Why gay marriage is perceived as a threat to "Family Values"

[richardf8]

I originally posted this in rain_luong's journal, but since it's my clearest articulation of these ideas to date, I thought I'd place it here as well. It should be noted also that "Family Values" is a particular paradigm for family organization that falls somewhere between slavery and feudalism, as I argue below.

"Heterosexual privilege" is largely defined as the rights conferred upon married people. The assumptions behind it are paternalistic in nature; built on the assumption that a woman requires a man's care, and that a man obtains power to care through his relationship with a corporation. From Ozzie and Harriet to Malcolm in the Middle this paradigm has been submitted as the American Dream.

The problem is that this paradigm never completely described reality and does so now less than it ever has before. And thus "wives" have become "partners," not just because of the existence of same-sex couples but because of the variability of which partner may have a relationship with a corporation.

In short, the reality of dual career couples has deconstructed the rationale for heterosexual privilege; yet the institution remains, along with the false nostalgia for the family-as-portrayed-in-sappy-sitcoms. In short, conservatives want to get back to the day when a corporation owned a man who owned a woman, and any revision of marriage undermines that agenda.

So, when you speak of "heterosexual privilege," what is in fact being spoken of is the privileging of a specific type of heterosexual relationship that receives state blessing. If the goal is that "everyone should have the same rights, because hey, we're all people," we need to stop privileging this particular class of relationship. In order to see the types of heterosexual relationships that are not privileged, one need only listen to congressional prattle about "unwed mothers" and "single parents."

One of the reasons that Canada can grant gays the right to marry more easily than America is that in Canada domestic partnership is defined in terms of things like shared household expenses, a joint mortgage, a joint account. These are the proofs required to demonstrate a relationship for the purposes of immigration; the state shows no interest in whether the people involved are married or not, nor in their genders. Of course, in Canada one does not need to be owned by a corporation in order to obtain health-care either.

Until we deconstruct the notion of marriage as a means of expression for patriarchal power, it will be a challenge for same sex couples to obtain it. And until we deconstruct marriage as a means by which rights that ought to be inalienable are conferred we will not see everyone receiving the same rights.

For this reason, while I back same-sex marriage on the principle that the opposition to it stems from hate, I do so with reservation, on the principle that marriage should confer no privileges in the eyes of the state.

Comments

[lordrunningclam.livejournal.com]

One of the other reasons Canada can grant gays the right to marry is that the weren't founded by and do not continue to be substantially run by puritans.

That little sound bite aside, I do think that much of the furur over this issue is simply silly on both sides. An anthropology course I took a long time ago taught that marriage is institution for the rearing and legitimization of children. Period. Adoptive couples aside, there is little need of that requirement in a gay partnership.

I do understand the problem, though and they mostly involve things like inheritance, health benefits, power of attorney and other simple things that naturally fall to a spouse. Most of these can be taken care of with a trip to a lawyer. I think there should be some kind of domestic partnership registration, that would avoid the lawyer like hetero couples avoid it with a trip to a a church or a notary.

I see it as a simple semantic problem. People can call it whatever they want among themselves. For official purposes call it something other than "marriage" and any reasonable person should have no objection to it. Reasonable people are, unfortunately, in short supply these days.

[richardf8]

Anthropology isn't a reliable science. It is based largely on the assumption that we can learn about earlier stages of our culture by studying the cultures of people more "primitive" than ourselves. Thus there is a tendency to project our own cultural assumptions onto the culture being studied. I think this was probably the case in the course that you took, and marriage as an institution for the legitimization of children is certainly a key matter for our culture. But that has everything to do with western culture's definition of legitimacy, which has everything to do with paternity.

Indeed, the fact that the rights of the child are defined in terms of the father is precisely the thing that relegates women to secondary status in so many cultures. However, for nearly a century now, women in our culture have been emerging from that secondary status, and creating estates of their own to leave to children. Paternity is becoming less relevant, and frankly, that has a lot of men scared. Rest assured that this fear is behind a great deal of the "family values" blather of today.

Marriage, especially in feudal societies, serves another purpose too, which I fear your anthro course may have overlooked. Specifically marriage was a way for two landed families to form a bond with each other and form an alliance. In this case the woman and her dowry were the tokens of exchange in something not unlike a corporate merger. The highest profile expample of this that comes to mind is the marriage of James, a Scot, into the British royal family -- this marriage was the union that united the United Kingdom.

Things that can be done with a lawyer are necessarily incomplete and rely on blood relatives being willing to seek out and accept the paperwork. Marriage is essentially the one-stop-shop, the package deal, that confers the rights and privileges that ought to be attendant on life partners by the simple virtue of their having chosen to care for each other. Your idea for a domestic partnership registration is great -- though I would extend it by saying that regardless of the genders comprising the couple, such registration should be the ONLY way to obtain the legal benefits currently conferred by marriage. If, after registering for such considerations, the couple wants to marry via ritual, they can do so.

So basically I agree with your conclusions, although I would be very cautious about reducing marriage to being just about rearing and legitimizing children. It's been used in too many other ways over the millenia for us to think about in terms of kids alone.

[lordrunningclam.livejournal.com]

Marriage is always a social institution and takes and has taken a lot of forms in different cultures with all kinds of cultural ramifications, But, at the base, that is the only reliable constant. The other things you mention are specific to the way it evolved in western Europe. Inheritance and other things vary quite a bit from culture to culture. I did sort of enjoy that Anthropology elective.

As for us, the stuff a lawyer can handle doesn't rely on blood relatives finding the paperwork but in the surviving or healthy partner producing it. You can leave your estate to whomever you want. Of course, people can always hire lawyers to try to negate the previous lawyers' work.

I've spent quite a lot of time this year dealing with a family member's terminal illness and an unnecessarily messy estate that's not being challenged at all. I don't even want to think about what it would be like if it were in dispute. The only winners would be the lawyers.

[morgan1.livejournal.com]

The very concept of there being legitmate vs. illegitimate children is one of the areas where I think society is ill served by the institution of marriage as we currently do it. And yeah, I know there's been a lot of progress recently on getting people to at least pay child support for kids even if they are out-of-wedlock, but there's still a strong cultural attitude that having that marriage ceremony is what really creates a relationship of responsibility between two adults, as well as being what makes the children that those two adults make together really matter. And if marriage is what makes for responsibility, well, there are people out there who can figure out the obverse of that: that you can be having sex with someone, but as long as you don't marry them, you don't have any responsibility for them. It'd be awfully nice and conscientious of you to protect them from STD's or pregnancy, but there's no commitment, you don't have to. It'd be nice too, if you took some care for their emotional well-being, but there's no commitment, so you don't have to. And hey, if a kid happens, you're not married, it's not your problem, it may not even be yours (yes, yes, I know that a woman couldn't get away with this last one).

What would our culture look like, I wonder, if we didn't have that disjunct between sex and responsibility? What if we taught our kids that having sex with someone, in and of itself, always entails a certain degree of commitment, and confers on you heavy-duty responsibilities for the other person's welfare, responsibilities that may end up being lifelong? What if our values said that you have those responsibilities even if you're not planning on forming a family with this person-- responsibilities to protect them from disease or unwanted pregnancy, to not use them exploitatively, so safeguard their emotional well-being, to shoulder your fair share of any fallout that the encounter may have. But wait, that would mean teaching the children about sex with an assumption that they're actually going to do it, maybe without getting married first, and we can't have that.

I also don't think we're well-served by the "free pass" that married couples get on dealing with inheritances and other legal stuff. Assumptions encourage sloppiness. If you know that your spouse is going to be your presumed heir, that lets you off the hook for having to plan adequately, because the wife or husband is going to get everything anyway. Being in an unmarried partnership has really made think about and plan for these things in a very conscious way, and having done so, I can't imagine how anyone, married or not, could reasonably go through their life leaving to chance details like the inheritance of their stuff and who gets to make medical decisions if they're incapacitated. I may just be silly, but I think we'd be better off if there were no assumptions and everyone HAD to make wills and specify that power-of-attorney stuff--it'd certainly save a lot of family fights over who gets what stuff or who makes the decisions now that dad is senile. (No, wait, it wouldn't because families will ALWAYS find something to fight about.)

One of the other reasons Canada can grant gays the right to marry is that the weren't founded by and do not continue to be substantially run by puritans.

Amen. We should never forget that America was founded by people who left their own country because the culture wasn't repressive enough.

[lordrunningclam.livejournal.com]

Regarding your position on sex and responsibility, I basically agree with you but I would be careful about generalizing current social trends over the long haul and laws should be made for the long haul.

There are responsible unmarried couples and irresponsible married couples. From personal observation, there are irresponsible married couples in abundance. Anyway, I do think there should be some sort of standard agreement on domestic partnership, perhaps just a standard contract worked out by the Bar Association. It doesn't even really have to be for gay couples. It could be used by unmarried older siblings or anyone else who share a household and trust each other. Everybodys situation is unique but among responsible adults, everybody's situation is mostly the same.

[morgan1.livejournal.com]

I think the kind of domestic partnership agreement that you suggest would be an excellent idea. As you point out, it's not just gay couples who may need acknowledgement of their "alternative" family format.