A Chatterbox

Let’s talk Prop 8. I’m sure most of you know, but as a refresher; Prop 8 is the measure to get gay marriage banned in California.

As a woman in a committed relationship with another woman who wants to make said commitment legally recognized, I will be voting No on Prop 8. This has less to do with things like taxes and health insurance and everything to do with things like being able to protect each other and any children we might have in times of crises.

But the tax benefits and legal acknowledgment of our union helps too.

When people argue against something that, to me, so obviously represses or infringes upon the happiness of others for no good reason, all I can think to myself is “they can’t understand what it feels like to be on the other side. They can’t know the real reasons why this is so badly wanted.” But if that is the case, there has to be something they do believe. Some reason that is “good enough for them”. I don’t think all of the people who want to vote yes on Prop 8 who do so out of hate — mostly it’s just fear.

Fear of what? Religion is a big part of it, but I don’t think it’s all, as I’ve met agnostics against gay marriage. (I have yet to meet an atheist against it, though, which I think says something.)

In the nature of understanding what my opponents are thinking in the same-sex marriage debate, I visited one of the “Yes on Prop 8″ websites and explored a couple of the articles linked there.

There was one particular article that caught my attention and I will link here when I get home and find the link again, so I’ll be citing my sources like a good little researcher.

The article was a point-by-point break down against the usual Pro-Gay Marriage points. It was well written, mostly non-secular, and well informed.

It was also one of the few times that I’ve seen the sheer depths of someone’s prejudice shining through even though they aren’t directly acknowledging it. He didn’t say that it was wrong to be gay or wrong for homosexuals to form long-lasting, loving relationships with each other — just as long as it wasn’t acknowledged as being equal to heterosexual marriage, because that would completely undermine civilization as we know it.

How, exactly, same-sex marriage would do that boiled down to two apparently interconnected fears:

1) It would imply that mothers and fathers are interchangeable when it comes to raising children.
2) It would imply that marriage is a social construct, not an act of natural design.

In regard to the first fear…in my mind, this is less about marriage and more about gender politics. This debate has been going on for ages and would be going on even if homosexuality didn’t exist. It hinges on one particular belief — that fatherhood is a role that can only be filled by a genetic (and, depending on who you’re talking to, self-identified) male and motherhood is a role that can only be filled by a genetic and self-identified female.

If having a uterus was the only requirement to making you a mom, the above would be true; anyone who’s been fucked over by the woman who gave birth to them could disagree with that. If being mom also meant that you cared, proved for, loved, supported, and raised a child into a adulthood — well,
men and women are equally capable of that, so why not just knock off the gender requirement all together? I understand the fear that comes with that concept, because wouldn’t that, by default, render one gender obsolete? I don’t believe so, but that’s another argument.

So far, studies have shown that while children do better in homes with more than one parent, there is no difference between the development of children raised in same-gendered households and those raised in opposite gendered households. And this is true whether they’re being raised by two gay men or two gay women or by a single dad and his best buddy, or two spinster aunts, or a single dad and his dead’s wife brother and his best friend (Full House was pretty progressive in that regard, if you want to think about it that way).

In short, preventing gay marriage does very little for this particular gender debate, sorry.

So lets go on to the idea of marriage being an act of natural design versus a social construct.

I really need to find that article, because he had a fairly lovely way of describing marriage. His view is that marriage is the basis of civilization; that it is the act of a man and a woman coming together to
produce and raise children, creating a family, and that family is in turn the building blocks that created civilization. So redefining marriage is impossible because it should be beyond redefinition – or society will collapse. Pretty, but faulty.

I could argue that marriage isn’t necessary to create a family — because that would imply that all those unmarried couples who are raising children together aren’t families, that communal households of friends and siblings aren’t family, that my household isn’t a family, etc and so forth. But that
could be nit-picked to death, so rather I want to talk more about marriage in relation to society.

To call a relationship between two individuals a marriage automatically implies a level of social acknowledgment. My partner and I can call ourselves married until we’re blue in the face, and it will not change how other people treat us or regard our partnership unless they can also agree that we are married. A societal definition and therefore, defined by society.

Nature dictates the desire of human beings to form emotional and physical partnerships. It is this natural desire to unify our lives with another, to produce children or to join families or increase wealth or merely to care for each other, that the article and others who hold to this belief are probably thinking of.

But it is society that CHOOSES to call it marriage and ascribes an importance to it not held by other relationships.

Marriage could be re-defined a hundred times over and never change the base human desire to form long term connections with other human beings. As long as that desire remains, our civilization will manage just fine.

Lastly, a similiar fault of this belief structure is that marriage has always been defined as being between men and women. This is only true if you’re Judeo-Christian, and not say, Roman, Greek, Chinese, Native American, or from certain African tribes (stuff about woman-woman marriages in Africa are especially interesting). Please to be researching more, thanks.

This entry was posted on October 3, 2008 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. Tagged: you may now kiss the other person. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.