Probably the most high-profile issue John Kerry and I disagree on is the issue of what is now known universally as “gay marriage.” Well, his website doesn’t put it quite so bluntly. It merely says that he supports civil unions, which is, well, gay marriage without the name, from what I can gather.
Now, this is a fascinating issue, and so are a lot of the responses and spins. Essentially, the argument is a very simple one, from my understanding: marriage laws discriminate based on gender. You can’t get married to someone of the same gender. And that is wrong. “Equal protection” or some such is in play here, it seems. This is why, I think, the GOP wants a constitutional amendment–they know that “gay marriage” (henceforth used without quotes, though I maintain it’s a very problematic term) is constitutional, and the only way to make something constitutional unconstitutional is to change the Constitution. Luckily, I feel like they’re really far, far away from changing the thing, but then, I also forget for 364 days of the year (365 this year) how crazy Christian most of America is.
So what’s in play here, then? I said a lot of things, so let’s start moving slowly. First, there’s the terminology. My argument here still isn’t quite as crisp as it could be. The term, “gay marriage” bugs me very much. I think this is largely since it takes something that should be open to all and specifies it to just gays. The Boston Globe seems to have adopted “same-sex marriage,” but that’s only a little better (then again, they yesterday posted that the current laws only let “heterosexuals” get married. I’d argue that in the last 100 years, thousands upon thousands of homosexuals have gotten married 100% legally just within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts alone. So it’s a slow process). This should be an argument for something like “open marriage,” but that term is already claimed by the poly crowd.
That is, the movement is not to make “gay marriage” legal, but, rather, to realise that current marriage law is unconstitutional. It’s sort of like how the segregation battle was not waged as an effort to advance “black rights,” but rather “civil rights.” By calling this “gay marriage,” it sets up an attack as being a “special right,” a term the Right has successfully mobilised to dupe a large percentage of generally non-homophobic people into supporting homophobic (and hence unconstitutional) policy.
The terminology problem continues with nearly every term provided in the proposed amendments to the Massachusetts Constitution. At the most basic level is, of course, “man” and “woman.” These seem obvious, but if you think about counterexamples, they become legally kind of messy. What is a post-op transsexual? What about people with various chromosomal issues that blur the lines? Our society has built a construct of binary gender assignment that does not have any real basis in any biological fact. Probably only the Bible satisfies as a “source text” that identifies specifically the limit of two and only two genders. But if we’re building our legal code on the Bible…
Then there’s the distinction between “marriage” and “civil union.” Now, Kerry, as noted, is in favor of the latter for gay couples, but not the former. But if there is a real difference between church and state in this country, then what the hell is the difference, other than the fact that by making a difference, they, in Plessy style, underscore the inability of being equal?
Or, to put some pepper on it, what the hell is George Bush talking about when he talks about the “sanctity of marriage”? Marriage, as conceived before the Constitution (of the US or of MA), is a purely legal concept. How can a legal concept have “sanctity”? You can go on about whatever a priest does with knots and rings and whatever in a church as having “sanctity,” but what a justice of the peace does cannot, will not, have any “sanctity.” The OED, of course, has my back here, too. There is literally not one definition of “sanctity” that someone believing in separation of church and state would want to apply to any apparatus of the state.
So as long as what a justice of the peace does is called “marriage” when it’s with a man and a woman, but “civil union” when it’s with a same-sex couple, it’s discrimination. It’s homophobic. It’s wrong. And the Right knows this. They know their argument has no real legal weight–so they change the realm of the debate to make well-meaning people forget the bulk of this paragraph.
After terminology, the next issue is why this is an issue at all. Much like Janet’s boob, this sort of thing simply is not important enough to take up the time it is, considering that there are still poor people in this country. This is part of the general trick the Right has perpetrated, starting with Reagan, of puking the private sphere all ovet the public sphere (pardon me if I start channeling some of my professors here…). That is, “family values” is a canard of an issue that should never have reached the prominence it has. The only reason it did was to mask the fact that the GOP is singularly committed to taking your money away from you unless you are rich. That’s it. That is their one goal. Bush has shown this, but, then, so did his father and so did Reagan. Now, since this is unconscionable, and, what’s more, un-Christian, they prop up a giant smokescreen: family values. “We’ll rob you,” they say, “but at least we’re good Christians when it comes to other stuff.” And people, including good Christians, get caught up in this–thinking that suddenly seeing a boob is a larger priority in their list of offenses to their Christian sensibility than the plight of the poor. It’s absolutely demonic, this trick–and it’s suckered a whole lot of people, going from the ethnic Reagan Democrats in the 80s all the way up to the Soccer Moms of today. Good-meaning people have been exploited in the name of Jesus. And that’s completely morally reprehensible. We’ve seen it before (“pro-life,” “death tax”), this manipualitve restructuring of the terms of the debate, and I suppose we’ll see it forever. That doesn’t excuse it, though.
The next main spin on it is the more out-there view built up on why on earth we’re still legislating something as heteronormative as marriage in the first place, and, similarly, what kind of concessions to heteronormativity are inherently given by adopting marriage as a seeming end (telos, if you will) of the “gay movement,” if it exists. This issue is probably best described in a paragraph of Dan Savage’s “Why I Still Won’t Get Married” piece in Salon. His boyfriend says he’s against marriage because he doesn’t “want to act like straight people.” And there’s a very large and important degree to which that is important. But it’s a level of discourse that is not only beyond this silly little website, but maybe beyond my current reading load. But if you read a lot of queer theory, that sort of thing will keep coming up. (Hell, if you read any identity politics-type of work, this sort of thing keeps coming up…) Why should gays want to be more like straights (obvious legal benefits aside…)?
And it’s that sort of reasoning that, at this current moment, makes me sort of against gay marriage. Given the fucked nature of our polity, and that, no matter what, marriage is here to stay, I’m in favor of it. Not civil unions, since that’s just separate but equal jibber jabber. Full-on, balls-to-the-wall marriage. But I can’t just say that without addressing the fact of who is it who decided that marriage was a good thing, a goal? And, furthermore, why did we ok having our society create laws protecting it? These positions are question-begging, yet they’re never seriously addressed by anyone spouting about marriage.
There is an answer of sorts in the proposed amendments in Massachusetts. Philip Travis, of Rehoboth, a town I’ve driven through, proposes:
It being the public policy of this Commonwealth to protect the unique relationship of marriage in order to promote, among other goals, the stability and welfare of society and the best interest of children, only the union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as marriage in Massachusetts. Nothing in this article requires or prohibits Civil Unions.
So marriage, for him, promotes “stability and welfare of society” as well as the “best interest of children.” And only straight, monogamous marriage can do this. What the hell is his proof? Where does he have a marriage-less (or, at least, non-monogamous) society that he can use as a counterexample? Sparta? Asian societies?
OK. I’m running out of steam here, and I’m also slowly getting more and more angry. It’s a vicious combination of feelings, but I think that I can let this stand as is. If you live in the best commonwealth in the US, write your peeps to support the Barrios Amendment.
February 15th, 2004 at 3:23
Hey Mo, do you remember the previous constitutional convention where then State Senate President Tom Birmingham got the votes needed to shut down proceedings before an actual consideration of gay marriage took place? That pretty much sealed my vote in the democratic primary back in 2002. Sometimes I feel that the more people you allow to vote on issues likes gay marriage the more likely you are to encounter Toqueville’s tyrany of the majority. This is one of those issues where we need to be grateful for the SJC ruling and then drown out the uber-emotional voices of angry people and their representatives. Civil rights advancements never come reaction-free. We just need to be strong enough to weather the storm.
February 14th, 2004 at 3:02
you’re pretty appallingly off here, Mo. I’ll explain it to you tomorrow night at the Partay.
a foretaste: unexplicated invocatgions of ‘equal protection’ are inherently question-begging (in the actual sense of that term).
-The RNC
February 13th, 2004 at 14:27
There is one elephant in the room that no one seems to be seeing. The “gay-marriage” debate is a microcosm for the ongoing trend of states relinquishing more and more power to the federal government. Marriage has traditionally been regulated by the states, not the federal government (except federal tax breaks, etc.). To introduce an amendment to the US Constitution essentially gives the federal government power to regulate marriage as well. This is exactly what people should want to avoid. The whole point of federalism, of setting up state governments and constitutions that have power to regulate, well, a whole lot of stuff, is so that the federal government wouldnt get too big and powerful, something the drafters of the US Constitution abhorred and feared. Taking away (essentially) state power to regulate marriage will transfer more power to the federal government, thus perpetuating the trend towards a far too centralized and tyrannical government. Some, of course, would argue that we have that already. Funnily, its usually the right who wants to keep the federal government small, and the left who wants to make it bigger. Turning this into a moral issue, however, keeps the right safe. Unfortunately, this is a very simplistic explanation of the entirety of my federalism-based argument, but so it goes.
February 13th, 2004 at 10:15
I said I was channeling profs. “Question-begging” is a Jay Schleusenerism. But I’ll take it into consideration. Thanks for the link.
February 13th, 2004 at 4:08
to “beg the question” is to make a circular argument. perhaps you meant to say “these positions are question-prompting.”