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Canuckistan Legalized SSM 10 Years Ago. Here’s What the US Should Expect Next
Laws will have to be re-written, for one thing; words like “husband” and “wife” have to be removed, along with the phrase “natural parent.” But there’s much more…
Because this process will have to be repeated in all 50 states and Washington D.C., there are likely lots and lots and lots of lawyers popping champagne corks today.
Published in General, Marriage
If I can jump in here, and at the risk of offering the opinion of one of the permanently single… here is where I see the purpose coming in.
Of course it is not 100%… what ever is in this world? (When was the last time you saw a poll hit even 90% agreement on any subject?) But marriage is about family. And in a way that goes way beyond the my mommy’s ex-boyfriend’s father who I still call Grandpa kind of way.
Without marriage, family ceases to live in the way one expects. Marriage grows families in two ways. On the wedding day, over on the other side of the church are a bunch of strangers. Some of those people are going to end up as family; and if you do it right, they will be family every bit as much as the ones on your side of the church.
And then there is of course the more direct expedient of increasing the size of the family by creating new people who are attached at birth. This is a strong one; I have no children of my own but among the blood descendants of my brothers, almost all of their kids look at least as much like me as their parent or grandparent, if not more. That makes for an undeniable connection.
But without marriage in some meaningful form, families will die out.
While we are doubting motives, I don’t believe the driving force for gay marriage was the desire of gays to support and strengthen the institution of marriage. Perhaps a teeny tiny minority wanted that, and a large number wanted the ability to marry and thought it would not harm the institution of marriage. But the driving force (possibly with understandable reasons) was recognition of homosexual sexuality as a protected, positive good for society, equivalent in every meaningful way to heterosexual sexuality. If that meant trivializing marriage by removing its procreative reason for existence, that was of little or no concern. Now that end has been achieved, those folks probably could not care less if anybody actually marries or stays married. They were not fighting for marriage.
Your wording suggests that gays and lesbians will value marriage so highly that they will not trash it by premarital sex, adultery and divorce like straight people have. That would be a ludicrous idea, and one not borne out by experience so far.
Enough that I didn’t bring it up the first 2,047 times you brought up Ruth and Naomi! (But who’s counting :-) )
Sure, marriage has multiple meanings and functions but they mostly flow from the procreative one. It does not make sense to me to say marriage is not about procreation but it’s about extended family ties. Those ties may not be there. And the main power of those ties, is that they are blood. Your mother-in-law is your children’s grandmother. And they don’t require legal marriage at all.
Because marriage has been such a widespread feature of adult life, there are some functions attached to it that are not necessarily procreation-related, like next of kin status. But single people ought to have a means to handle this as well as couples who are not legally married.
I have a theory that the success of a marriage is inversely proportional to the amount of money spent on the wedding.
I have to tell you though, that I don’t think your approach of persuading the already-married to stay married and scaring off the not-yet-married from taking the plunge is going to overcome the headwinds against marriage. If it’s optional I think dwindling numbers of people will bother, or at least they won’t hurry. I just read the average age at first marriage in Canada is 29. For women. For men it was 31 or 32.
I agree—nicely done.
Sure, marriage has multiple meanings and functions but they mostly flow from the procreative one. It does not make sense to me to say marriage is not about procreation but it’s about extended family ties. Those ties may not be there. And the main power of those ties, is that they are blood.
JoJo—you’re right; most of these bonds and connections do proceed from an actual or potential procreative connection. And the extended family bonds are probably a lot stronger when children are involved, including those between parents and their widowed daughters-in-law (the childless R & N aside). We could add other factors that affect the relationship, but the presence of kids is a really big one.
Procreation matters a lot. Still, I believe our society’s default assumption is that when people get married, their intention is love.
Sure, children too, probably, and sex, most likely, though an officiant need not demand guarantees on that score, or examine the bed-linens. And it’s reasonable to throw in ideas of kindness, support and fidelity though we generally leave it up to the wronged spouse to decide when enough is too much. I marry a lot of people, and at least in my experience, people who get married do so with the intention of loving one another, in all the ways and by all the means that they can, until they are parted by death. And my next assumption, one I believe to be more or less reflective of the community/church/state, is that this is both possible (married people can love one another) and a good thing not just for them but for all of us. Why? For their own well-being and spiritual growth, certainly…and because of procreation, family, the safety net woven through extended family bonds, the organization of social life, the regularization of inheritance, custody, property transfer, taxation, etc. etc.
Since almost no other contract can be dissolved without cause by a single party, as a start, I recommend either a return to the legal arrangements before no-fault divorce and gradual evolution from those positions with the goal of strengthening the institution for all of its implicit purposes or transforming marriage with explicit contracts. Though I agree with you that marriage is built mainly on providing for children, marriage implicitly includes other aspects like joining families and a promise of intimacy, and we have to begin with a frank discussion of each party’s obligations under marriage. For example, feminist treat the duty to be intimate as of a piece with prostitution, and as a result, I’ve seen several marriages die due to the attitude of American women that sex is at worst some kind of chore and at best a carrot used in a way demeaning to a man to ensure his compliance with a wife’s wishes. People refuse to recognize the phenomenon of constructive abandonment and its relationship to infidelity or the marriage strike, but I think that the problem is real and worthy of serious discussion. (By the way, you don’t see the same attitudes in women abroad in places like China.)
Incidentally, single people (heads up, Creepy Lurker!) have a default next of kin too; it’s Mom and Dad. (We deal with this a lot at the scenes of accidents or drownings). And if you aren’t married, motherhood trumps girlfriend-hood. (Legal wife-hood also trumps girlfriend-hood.) (It arises.)
Gay and lesbian couples, before SSM, would create legal arrangements (Durable Power of Attorney, I think) to allow their girl- or boy-friends to be as next-of-kinny as they personally felt them to be. During the AIDS crisis, long-time partners were edged out of the hospital room by parents who hadn’t spoken to their dying sons for years. (Did I mention that people are crazy?)
I know this is a weirdly old-fashioned idea, but a human being can’t live on hook-ups alone. Even in the heyday of the liberated gay, with the bathhouses and leather bars in the Castro and the West Village, a majority (at least according to what I’ve read ) of gay men as well as lesbians nonetheless formed pair-bonds. We tend to. It’s built-in, and it is relatively powerful (because passionate) as human non-blood relationships go. I’m not talking perfect monogamy, just the usual, error-prone attempts at fidelity that marriage seeks to perfect (and sometimes does) through solemn promises.
This is what makes marriage so educational—because you have to work out all these paradoxes (koans, a Zen buddhist might say): how do you joyfully and willingly engage in what is your duty? what’s the difference between “you mowed the lawn and I’m rewarding you with nookie” and “I am so glad I didn’t have to mow the lawn myself that gratitude is merging mysteriously into desire?” Or “just because you finally mowed the lawn doesn’t mean you should expect me to put out…” or “oh, sure, now you’re all lovey-dovey, just when I’m so exhausted from mowing the lawn that I just want to go to sleep…”
In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis is very funny about the built-in humiliations of sex and sexual relationships.
“Gay and lesbian couples, before SSM, would create legal arrangements (Durable Power of Attorney, I think) to allow their girl- or boy-friends to be as next-of-kinny as they personally felt them to be. During the AIDS crisis, long-time partners were edged out of the hospital room by parents who hadn’t spoken to their dying sons for years. (Did I mention that people are crazy?)”
It’s good to see the foundational myths being recycled.
I can only speak for myself, but I don’t desire to have sex with someone who doesn’t really want to have sex with me. It’s not arousing since part of the thrill is being wanted. I think that I have a healthy attitude to sex, and in my experience, the problem that I described is peculiarly American. American women seem to resent sex in ways that others do not. I think that feminism created a culture of resentment surrounding sex, and the result has been a destruction of at least one half of the implicit compact of marriage, the obligation to be intimate with a partner. Since I’ve started seeing foreign women, I’ve found that there are women who don’t actually resent sex.
Beautifully put, Creep ;-)
I ended up with some insight by spending two weeks in London a few years ago. I was discombobulated the whole time I was there and didn’t figure it out until I got back. I was attracted to just about every women I met and couldn’t figure out why. The women there are feminine in a way that most American women have lost. I don’t think it’s sex American women resent; it’s being feminine.
(I’m not making blanket statement here about all American women, so no need to lynch me. I was living in NYC city at the time and things are a little more extreme there.)
Without replying to anyone in particular, I’d just like to say that I have my own theory on the origin of sudden push for same-sex marriage. I think that the gay and lesbian community is being used as a prop in the gender war. Historically, women have been the enforcers of the hegemony on sexuality. (What men fear most about being identified as gay is exclusion from heterosexual pairing.) Feminists embraced the cause because they cannot retain the institution of marriage and its benefits but effectively complain about marriage by contrast with another institution as long as marriage is exclusively between men and women. By broadening the definition of marriage, radical feminists can point to other forms of marriage to contrast with traditional marriage and undermine its norms.
Why do feminists want to undermine the norms of traditional marriage? In my opinion, feminists are an arm of a larger progressive movement that wants to destroy the bonds of community and family, bonds creating responsible citizens instead of isolated, dependent individuals. Traditional gender roles in marriage made marriage an easily exploitable weakness in the traditional organization of society overall.
No, it’s not natural for people to live on hook-ups alone, and it’s not natural for them to be monogamous for life, either. It takes a lot of social support to make it possible. That social support has been eroding and SSM will add to the erosion. There is no compelling reason for same sex couples to be monogamous or for society to care.
Here’s a recent pro-SSM article about how really the monogamy standard is not the same.
Kate contends marriage is about procreation – but not only about procreation. She says marriage also exists to create kinship in other ways. Or as Creepy put it,
What we live through inevitably colors our perception. Kate, who, as a remarried widow still close to her first husband’s family, and as a chaplain present at an endless parade of deaths and accidents, is constantly reminded of marriage’s non-procreative kinship formation. You, Jojo, having (according to you) no non-procreative ties of kinship in your own marriage, naturally focus on the ties you do have – the procreative ones.
You are funny, Kate. “Gratitude merging mysteriously into desire,” definitely the way to go.
Seriously, I think the big problem with feminism is lack of gratitude.
Hi MFR! I have some kinship ties- my husband gets along well with my family- but I answered your point before you made it. I think the kinship ties largely flow from the procreative ties, and in any case there is no need for a marriage to establish the kinship ties but there is a benefit from the clarity of a marriage for the procreative ties. I think the fact that there may be kinship ties and there may not be procreative ties in no way negates the fact that the purpose for the institution of marriage is to structure procreation. It is not there so you can have a mother-in-law. It is there so your babies have a daddy. Or so you set a good example so other babies have daddies.
Or so I thought before the Supreme Court said it’s just about love. (In which case every marriage has moments of invalidity!)
It may be a foundational myth but, like many myths, is based in fact. I knew a couple of these guys personally. It was ugly. I knew a few more, of course, whose parents told everyone their sons were dying of something else because admitting that your son had AIDS was admitting that your son was gay. This came up in my world, not just in my protest literature. I’d like to think it was uncommon, even rare. Even vanishingly rare—I’d like to think that, because I want to believe that the love of parents for their children can jump over just about any obstacle. Got data, Basil? Cheer me up, friend.
Glad to hear it!
The procreative ties are undoubtedly a strong motivator of other kinship ties, but not the only one. You yourself use the phrase “largely flow”, different from “flow entirely”, which prompts me to question your claim that “there is no need for a marriage to establish” non-procreative kinship ties.
Anything that civilizes sex also structures procreation. If I said, “The purpose of marriage is to civilize sex,” structuring of procreation would inevitably follow – as well as the other “side benefits” of marriage that you are reluctant to associate with the purpose of marriage.
Re #79 : Questioning my claims, you are, eh? There does not need to be a child for someone to have a kinship affection for their beloved’s parents, siblings, etc. but there also does not need to be a marriage.
Not sure where you are going with the last paragraph, but I mistrust being told what I am reluctant to associate with what.
I see this as the dynamic going all the way back to cave man days, the point at which they figured out where babies come from. At that point, the woman’s position becomes if you want to hook up, then you have to help take care of the baby. The man says, that if I have to take care of the baby, then we’re going to make sure it’s my baby, so no sleeping with anyone else. Woman says, fair enough… oh by the way, I don’t need you splitting your attention with other women’s kids, so no sleeping around for you either.
And you have marriage… an arrangement that can only be sustained by a vow that both are willing to keep. Not surprising that people fall short; that’s a tough bar to clear. But still worth keeping around.
I can’t prove a negative, Kate, but if being locked out of hospital rooms were a problem, it was not one which required the redefinition of marriage to solve. It was, rather, a useful problem designed to appeal to useful idiots in the march toward SSM.
Apologies – I should have said you appear to be reluctant to me. What you really are reluctant to do is not for me to know: I can only guess based on what you’ve said.
I still don’t know what you meant, actually.
But were you trying to say that the purpose of marriage is not to structure procreation but to civilize sex (which has the side effect of structuring procreation) ? Why do we want to civilize sex?
I want to meet Jojo.
Best laugh I had all day!
Wow! Interesting.
What men fear most about being identified as gay is exclusion from heterosexual pairing.
Really? My impression is that what straight men fear most about being identified as gay is the implication of effeminacy—same thing that made “woman!” a fight-worthy insult in my high school. Being female (as opposed to being with one) was low-status.
But I don’t know…Other men weigh in, here?
Creepy and Joseph’s observations on American women are fascinating—here my impression has been that young American women are absurdly, even self-destructively inclined, thanks to the assiduous tutelage of Cosmo and Victoria’s Secret, to thong-up and put out and at least pretend to like it. Yeesh. We’re being out-put-out by the BRITS?
And does it strike anyone else as slightly ironic that Creepy and Joseph (both single) are commenting on the decline of marriage as the result of a feminist plot while, with downright endearing guilelessness, celebrating the willingness of women in foreign climes to meet them unresentfully sans-culottes without benefit of clergy?
Congrats on the nookie, boys. Hope you, y’know, took precautions. (That sounds pretty weak doesn’t it, for someone who claims to Defend Marriage?!)
Anyway, I, too, think feminism (and, for that matter, the liberal adoption of feminist tropes) can indeed seem pretty ungrateful when it comes to the worth and value of men. Read all about it in….(wait for it)….
My new book! Anchor & Flares, available in bookstores July 14th…
Oh, my publicist would be so pleased with me! Slipping it in there so natural-like…
Did I tell you, JoJo, that one of my favorite comments from a reader ever is “you can be so wise.” I love that “can be.” SO TRUE! (And I can be such a ninny. But don’t tell anyone—we want A & F to do super-well, so I can pay hospital bills!)
Well, uncivilized sex results in murders, beatings, rapes, and other crimes of passion, not just in bastard babies.
Again, I admit my own experience colors my perceptions: There is someone in my past I could well have murdered if I had also had sex with him. Fortunately, I hadn’t, so the impulse to murder was easier to contain.
This is weirdly true. In my admittedly strange experience.
You presume too much. No where did I mention nookie. I talked about attraction, and being confused by something I couldn’t figure out in real time.