Stumble it!Gay marriage is the end of marriage.
posted in Society by themaiden |Or so some folks would like us to believe. Its an old article, but the issue will resurface so I may as well hit it now. Orson Scott Card, writing for Meridian Magazine, a publication affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, has published a ptolemic agianst gay marriage and against the court orders that have in some cases protected it. He’s titled his piece “Homosexual Marriage and Civilization”, as if to emphasize the close link between straight sex and people-being-nice-to-one-another, and he starts off with a revealing quip– revealing in its lack of insight.
The Massachusetts Supreme Court has not yet declared that “day” shall now be construed to include that which was formerly known as “night,” but it might as well.
Well, Orson Scott Card, having spoken English since I first began to speak I feel pretty confident stating that the word ‘day’ already has, in some usages, the ability to refer to night. Have you ever heard of a ‘24-hour day’? Ever asked someone, at 9 0′clock PM, “What day is it?” Ever started your work day while it is still dark outside? It’s a bad start, but the rant has only just begun.
By declaring that homosexual couples are denied their constitutional rights by being forbidden to “marry,” it is treading on the same ground.
Do you want to know whose constitutional rights are being violated? Everybody’s. Because no constitution in the United States has ever granted the courts the right to make vast, sweeping changes in the law to reform society.
Everyone’s rights are being violated? Oh please! If you are heterosexual, and that is a strong majority to say the least, absolutely nothing changes. Nothing. I wonder what ‘vast, sweeping changes in the law’ Card thinks the courts have implemented. And bear in mind that the Massachusetts Supreme Court struck a law, which means that, far from making sweeping changes, the court has effectively reset things to the way they were prior to the passing of the law it struck. In other words, the status quo has not changed. Card is making something of nothing, and much of his tract depends upon this idea that society will collapse if gays get a little slip of paper giving them the right to share an insurance policy.
The court’s actions do not indicate reformation of society, only of law. There is a difference. People, individuals, make up society and they may associate with or avoid anyone or any group at will, in a free society. The court has not changed this dynamic. Card doesn’t have to associate with ‘queers’. He doesn’t have to attend their weddings. He doesn’t have to sit next to them in Church. What he does have to do, according to this court decision and this is the part that involves the law, is treat them like human beings in those situations where he is forced by circumstances to encounter ‘them’ — the homosexuals. It is much like the civil rights laws protecting African-Americans. No law requires anyone to like African-Americans. The law requires that one not lynch them. This decision, which has Card so upset, is far milder though than those civil rights laws. Homosexuals, in fact, are already protected, for the most part, by those same civil rights laws. This vast and sweeping reform only means that homosexuals get to share bank accounts and pay alimony. This changes nothing in Card’s life. How is meeting a married gay couple in the grocery store any different from meeting an unmarried one? Chances are a person wouldn’t even know the difference without asking. In other words, he is upset about absolutely nothing. His life won’t change if homosexuals marry. The lives of those homosexuals may change for the better just a bit.
The Court is not, as Card claims, dictating a social innovation. What the Court is doing is refusing to allow the sanctioning of a religiously motivated social convention which would limit the rights of a group of citizens while doing nothing to benefit society as a whole. Card may have his feelings about gay marriage, but he cannot turn those feelings into law without strong reasons for doing so. The law does not exist to validate or to uphold Card’s, or anyone else’s, feelings. The law, as set up in our Constitution, exists to assure that the prejudices, feelings, convictions, and traditions of one group do not trample the freedoms of any other group. The Judicial Review system was set up to monitor the law in this respect. When the law violates these principles it is supposed to be struck. It seems the court has done its job properly.
Later in the article Card argues that homosexuals already have the right to marry and hence their civil rights are not being violated as things currenty stand.
Any homosexual man who can persuade a woman to take him as her husband can avail himself of all the rights of husbandhood under the law. And, in fact, many homosexual men have done precisely that, without any legal prejudice at all.
So they are free to marry, they just can’t marry the people they choose? What an unbelievably warped concept of freedom and of civil liberty! Would he have made the same argument fifty years ago when a black man wanted to marry a white woman? Would he tell that man that “your rights are not being violated; you have every legal right to marry a black woman”? Does anyone believe this represents anything like civil rights?
Card moves on to describe… well, the joy of heterosexuality.
Men, after all, know what men like far better than women do; women know how women think and feel far better than men do. But a man and a woman come together as strangers and their natural impulses remain at odds throughout their lives, requiring constant compromise, suppression of natural desires, and an unending effort to learn how to get through the intersexual swamp.
What case is he trying to make? “It sucks to be straight but if I have to do it so do you.” That is not an argument I find convincing, nor does it say much for Card’s humanity. Actually, I think he is using wierdly anti-heterosexual lead to begin a type of historical/anthropological argument that goes something like “human cultures have always encouraged male-female pairs and so that is the right way to do it.” Unfortunately he misses one important thing about human culture. Culture is adaptive. It is our primary means of adapting to our environment. What is beneficial– that is, ‘right’– under some set of circumstances is not automatically beneficial when those circumstances change. Obviously survival of a clan, family, or civilization requires reproduction and until very recently that more or less required some form of long-term heterosexual pairing. This is no longer the case. Our economic systems, our health systems, our culture is such that we are capable of greater freedoms than ever before. And Card wants to nip those freedoms in the bud. “We didn’t used to have those freedoms, so lets not have ‘em now either.” I cannot jump on board that bandwagon.
Nor can I jump on board with his idea that the man is the only one capable of instilling moral values in children and the only one whose praise is believed.
Only when the father became powerless or absent in the lives of huge numbers of children did we start to realize some of the things people need a father for: laying the groundwork for a sense of moral judgment; praise that is believed so that it can instill genuine self-confidence.
People lacking in fundamental self-esteem don’t need gold stars passed out to everyone in their class. Chances are, they need a father who will say — and mean — “I’m proud of you.”
It seems that Card harbors a distaste for more than just homosexuals. Perhaps this is the source of the real damage he sees being done to marriage. A distaste for one’s mate, implied in his words, can’t be good for long-term commitments.
Card argues that:
Marriage Is Everybody’s Business.
And it isn’t just the damage that divorce and out-of-wedlock births do to the children in those broken families: Your divorce hurts my kids, too.
He never supports the statement, but his strongest argument seems to be this, that:
Monogamous marriage is by far the most effective foundation for a civilization. It provides most males an opportunity to mate (polygamous systems always result in surplus males that have no reproductive stake in society); it provides most females an opportunity to have a mate who is exclusively devoted to her. Those who are successful in mating are the ones who will have the strongest loyalty to the social order; so the system that provides reproductive success to the largest number is the system that will be most likely to keep a civilization alive.
Monogamy depends on the vast majority of society both openly and privately obeying the rules. Since the natural reproductive strategy for males is to mate with every likely female at every opportunity, males who are not restrained by social pressure and expectations will soon devolve into a sort of Clintonesque chaos, where every man takes what he can get.
We are not proverbial rabbits driven mindlessly and inexorably to reproduction. Reproductionis not the end-all of existence. Card reduces humanity to a collection of sperm-donors and cum-bins. And again:
Why would men submit to rules that deprive them of the chance to satisfy their natural desire to mate with every attractive female?
Why would women submit to rules that keep them from trying to mate with the strongest (richest, most physically imposing, etc.) male, just because he already has a wife?
He does not paint a pretty picture. How sad that this is what he finds in human relationships, but it explains, emotionally, some of his attitudes.
“Civilization,” he continues, “Is Rooted in Reproductive Security”.Perhaps, but we are not plants and are not bound by our roots. We get to invent our lives. His paranoia is striking.
But the rule must be largely observed, and must be seen to be observed even more than it actually is. If trust between the sexes breaks down, then males who are able will revert to the broadcast strategy of reproduction, while females will begin to compete for males who already have female mates. It is a reproductive free-for-all.
All of this if our rather narrow and incredibly recent definition of marriage is altered? Wow. A few hundred years ago marriage was a quite different affair. Men were men and wives were barely post-pubescent. Girls were told who to marry and often died young in childbirth. Now, we marry for love, or at least we chose. Society didn’t collapse. It changed. A hundred years ago beating a wife or a child was A-Okay. Now it isn’t. The ’sanctity’ of the marriage was violated when laws put an end to such abuse, but society didn’t collapse. It won’t collapse this time either.
In this delicate balance, it is safe to say that beginning with a trickle in the 1950s, but becoming an overwhelming flood in the 1960s and 1970s, we took a pretty good system, and in order to solve problems that needed tweaking, we made massive, fundamental changes that have had devastating consequences.
A pretty good system? Does Card not realize that if things were fine, they would not have been changed? Change requires work, and people are lazy. If things were okay, no one would have bothered to change them. In fact, history seems to suggest that things have to be very, very bad for people to exert any extra effort to provoke change. In this ‘pretty good system’ women were second class citizens and children were hardly human. Men had all the power. The rest of the family was under dad’s thumb. Yes, that is a pretty good system but only if you are male and an adult. Otherwise, it amounts to servitude. And yes, few got divorced. Instead, they suffered. Men cheated. Women cried. Women cheated. Men beat them. The police brushed it off as a ‘family problem’. Shall we return to this?
And finally…
Let me put it another way. The sex life of the people around me is none of my business; the homosexuality of some of my friends and associates has made no barrier between us, and as far as I know, my heterosexuality hasn’t bothered them. That’s what tolerance looks like.
But homosexual “marriage” is an act of intolerance. It is an attempt to eliminate any special preference for marriage in society — to erase the protected status of marriage in the constant balancing act between civilization and individual reproduction.
Homosexual “marriage” is an act of intolerance? Intolerance of what? Of Whom? Homosexual marriage adds a level of freedom to humanity. How in hell is that intolerance?
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