts are part of traditional marriage. Gay marriage is blissfully free of these constraints. There is no particular reason to ban sexual intercourse between brothers, a father and a son of consenting age, or mother and daughter. There are no questions of ritual pollution: Will a hip Rabbi refuse to marry a Jewish man–even a Cohen–to a Gentile man? Do Irish women avoid Italian women? A same-sex marriage fails utterly to create forbidden relationships. If Tommy marries Bill, and they divorce, and Bill later marries a woman and has a daughter, no incest prohibition prevents Bill’s daughter from marrying Tommy. The relationship between Bill and Tommy is a romantic fact, but it can’t be fitted into the kinship system.
What. The. Fuck? So the problem with gay marriage is that it doesn’t discriminate based on class or race? The fact that a same-sex marriage “fails to create forbidden relationships” seems like a benefit to me. Why on earth you would argue in favour of racial discrimination in marriage? As for the incest prohibition, that is also an argument against adopting, or marrying someone who has kids from another marriage. As the author points out, it’s a social taboo. And since it’s not biological, gay marriages would still carry that taboo.
Crazy point number 3.
Can we imagine Frank’s family and friends warning him that “If Joe were serious, he would put a ring on your finger”? Do we ask Vera to stop stringing Sally along? Gay sexual practice is not sortable into these categories–licit-if-married but illicit-if-not (children adopted by a gay man or hygienically conceived by a lesbian mom can never be regarded as illegitimate). Neither does gay copulation become in any way more permissible, more noble after marriage. It is a scandal that homosexual intercourse should ever have been illegal, but having become legal, there remains no extra sanction–the kind which fathers with shotguns enforce upon heterosexual lovers. I am not aware of any gay marriage activist who suggests that gay men and women should create a new category of disapproval for their own sexual relationships, after so recently having been freed from the onerous and bigoted legal blight on homosexual acts. But without social disapproval of unmarried sex–what kind of madman would seek marriage?
If your argument against gay marriage is that gay couples won’t get married, then why oppose it? Also, tens of thousands of couples in Europe, Canada, South Africa, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Iowa, and California definitively proved that statement wrong. And I can see why a traditionalist would be upset that gays might have sex before marriage, but that’s not really something you should worry about gays doing. Why not focus on all the straight people having “illicit” sex. Particularly nice is the bit where the writer laments the fact that gay parents’ kids can never be labeled illegitimate. Cause nothing beats making fun of bastards.
Fourth, marriage defines the end of childhood, sets a boundary between generations within the same family and between families, and establishes the rules in any given society for crossing those boundaries. Marriage usually takes place at the beginning of adulthood; it changes the status of bride and groom from child in the birth family to adult in a new family. In many societies, such as village India and Jewish Chicagoland, a new bride becomes no more than an unpaid servant to her mother- and sisters-in-law. Even in modern romantic marriages, a groom becomes the hunting or business partner of his father-in-law and a member of his clubs; a bride becomes an ally of her mother-in-law in controlling her husband. There can, of course, be warm relations between families and their children’s same-sex partners, but these come about because of liking, sympathy, and the inherent kindness of many people. A wedding between same-sex lovers does not create the fact (or even the feeling) of kinship between a man and his husband’s family; a woman and her wife’s kin. It will be nothing like the new kinship structure that a marriage imposes willy-nilly on two families who would otherwise loathe each other.
Yes, that’s right. Gay people don’t have families.
The conclusion?
As kinship fails to be relevant to gays, it will become fashionable to discredit it for everyone. [...]
The whole set of fundamental, irrational assumptions that make marriage such a burden and such a civilizing force can easily be undone.There is no doubt that women and children have suffered throughout human history from being over-protected and controlled. The consequences of under-protection and indifference will be immeasurably worse. In a world without kinship, women will lose their hard-earned status as sexual beings with personal autonomy and physical security. Children will lose their status as nonsexual beings.
In the end, just like every other gay marriage opponent, it turns out to be about the slippery slope. Once again, gay marriage=child molestation.
What a joke.
P.S. Here’s the best part.
Few men would ever bother to enter into a romantic heterosexual marriage–much less three, as I have done–were it not for the iron grip of necessity that falls upon us when we are unwise enough to fall in love with a woman other than our mom.
That says it all.
Posted by kstar35 
Really, even above 500, STV support is mostly static, and only the highly urban Vancouver and Victoria ridings show any sign of a trend. Overall, while STV’s biggest support came from cities, it wasn’t a rural-urban split that killed the referendum, but general dislike throughout BC.
