{"id":65879,"date":"2013-04-06T14:00:22","date_gmt":"2013-04-06T18:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=65879"},"modified":"2013-04-05T12:44:45","modified_gmt":"2013-04-05T16:44:45","slug":"march-marriage-madness-and-april-fools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/planet-waves-promo\/march-marriage-madness-and-april-fools\/","title":{"rendered":"March Marriage Madness and April Fools"},"content":{"rendered":"

The recent marriage equality hearings made me think long and hard about what marriage is, what it\u2019s intended for, how it works, and how I feel about it. I\u2019m still thinking and researching; I haven\u2019t come to too many conclusions yet, but I know it\u2019s something I have to both keep an open mind about and come to a better understanding of.<\/p>\n

\"Poly
Poly Paradise at Burning Man. Photo by Eric.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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<\/em> calls it, \u201csome seriously crazy shit.<\/a>\u201d <\/p>\n

He also calls it \u201cone of the weirdest, most mean-spirited things I\u2019ve ever seen in the New York Times<\/em>.\u201d And: \u201cWhat an asshole!\u201d<\/p>\n

I share his reaction to David Brooks\u2019 recent column<\/a> on marriage equality. <\/p>\n

Isaac, scanning the news while on the road, sent me the link to the Brooks column, \u201cFreedom Loses One\u201d (one what? Ball?), because he saw it as poly blog fodder right away. I read it and quickly fired back: \u201cYeah, that Rebecca (our single-mom-of-two-by-choice friend who recently had Isaac and Tobi over for Passover dinner), she\u2019s no better than one of those greedy CEOs, the way she refuses marriage! And she has an \u2018unsteady home\u2019 too!\u201d (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.) <\/p>\n

So how seriously crazy is this shit, anyway? Brooks\u2019 column casts gays and lesbians as a bunch of hedonistic, permissive, jeans-wearing, grooving babies who just wanted to \u201cfollow their desires\u201d — but who are finally, thank god, showing signs that they\u2019re ready to grow up and settle down, by asking for marriage equality.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The tone of the column is that he\u2019s really shocked that these libertines would trade in their \u201cfreedom\u201d for marriage vows. <\/p>\n

Libertine. That\u2019s such a great word — like liberal and serpentine put together, isn\u2019t it? It\u2019s also kind of like Ovaltine. Mmmm. You\u2019ll have to excuse me. I don\u2019t even like Ovaltine. But I\u2019ve started fasting two days a week — I read it\u2019s 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\u2019s not really that hard. I\u2019ll try to stay on topic.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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. …<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u2019ve been bound for decades to narrowed options, surrendering your autonomy and wedded (so to speak) to self-sacrifice? I\u2019m married, and I don\u2019t see it that way. For a proponent of marriage, Brooks sure makes it sound dismal. There\u2019s so much more, but I\u2019ll let Taibbi give the counterpoint:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The reason this \u201cconfronts me,\u201d as the blues singers put it, is that Brooks\u2019 contention is probably the No. 1 argument leveled against those in polyamorous relationships. We\u2019re childish, hedonistic. We think we\u2019re above the rules. We want to have our cake and eat it, too. (Oh, dear. Cake and Ovaltine. Yum.) We\u2019re immature — we don\u2019t understand that people need rules and boundaries and order to survive in society.<\/p>\n

Because poly people don\u2019t do rules or boundaries or limits. We don\u2019t 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\u2019s being fair to everyone; tell that to the man who lends his wife\u2019s 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\u2019 movies. (Mmmm, chicken nuggets. I don\u2019t even like chicken nuggets!) <\/p>\n

The truism in polyland is that we\u2019re humorless nerds who talk and talk everything to death, not that we\u2019re wildly swinging carefree types. But the true truth is that we\u2019re 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. <\/p>\n

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<\/a> deemed cohabitation as \u201cfirst union\u201d to be \u201cubiquitous.\u201d Unmarried couples are staying together longer and more of them are having children.<\/p>\n

I always like to see the U.S. habits compared with those around the world. So many \u201ctrend pieces\u201d 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\u2019t always define a relationship as a state-sanctioned ceremony involving one man and one woman. You know those Europeans — such libertines.<\/p>\n

“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.
\nThe 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Is this because women without higher education are trifling? Nope. I was astounded to see that the sociologist gives them credit for making decisions.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The reality is that the world Brooks and other conservatives believe is the norm, the standard, or the benchmark doesn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n

As Amy Davidson writes in The New Yorker<\/a><\/em> about the Brooks column:<\/p>\n

Was Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the DOMA case, more free when she couldn\u2019t 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 \u201csecurity risks\u201d — or the day she finally got married? <\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

Brooks\u2019s 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<\/em>. They can stop challenging things. They can be smug, too. Brooks, apparently, would consider that only polite.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Smug, polite and, apparently, mature — because real grown-ups don\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n

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\u2019re all equal in one way — no effort means no rewards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The recent marriage equality hearings made me think long and hard about what marriage is, what it\u2019s intended for, how it works, and how I feel about it. I\u2019m still thinking and researching; I haven\u2019t come to too many conclusions yet, but I know it\u2019s something I have to both keep an open mind about … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65879"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65879\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}