So Dear Reader, remember a few weeks ago when I posted something about how one of the great things about being a godsdamned queer is that it sets you free of many of the oppressive systems of the world? And, at least as a Christian in today's America, it frees you from the heresy of believing yourself to be a perfectly morally righteous person? Remember?
Well, I may not have said it that clearly, but that's what I was going for.
Here's an article that a friend laughingly sent me:
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/533narty.asp
The author Sam Schulman argues that it's just fine to be anti-gay marriage because it's not just the bigots and the Bible-thumpers who believe that one group should be excluded from a set of rights enjoyed by others. Sam says that the real problem people have with gay marriage has nothing to with morals and ethics, but is rather a question of kinship.
Now friends, you might be saying, “Kinship? Really? What is this, Freshman year anthro class? ... And if it is Freshman year again, why I aren't I more hungover?”
Well Dear Reader, we for better or worse are here in the present, as we always tend to be. What's going on here, I suspect, is that it has started to penetrate many Conservatives mental shields that there's something wrong with discriminating against queers solely on the basis of who they develop sexual and romantic feelings for. They are, Lord help them, starting to feel guilty about their bigotry.
And that's a good thing. I firmly believe that it's possible for people to get along. We can love each other, make things work. The world doesn't absolutely need to be in the state that it is. A new world, a better world is possible. That, friends, that is the world that I believe Christ was calling us to.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Real quick, let's take a look at Schulman's four ridiculous reasons for claiming that homosexuals will never be able to fully participate in systems of kinship:
Here's the core of his first argument:
Marriage, whatever its particular manifestation in a particular culture or epoch, is essentially about who may and who may not have sexual access to a woman when she becomes an adult, and is also about how her adulthood--and sexual accessibility--is defined.
and later
This most profound aspect of marriage--protecting and controlling the sexuality of the child-bearing sex--is its only true reason for being, and it has no equivalent in same-sex marriage.
Without systems of kinship, Schulman says, no one has “a duty to protect her virginity until the time came when marriage was permitted or, more frequently, insisted upon.”
So basically, women need not only protection, but also a clear outside force telling them when or when not they can have sexual relations. With homosexuals, there's no one telling women what to do with their bodies. And God only knows what a woman will get up to with out a powerful force regulating her body.
Schulman seems vaguely aware that this is a stupid and horrible thing to say, but he comforts himself and his readers with the following statement:
But the duty of virginity can seem like a privilege, even a luxury, if you contrast it with the fate of child-prostitutes in brothels around the world.
Yeah, see? If it weren't for men telling women what to do with their bodies, it'd be nothing but horizon to horizon child-prostitute brothels.
He is saying that the only two choices for women is to hand over control of their bodies and their virginity to powerful men or to be whores. The system is what keeps women safe, and nothing else. If women do not submit themselves to the system, then, says Schulman, they are doomed.
Moving on to argument #2:
Second, kinship modifies marriage by imposing a set of rules that determines not only whom one may marry (someone from the right clan or family, of the right age, with proper abilities, wealth, or an adjoining vineyard), but, more important, whom one may not marry. Incest prohibition and other kinship rules that dictate one's few permissible and many impermissible sweethearts are part of traditional marriage. Gay marriage is blissfully free of these constraints. There is no particular reason to ban sexual intercourse between brothers, a father and a son of consenting age, or mother and daughter. There are no questions of ritual pollution: Will a hip Rabbi refuse to marry a Jewish man--even a Cohen--to a Gentile man? Do Irish women avoid Italian women? A same-sex marriage fails utterly to create forbidden relationships. If Tommy marries Bill, and they divorce, and Bill later marries a woman and has a daughter, no incest prohibition prevents Bill's daughter from marrying Tommy. The relationship between Bill and Tommy is a romantic fact, but it can't be fitted into the kinship system.
(I swear, I was going to dig out the most telling bit of that paragraph but the whole thing is evidence of the ridiculousness of this argument)
To restate Schulman's claim, because homosexual relationships violate one part of Schulman's idea of kinship, he sees no reason by they shouldn't transgress every taboo, law, ethic and moral known to man. It is somehow unimaginable to Schulman that all the same societal rules would remain in place with the exception of the gender of the two participants in the relationship. This assumption of the utter depravity of a homosexual relationship only makes sense it one can imagine homosexuals to be entirely incapable of good.
Here's another way of looking at it: Let's imagine that I enjoy drinking Coca Cola and you enjoy drinking Pepsi. More than enjoying Pepsi, you believe that Pepsi is the only thing worth drinking, and that it is terribly wrong to drink anything that isn't Pepsi. If someone's not drinking Pepsi, you say, why wouldn't they be slaughtering children and drinking the blood? If someone doesn't like Pepsi, you say, well then you just better not drink anything, no matter how thirsty you are.
It has nothing to do with the benefits of drinking the Coke or the Pepsi, is all about the sanctity of the system, the sanctity of the idea that Pepsi is the best product. It is madness.
Also, oddly, a lot of Schulman's big questions seem to be less about incest and pedophilia, and more to do with whether or not it's ok for homosexuals to cross race norm, leading of course to “ritual pollution.” Can a Jewish marry a Gentile? An Irish woman marry an Italian woman? It seems that Schulman puts inter-racial relationships on the same level as a father having a sexual relationship with his son.
I don't know if anyone has told Schulman, but it's ok for folks to have inter-racial relationships. Most folks no longer consider that as bad as incest and pedophilia.
But, leaving that alone, let's move on to #3:
Third, marriage changes the nature of sexual relations between a man and a woman. Sexual intercourse between a married couple is licit; sexual intercourse before marriage, or adulterous sex during marriage, is not. Illicit sex is not necessarily a crime, but licit sexual intercourse enjoys a sanction in the moral universe, however we understand it, from which premarital and extramarital copulation is excluded. More important, the illicit or licit nature of heterosexual copulation is transmitted to the child, who is deemed legitimate or illegitimate based on the metaphysical category of its parents' coition.
and later
Gay lovers live merrily free of this system. Can we imagine Frank's family and friends warning him that "If Joe were serious, he would put a ring on your finger"? Do we ask Vera to stop stringing Sally along? Gay sexual practice is not sortable into these categories--licit-if-married but illicit-if-not (children adopted by a gay man or hygienically conceived by a lesbian mom can never be regarded as illegitimate). Neither does gay copulation become in any way more permissible, more noble after marriage.
So basically, straight folks can have both licit and illicit sex, which is important because it determines whether or not their child is a valid member of society. Homosexuals, though, homosexuals are incapable of licit sex. While Schulman does admit that the children of homosexuals don't count as “illegitimate,” as he never goes so far as to say that they are “legitimate) The idea here is that since everything homosexuals do is immoral, there is no reason to sanctify it in marriage.
One of the problems here is that once again Schulman can only imagine a coercive, dominating societal rule in which people must be placed into neat, clean categories from which they may near escape. For Schulman, a child must be either legitimate or illegitimate. A woman must either be a virgin or a whore. If we start dismantling the systems by which we define people and assign them their proper place in society, asks Schulman, how will they be properly controlled?
The other problem, and this is the big one, is that Schulman can not imagine a real, beautiful, spark of divine love existing between two people of the same gender. Love is notoriously hard to define with hard and fast logic. If Plato, Omar Khayyam, and Augustine couldn't nail down what love is, well the ol' Combat Queer probably isn't going to do much better. All I know is that the God I follow, the one I search after, He was tortured to death because of His love for us. He defined Himself by His love for us. If we poor humans can find some love, if we can find someone with whom to try to build a shelter against the storms of the world with, and build that shelter in love, then it seems to me that that love, that relation is worthy of honor.
Schulman isn't worried about love. He only cares about the system, and making sure that everyone from illegitimate child to
Moving on to #4:
Fourth, marriage defines the end of childhood, sets a boundary between generations within the same family and between families, and establishes the rules in any given society for crossing those boundaries. Marriage usually takes place at the beginning of adulthood; it changes the status of bride and groom from child in the birth family to adult in a new family.
and later
A wedding between same-sex lovers does not create the fact (or even the feeling) of kinship between a man and his husband's family; a woman and her wife's kin. It will be nothing like the new kinship structure that a marriage imposes willy-nilly on two families who would otherwise loathe each other.
Now, the only way that I can imagine someone making this argument is if they have never spent time which the family of a homosexual whose family loved and welcomed her or his same-sex significant other. I've know several such families. I've heard a friend's mother regularly refer to her son's long term boyfriend as her son-in-law, wholly without irony. Family's who love their children, a lot of them will eventually accept the fact of their kids' homosexuality. It just happens. Marriage does not magically bind the fates and fortunes of two families. We're not royalty tying together two warring nations. The idea that straight marriage somehow magically makes two families get along is ridiculous. I have lived through many, many fights among in-laws. It's just a part of the world.
Schulman, for whatever reason, really hates the idea of people being free. More than anything else Schulman wants people bound up in chains of tradition and worldly bullshit. In the Gospel of Luke, Christ called us out of exactly this kind of thing. (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%2014:25-33;&version=31;)
Christ calls us to throw away the systems of the world. Why? Because these systems are bullshit.
These systems of control only exist to turn human being into products, into commodities. These systems only exist to prevent us for understanding each other as being equally human. These systems that Christ freed us from only exist to let us know who we can kill, who we can use, who we can treat as things. These systems tell s that we are Americans and they are Iraqis, and that makes it ok that we've killed a million of them for no good reason.
It's absolute bullshit, but some folks want to keep us in those chains. The strange freedom is somehow far more frightening than that familiar entrapment.
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