Sg, I hope that it will one day strike you as odd that you lived in a time when most of America forbade same-sex marriage. It certainly blows my mind a little that my parents (who still don't seem all that old to me) lived in a time of separate water fountains for blacks and whites. And it still hasn't been 100 years since women were allowed to vote in U.S. federal elections! These kinds of institutionalized prejudices are costly to maintain, yet there are groups that somehow find the energy to keep them up.
For example, there are people who claim to have thought about same-sex marriage and come to the conclusion that it poses a threat to the welfare of our society. In other words, they are trying to keep gays and lesbians from marrying other gays and lesbians, respectively, not because it icks them out, but because failure to do so would weaken or destroy our civilization. Here's an example of that kind of argument from a website called Defend Marriage:
Marriage has been understood and transmitted down through the centuries and across civilizations as a man married to a woman. It has been proven[1] to be the best institution in which to provide for the continuance of life, to protect and provide for children and to train them to be good citizens and responsible members of society.
Governments and society have uniformly granted benefits and protections to men and women in marriage because of their biological potential to bear and effectively raise the next generation.[2] Since homosexual relationships are based entirely on "feelings"[3] and a particular type of sexual activity, rather than on producing and nurturing the next generation,[4] legalizing same-sex "marriages" would create a new standard by which a "right"[5] to marry would be recognized. This would then open the door to any kind of "marriage" which met this standard, such as letting any number of people "marry" each other, allowing close blood relatives to "marry," permitting adults to "marry" children and so on.[6]
One of the biggest threats to legalizing same-sex "marriage" is that it would make it more difficult to prevent same-sex couples from adopting children. Studies show[7] that the incidence of child abuse in same-sex "families"[8] is many times higher than in traditional families and that children in homosexual families are more likely to suffer emotional problems.
This illustrates fairly well that the people who are against same-sex marriage, and who also don't want to admit to plain old bigotry, need to frame their argument as a defense of what they call "traditional marriage."[9] I have always found that idea to be pretty ridiculous — is my marriage somehow worth less if same-sex marriage is legal? But this morning I read something that changed my mind.
Amanda Marcotte (who, studies have shown, is awesome), writing at Reproductive Health Reality Check says:
just because conservatives dance around why same-sex marriage is a threat to "traditional" marriage, it doesn't mean they're crazy or don't have their reasons for opposing it. Mostly, they know that their reasons won't sit well with the general public. Which is why I read with amusement Tara Parker-Pope's piece in the New York Times about why same-sex relationships might be healthier on average than opposite-sex marriages.
The article had a tin ear for what makes opponents of same-sex marriage fearful. Conservatives say that gay marriage is a threat to "traditional" marriage, and this article all but answered, "Oh yes it is and thank God for it."
The article she refers to describes research that indicates that there is less inequality in same-sex marriages:
Notably, same-sex relationships, whether between men or women, were far more egalitarian than heterosexual ones. In heterosexual couples, women did far more of the housework; men were more likely to have the financial responsibility; and men were more likely to initiate sex, while women were more likely to refuse it or to start a conversation about problems in the relationship. With same-sex couples, of course, none of these dichotomies were possible, and the partners tended to share the burdens far more equally.
While the gay and lesbian couples had about the same rate of conflict as the heterosexual ones, they appeared to have more relationship satisfaction, suggesting that the inequality of opposite-sex relationships can take a toll.
“Heterosexual married women live with a lot of anger about having to do the tasks not only in the house but in the relationship,” said Esther D. Rothblum, a professor of women’s studies at San Diego State University. “That’s very different than what same-sex couples and heterosexual men live with.”
Did you catch that last bit? A disproportionate share of the burden of domestic strife is borne by women in heterosexual relationships. Same-sex couples tend to share the burdens more evenly. It is straight married men, then, who are receiving a bonus from marriage. If same-sex marriages become common, it seems reasonable to think that some of that marriage egalitarianism will slip into the mainstream. As Ms. Marcotte puts it:
The Times article argues that the equality modeled by same-sex relationships could influence opposite-sex marriages to adopt that kind of equality. This is exactly the assault on "traditional" marriage that conservatives are talking about.
... Opposite-sex couples can learn how to relate more equitably, and equal marriages are happier.
Happier, pray tell, for whom?
Not for the men who would suddenly be living in a world where dishes don't just do themselves and diapers aren't changed by magic. Men who face the prospect of having to give up being right in every conflict, having to take the wife's opinion on finances seriously, or even of having their right to name their wives after themselves called into question might dispute the idea that they'd be "happier" in this new egalitarian world.
Falling
(Obi Blanche Remix)
by Norman Palm
I hope that one day, when you are reflecting on the crazies who once tried to keep same-sex marriage illegal, it is from a world where the inequality they were defending is a generally-recognized ill. I hope it is from a world where there is no real question that sexism is not, in fact, simply the way things were meant to be.
1 I think that when someone is making an argument and says things like "it has been proven", or "studies show", it is important to mentally mark the point that follows as suspect. This is especially true on the internet, where (a) anybody can set up a website that says anything, and (b) backing up a statement is as easy as linking to the proof.
2 I don't know, I really don't think this is true. If it were, wouldn't there be some kind of fertility test you would have to pass to get married? Or wouldn't long-haul prisoners, who are not able to raise the next generation, be forbidden from getting married? This sounds fishy to me.
3 Oh noes!
4 Just speaking for my own marriage, it is, at the moment, based on feelings, nurturing the next generation and not to gross you out, but, you know, "acts".
5 These are called scare quotes, or distance quotes, by the way, and they're the equivalent of putting "so-called" before the word in the quotes. In this case, the author is making double sure we understand that he does not believe that there is any right to marriage. The author is wrong about this; marriage is a fundamental right under the U.S. constitution.
6 This is a version of the "slippery slope" argument. In its general form, the slippery slope looks like this: "If A happens, then by a gradual series of small steps through B, C,…, X, Y, eventually Z will happen, too; Z should not happen; therefore, A should not happen, either." There is a place for this kind of argument, but the slippery slope is so often employed as a cheap rhetorical trick that it's usually a good idea to stop when you recognize one and think it through. In this case, it occurs to me that there might be possible to agree that same-sex marriages are acceptable, whereas marriages between people and goldfish are not.
7 See note 1.
8 See note 5. The author makes it clear that, not only does he think that same-sex marriages aren't really marriages, he believes that families including same-sex couples aren't really families. I'm going to go out on limb and suggest that perhaps the author is not a very nice person.
9 Yes, these are scare quotes, or distance quotes, too. I'm saying that I don't think "traditional" is a fair way to describe the fact that a union involves a man and a woman. A same-sex marriage can be traditional in the sense that it involves loving respect, entwined financial fortunes and legal status and family building.
Brilliant and eye-opening
I had never considered the anti-gay-marriage argument as being sexist, but it seems pretty clear when presented like this. Nice find.
Heavily footnoted text like this is kinda hard to read. I tend to read every footnote (especially when they're so humorous), and it's a pain in the scroll bar. Wikipedia uses anchors pretty well to make it as painless as I've seen.
And my relationship with my goldfish is about more than "feelings".
Thanks
My life is much richer for Amanda Marcotte's blogging.
I used to do this with anchors, but when typing this up I thought "it's so much work, and it's not like anyone cares". :) I stand corrected.
Overanalyzing
While this way of thinking is interesting, I think it's probably overanalyzed a bit. I suspect that most opponents of gay marriage haven't thought it through this much. Most of them make it to the "ewww, gross!" stage and make up their minds.
That's fair
I don't disagree with you, but I do think that the leaders of the bigot brigade are the ones who have thought it through. And I'd be surprised if they didn't see the subservience of wives (whether they would frame it as such or not) as one of the values of the institution they are fighting to protect.