The recent marriage equality hearings made me think long and hard about what marriage is, what it’s intended for, how it works, and how I feel about it. I’m still thinking and researching; I haven’t come to too many conclusions yet, but I know it’s something I have to both keep an open mind about and come to a better understanding of.
Others apparently have not felt the need to indulge in this drawn-out process, but instead have viewed recent events and written, as Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone calls it, “some seriously crazy shit.”
He also calls it “one of the weirdest, most mean-spirited things I’ve ever seen in the New York Times.” And: “What an asshole!”
I share his reaction to David Brooks’ recent column on marriage equality.
Isaac, scanning the news while on the road, sent me the link to the Brooks column, “Freedom Loses One” (one what? Ball?), because he saw it as poly blog fodder right away. I read it and quickly fired back: “Yeah, that Rebecca (our single-mom-of-two-by-choice friend who recently had Isaac and Tobi over for Passover dinner), she’s no better than one of those greedy CEOs, the way she refuses marriage! And she has an ‘unsteady home’ too!” (She has a very yappy dog, mismatched cups, a toddler who plays with cardboard boxes, a good share of dust and cereal on the floor, oh, the list goes on and on.)
So how seriously crazy is this shit, anyway? Brooks’ column casts gays and lesbians as a bunch of hedonistic, permissive, jeans-wearing, grooving babies who just wanted to “follow their desires” — but who are finally, thank god, showing signs that they’re ready to grow up and settle down, by asking for marriage equality.
The tone of the column is that he’s really shocked that these libertines would trade in their “freedom” for marriage vows.
Libertine. That’s such a great word — like liberal and serpentine put together, isn’t it? It’s also kind of like Ovaltine. Mmmm. You’ll have to excuse me. I don’t even like Ovaltine. But I’ve started fasting two days a week — I read it’s good for reducing hormonal imbalances, depression, inflammation and a host of other evils, so about a month ago I decided to give it a try. I do get food-obsessed from time to time, but it’s not really that hard. I’ll try to stay on topic.
So, the Ovaltine-drinking libertines took it to the Supremes last week, and everyone changed their Facebook photos, and all David Brooks got out of it was this:
Recently, the balance between freedom and restraint has been thrown out of whack. People no longer even have a language to explain why freedom should sometimes be limited. The results are as predicted. A decaying social fabric, especially among the less fortunate. Decline in marriage. More children raised in unsteady homes. Higher debt levels as people spend to satisfy their cravings. …
Marriage is one of those institutions — along with religion and military service — that restricts freedom. Marriage is about making a commitment that binds you for decades to come. It narrows your options on how you will spend your time, money and attention.
Whether they understood it or not, the gays and lesbians represented at the court committed themselves to a certain agenda. They committed themselves to an institution that involves surrendering autonomy. They committed themselves to the idea that these self-restrictions should be reinforced by the state. They committed themselves to the idea that lifestyle choices are not just private affairs but work better when they are embedded in law.
And far from being baffled by this attempt to use state power to restrict individual choice, most Americans seem to be applauding it. Once, gay culture was erroneously associated with bathhouses and nightclubs. Now, the gay and lesbian rights movement is associated with marriage and military service. Once the movement was associated with self-sacrifice, it was bound to become popular.
Wow. Insulting monogamous marriage and LGBT people and even people in the military, all at the same time — masterful. Marriage is like a deployment to Iraq? How about it, monogamous readers: do you wake up every morning feeling like you’ve been bound for decades to narrowed options, surrendering your autonomy and wedded (so to speak) to self-sacrifice? I’m married, and I don’t see it that way. For a proponent of marriage, Brooks sure makes it sound dismal. There’s so much more, but I’ll let Taibbi give the counterpoint:
None of what he’s talking about is within a hundred miles of anything relevant to the gay marriage question. It’s just weird, confused, old-person bitterness, mixed in with the usual obnoxious conservative delusions — like the way fiscal irresponsibility is always poor people buying wide-screen TVs on credit, and never teams of Ivy Leaguers at places like Lehman Brothers running up trillion-dollar balance sheets at 40-1 leverage.
The whole world seems rapidly to be coming to an understanding that this discrimination against gays and lesbians has to end, and the fact that this change is coming is a beautiful thing. You have to be a very unhappy person indeed to feel anything but joy about it — much less this sarcastic depression.
The reason this “confronts me,” as the blues singers put it, is that Brooks’ contention is probably the No. 1 argument leveled against those in polyamorous relationships. We’re childish, hedonistic. We think we’re above the rules. We want to have our cake and eat it, too. (Oh, dear. Cake and Ovaltine. Yum.) We’re immature — we don’t understand that people need rules and boundaries and order to survive in society.
Because poly people don’t do rules or boundaries or limits. We don’t care about others, especially not the children. We just want our freedom. Tell that to the woman who parcels out her weekend like billable hours to make sure she’s being fair to everyone; tell that to the man who lends his wife’s lover his stainless French press for their camping weekend (this actually happened, and we had to talk it through for a while beforehand, because a coffee press is pretty important); tell that to the man who, on Friday nights when he could be out being a libertine, is instead hanging out with his girlfriend and her daughter, eating organic chicken nuggets and watching bad kids’ movies. (Mmmm, chicken nuggets. I don’t even like chicken nuggets!)
The truism in polyland is that we’re humorless nerds who talk and talk everything to death, not that we’re wildly swinging carefree types. But the true truth is that we’re all over the map, just as are gay, lesbian and bi people — many of whom are poly as well. We just want the options and the same rights.
Apparently, a lot of man-woman couples want the options as well, and are opting not to marry. A report last week from the National Center for Health Statistics deemed cohabitation as “first union” to be “ubiquitous.” Unmarried couples are staying together longer and more of them are having children.
I always like to see the U.S. habits compared with those around the world. So many “trend pieces” are written as if a couple of financiers in New York City or hipsters in San Francisco or evangelicals in Tennessee constitute a global phenomenon. Apparently, people in other nations and cultures don’t always define a relationship as a state-sanctioned ceremony involving one man and one woman. You know those Europeans — such libertines.
“The United States has long had the shortest cohabiting relationships of any wealthy nation and now these relationships are lengthening,” says sociologist Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
The new data show 70% of women without a high school diploma cohabited as a first union, compared with 47% of those with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Among women ages 22-44 with higher education, their cohabitations were more likely to transition to marriage by within three years (53%), compared with 30% for those who didn’t graduate [from] high school.
Is this because women without higher education are trifling? Nope. I was astounded to see that the sociologist gives them credit for making decisions.
“What we’re seeing here is the emergence of children within cohabiting unions among the working class and the poor,” Cherlin says. “They have high standards for marriage and they don’t think they can meet them for now, but increasingly, it’s not stopping them from having a child. Having children within cohabiting unions is much more common among everybody but the college educated.”
The reality is that the world Brooks and other conservatives believe is the norm, the standard, or the benchmark doesn’t exist. People have worked out all kinds of relationships through the years, to fill their needs and to raise families, and here we are, still breathing and polluting and drawing on the cave walls to this day. What was shown by the marriage equality issue on this patch of Earth was that people are more open to a larger perspective than these conservatives realized.
As Amy Davidson writes in The New Yorker about the Brooks column:
Was Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the DOMA case, more free when she couldn’t tell her coworkers she was engaged without losing her job — I.B.M., her employer, was, at the time, subject to an executive order that kept federal contractors from hiring gays and lesbians as “security risks” — or the day she finally got married?
He also misses a crucial point about marriage in a free country: that one of its functions is creating a space where freedom is fostered, where one can put up something of a wall against the state — a mini civic society. (This is something that the Supreme Court has recognized in cases like Griswold v. Connecticut.)
Brooks’s argument is that … now, at last, gays can and should stop worrying about anything but whether their wedding announcement will make it into the Times. They can stop challenging things. They can be smug, too. Brooks, apparently, would consider that only polite.
Smug, polite and, apparently, mature — because real grown-ups don’t take on civil rights issues or the hard business of working out a relationship day after day. They just accept injustice, or use a mold devised in a distant time and place, for reasons that often served injustice.
Keeping relationships alive requires consistent consciousness and emotional intelligence, just as improvisation is fertile territory for only the most skilled and disciplined artists. Laziness and lack of commitment can exist just as easily in a formal, traditional structure as in an open or non-monogamous one. We’re all equal in one way — no effort means no rewards.
Whereas the tax breaks conferred upon marrieds may have had their conception based on the idea that raising a family is expensive so giving that tax break to people who do that is society’s way of helping them do it; the marriage part should not have been in that. The problem with their reasoning is that they tacked on the “marriage between a man and woman” requirement. So if a single person has a child (by whatever means) they get no such tax relief. The whole thing is based on a bad religious idea of how humans are supposed to procreate and live their lives. Heteronormative monogamy and committed (under state sanction) relating isn’t about procreation only and love comes in too many variations to legislate it. The old argument that society “just wants to protect the children” is bullshit too; if that were so they would do more to help ANY set of people (monogamous, gay, poly, extended family) that engages in child-raising. That they don’t just shows their religious bias in this while area of human life.
Also, rewarding only procreating or state-sanctioned, cohabiting, monogamous humans places procreation or marriage and monogamy in a higher level which then creates the sub-class of non-attached or non-parenting people as though they are somehow less contributive to society. Special privileges are just that; special and unequal. Penalizing people for a) not being heteronormative, b) not being monogamous, and c) not procreating is discrimination and shows an internalized dominance so prevalent and pervasive it goes unnoticed by most.
Why not value all humans, no matter their state? That’s what needs to happen.
I see it the other way round, that the state is irrelevant to a marriage, like colonisation or corporate interest is ‘imposed’ from outside for ‘convenenience’. Marriage of this sort (without the state) isn’t limited to any group but a question of something real between people.
Legalities/administration are often two sided/limited – work in some scenarios and not in others.
<< Assuming that people who aren't heterosexual can't practice self-restraint or long-term commitment is bigotry, and I don't have any qualms about slamming that. >>
It’s a special form of bigotry called projection.
I love that “substance of the bride” phrase by the way. It’s so Duchampy.
The problem I had with Brooks’ column–and the view of his “conservative” buddies–is the assumption that restrictions of freedom, sacrifice, caring for others, loyalty, etc., are not practiced and have not been through history practiced except by those in a state-sanctioned, man-woman relationship (and let’s add, in the US among two white people in the past 70 years or so). The implication that LGBT life was all a merry round of bathhouses and discos until marriage came in is offensive to me, besides being wrong. Assuming that people who aren’t heterosexual can’t practice self-restraint or long-term commitment is bigotry, and I don’t have any qualms about slamming that. I was actually surprised that such bigotry is still out there, much less in the pages of a mainstream newspaper. I don’t have any adolescent beliefs about infinite freedom and liberty; I don’t believe it exists; even art requires form. It’s the notion that commitment is available only to the few and only through a legal ritual that bothered me.
Eric. Exactly.
xoxo Thx for sayin’.
Linda, a whole lotta prejudice is the difference. Or maybe just enough to be really, really annoying. However, when you consider the do-or-die pressure that is put on people to marry, and that people put onto themselves, there’s a lot implied in that question.
On a snitty little side-note – I find it ironic (at most polite) that most forms requiring marital status have a separate checkbox for “divorced” or “single”. Really? What’s the difference?
Great conversation. As I think has been pointed out – the whole “marriage” discussion is faulty because it separates those that are (married) from those that are not.
My taxes, auto insurance rates etc. should not be dictated by way of any legally binding partnership with anyone/s else.
Thanks, Alex for this, “I find it incredible that anybody believes that being able to marry gives any person greater rights.”
Amen.
There is something wrong with any argument that suggests that the way to secure equality is to circumvent the basic inequality of any party by procuring a marriage. Injustice should be addressed within its own fundamental terms of reference not by annex from some other principle.
Such faulty associations may sound plausible but inveigh against basic principles of reason. As I say, sucking minority sectors into the mainstream only succeeds in re-drawing the lines of oppression. When you are on the inside track you gain at somebody else’s expense. That is how it works. Neutralization via normalization..
(Just for interest)
Health insurance – in France too through one partner or the other – but not necessary to be married – ok to have a letter from the Mayor saying that you are a ‘concubine’ (at least a decade ago that was true). Even gay couples could do this even 10 years ago – tho perhaps that they were English (the couple I know) was easier that if they had been French?
Here in the US, marriage is a legal contract which confers certain legal benefits; a huge benefit in the tax code, the legal transfer of property with ease, the legal visitation of spouses in the hospital, the legal health decision making, the legal benefits of co-ownership of property and so much more. The sanctity part could be called “sacred matrimony” and would be completely different from the legal form of “marriage.”
The truth is, the fight for equality in marriage is just the tip of an enormous iceberg; if marriage equality is won then protection under the law of the rights of all LGBTQ people will follow and that is the ultimate goal. Right now, in the US, landlords can discriminate against all LGBTQ people as can employers, banks, credit institutions, physicians, universities, medical practitioners, in fact any person can mistreat any LGBTQ person. LGBTQ people have NO protection under the law. Marriage equality is the first step in the fight to get equal protection for LGBTQ people. I would like to see poly folks added to that as well.
That’s what’s at stake here. Just as we fought to have equal rights for women and people of color, we are fighting for the same for LGBTQ (and hopefully poly) folks. It isn’t about polarization but rather working to get equality under the law for all.
I’m in WA state, where G/L marriage became legal in the last election- and we’re all delighted for our near and distant friends and relatives who have (for their own individual reasons) happily tied the knot. AND all this seems to be yesterday’s news, though the wrong ruling would slap us hard in the face after we voted for what we think is only right and fair. What’s next- the Supremes will reverse all our domestic violence laws, too? Or our new permission to have an ounce of marijuana?
Exactly, alpssmile. That was my contention in my first post on this thread. Brooks is spot on and no amount of labelling can change that!
Too bad that David Brooks took the occasion of this loaded moment in the gay political arena to make what I feel is a very good point: freedom that works well necessarily means the directed focus of one’s intention and goals. My experience tells me that without renunciation of one’s energy toward that which is OTHER than value-based purpose, intention, goals, my orientation becomes diffused and reactive. Stereotyping David Brooks into the category of conservative that sets him up for a good bashing, then twisting his discussion points to support an ongoing liberal tirade misses the point of what he is trying to say about the human condition and its relationship to freedom. Again, too bad he chose a topic that is such a trigger wherein his message has in my opinion become quite corrupted. How is polarization serving the truth here?
Nice one, Maria!
Mainland Europe has, in parts, a more balanced position than the paid/free poles of U.S.A./U.K.
It is possible to pay for what you use (a principle absent in the UK which breeds an entitlement mentality) and then receive a rebate on a sliding scale and according to volume of personal usage. That way, the hypochondriacs and leeches of the system are deterred. The benefit is that you choose practitioner and they have to ‘care’ about the service they offer. (In the U.K., if your G.P. is constantly offering inadequate service and the cheapest, slowest treatments, he still gets paid).
People should contribute to their health care on a fair use model. The models we see in the States and Britain are flawed deeply but yours is barbaric and hardly covers your nation in glory! How you guys tolerate it is a mystery to me.
My sexual and romantic expressions may evolve and flow with the years–but I’ll always be WAY gay for a national health program.
I hear more and more people talking about opting out of the state contractual model and instead seeking to give meaning to personally devised vows. People can support each other outside of state mechanics – maybe there is a sacrifice to make but it has to be better than selling one’s soul to the god of Law..
We need to shake this shit down..
Alex, we don’t need the government for that last bit you described.
Government sanctioned marriage is an economic contract, which astrology reminds us: it’s an 8th house entity, falling under the general description of “death, dowry and the substance of the bride.”
Till death do we part, I get the dowry if we marry; what is the substance of the bride? How much will I inherit, etc.
I see the dilemma there Eric, on a practical level. I am amazed, for all the berating it gets here in the UK, that people do not value the NHS more. In the past days I have had free blood tests, lower back X-ray, a consultant appointment for my coeliac disease and free physiotherapy for a rotator cuff injury!
Nevertheless, how shocking that a case can be made for the significance of marriage solely on the basis of economic benefits, rather than intrinsic sanctity. It is a sad day when the vehicle appointed to facilitate relationship is merely a matter of securing advantages, rather than a sacred contract of commitment between conscious, fully alive, celebrants..
Alex — you’ve said you don’t believe in the concept of ‘rights’ as normally conceived. Perhaps better to consider marriage a contractual privilege, which gets one quite a bit in the United States — for example, the privilege of being able to afford a hospital visit or not. In the UK everyone has healthcare privileges. In the US, many get them through the benefits of a spouse.
We see a common problem emerging in all polemics. Everything becomes coloured by which side of the fence one sits.. The unfortunate consequence is then the kind of filtering that says “conservatives are entrenched in such and such a camp” and likewise “liberals”. This means we commit to the silly bi-partisan merry-go-round and then who you are seen to be supporting as a camp takes precedence over intelligent, critical reflection. As a Brit, I frankly couldn’t give a damn about the political affiliation of any prominent speaker. The question is whether the observation cuts to the heart of the matter and the quote from Brooks above does just that.
I find it incredible that anybody believes that being able to marry gives any person greater rights. By every reality we experience in the modern world we see that marriage erodes happiness. And the utter absurdity of people seeking marriage as a right enshrined in law as a good thing just shows how far politics is defined by mindlessness these days! But most of the prominent debates in society are pre-defined by pointless agendas that lead nowhere apart from cosmetic victories, while the deeper issues get lost in translation.
All these polarised debates lead to the same hollow, tail-chasing debates. In the real world most people understand that more legislation = less freedom. Most people automatically seek stability and they equate that with simplicity. They can’t imagine grey areas and that is why they propagate black/white scenarios like 1 man, 1 woman. Plus children. The only out from that is personal growth and a broadly permissive fulture.. not one that legislates norms.. because all norms oppress minorities.
I think you’re spot on, Carrie.
One of the reasons so many conservatives are afraid of gay marriage and poly relating is because deep inside they are afraid these people are having more fun (and ESPECIALLY more sex) than they are and they just cannot have that! “By god if we can’t have all that sex and freedom, NO one will!” They miss the point of such relationships completely; it isn’t about sex or freedom as it is about wanting to love who you love without anyone treating you like crap for it or threatening to take away your kids or fire you. Equal rights isn’t about sex OR fun but about treating all people equally under the law.