All Things in Moderation

Fourth is a four part series which closes out Pride Month.

I have previously discussed pedophilia and bestiality as slippery slope oppostions to to gay marriage. Another one frequently brought up is polygamy. When in doubt, the man whose name is synonymous with slippery slope (so to speak) metaphors, Rick Santorum is always good for a quote.

“So, everybody has the right to be happy? So, if you’re not happy unless you’re married to five other people, is that OK?”

Rick is prone to these Socratic rhetorical outbursts, but why did he pick that particular example when ‘man on dog’ had been such a winner for him in the past? Well, Eugene Volokh in the Hofstra Law Review explicitly endorses polygamy as a slippery slope gambit.

And as it happens, there probably is a large group of American listeners that neither firmly opposes nor firmly supports same-sex marriage, but pretty firmly thinks that polygamy ought not be recognized, and a smaller but nontrivial group that is open to same-sex marriage but skeptical about at least some kinds of bans on sexual orientation discrimination. People in these groups are thus potentially swayable by the slippery slope argument.

As I mentioned in my last post, the most common definition arrayed against gay marriage is that it is traditionally between one man and one woman. And while I find the gender distinction irrelevant, some people fixate on the ‘one’ part of the circumlocution. They feel that allowing gay marriage could lead to polygamy, not realizing that polygamy exists in lots of countries already, many of them highly opposed to gay rights of any variety, so the connection is tenuous at best. Polygamy is a Biblicly endorsed practice along with slavery and the shunning of menstruating women. As such, it is hardly novel or shocking.

These objections over tradition also seem oblivious to the fact that the religion of the Republican candidate had polygamy as one of its founding tenets, a practice it refuted only just over a century ago even though splinter sects still practice it. And the practitioners don’t go through the motions of civic marriage, even if they could, because that infringes on their gaming of the child welfare system that is part of their economic model.

Polygamy raises the hackles of many people including feminists who find it a patriarchal institution suppressive of women. I doubt you will find many lesbians, single or married, in support of ‘traditional’ polygamy.

The more modern form of multi-partner relationships is called polyamory in order to distinguish it from the older variety, but even it is nothing new as it is just a newer variation on the Free Love and Open Marriage movements which have been around for years. By taking the ‘gamy’ suffix out, it divorces (so to speak) the romantic/sexual relationship from the square traditional concept of fidelity. Also within the concept of polyamory is an implicit acceptance of bisexuality as at least one of the possible permutations.

For the most part, polyamory seems to be for people who just find the emotional tightrope of traditional relationships too easy and need a greater challenge. At least that is my impression from my major source of information on this topic, Dan Savage’s Lovecast podcast. Judging by his listenership the predominant paradigm in these relationships is a primary partnership, which may or may not be a legally married couple, and ‘special guest stars’ of indeterminate duration. The very ephemeral nature of the secondary partners makes absorbing them into the marriage concept complicated to say the least, and most likely unnecessary in the long term.

Conceptually the idea of extending marriage to multiple partners is simply to make marriage contracts non-exclusive. This could lead to all sorts of interlocking directorates of sorts which would really not do much except open new areas of practice for divorce lawyers. This would also require the elimination of bigamy laws which I have no qualms with since I have always considered bigamy its own punishment.

So when someone goes on clambering about how gay marriages are going to destroy society, try to realize how much society has absorbed already. Gay marriage was originally drafted as a conservative measure to draw homosexuals into society. Marriage in any form is a civilizing influence. It creates responsibility and fosters commitment, not just to a person but to a code of behavior and expectations. Love comes is all colors, sizes, and shapes and should be celebrated wherever it occurs and to whomever it happens.

On a personal note, my cousin had her civil union in Delaware on Wednesday. The Delaware rules make a ‘solemnized’ union literally indistinguishable from a marriage. Today four generations of all political stripes will gather to celebrate and honor the creation of a new family. I’m sure it will bring a tear to my eye because I find all brides beautiful and today’s ceremony will be doubly gorgeous.

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Third in a four part series.

One of the most common mantra against allowing gays and lesbians to marry is that marriage is meant to be between one man and one woman. When asked why, the response is that only a man and a woman can make a child. Despite this basic biologically obvious observation, not all men nor all women can make a child. Otherwise an enormous fertility industry would not exist. Nor do all married couples want children despite the best efforts of some to turn back Griswold vs. Connecticut.

If children were the sole reason for marriage, then the logical position would be to deny licenses to anybody who cannot produce a positive pregnancy test result. Indeed, apocryphally (and I cite Jude the Obscure as but one literary example) many marriage proposals in times past not involving the exchange of property occurred only after a metaphorical rabbit had died. For peasant farmers there was no reason to do otherwise. And if marriage was only for raising children the fact that infertile people or post menopausal women can get married proves that there are larger issues than just procreation in the mix.

Recently David Blankenhorn has reversed his position against gay marriage which had largely been based on the pro-procreation argument.

I had hoped that the gay marriage debate would be mostly about marriage’s relationship to parenthood. But it hasn’t been. Or perhaps it’s fairer to say that I and others have made that argument, and that we have largely failed to persuade. In the mind of today’s public, gay marriage is almost entirely about accepting lesbians and gay men as equal citizens.

He makes the case that it is ironic that the gay community is embracing marriage as broader society is becoming more blasé about it, with or without children. 53% of children born to mothers under the age of 30 who weren’t married. Many weddings that do occur now include the children of the bride and groom as members of the party.

And lots of gay couples enter marriage to form families. Despite the biological headwinds they face, they have available the same resources heterosexual couples can take advantage of, adoption, donor sperm, surrogacy, etc. And to say that a gay or lesbian person is not the parent of a child just because they have no genetic material at stake is an insult to any adoptive or step-parent who has ever taken on parental duties.

But having children is not the sole or even primary reason to get married. Many straight couples never intend to have kids. Why should gay couples have to meet some higher standard? Marriage throughout history has had many purposes, exchange of property, insurance of fidelity, political bonding, but the modern notion is that marriages should be based on love and affection. While arranged marriages still occur in many cultures, the Western notion of the love match is taking root through the soft imperialism of popular culture.

And with modern contraception, children are not a necessary nor sufficient reason for a marriage. For two people to get married the necessity nor the possibility of them having children no longer makes any sense as a criteria. A mutual affection and a desire for commitment should be be all that is needed.

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Second part of a four-part series. Thanks to everyone wishing my cousin well. She has changed her Facebook status, implying that they got married in DC today.

In the first post of this series I mentioned that one of the arguments marshaled by opponents of marriage equality is that it will lead to open practicing of pedophilia. Another frequent slippery slope case made famous by none other than erstwhile presidential candidate Rick Santorum. In the famous interview he said:

In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality —

It was this equating homosexuality with pedophilia and bestiality which prompted Dan Savage to redefine ‘santorum’ in a way that muddied his name forever. But he isn’t even the only presidential candidate to make the connection. Here is Michele Bachmann and Glen Beck making the direct comparison.

This is not to say that there are not proponents and advocates of bestiality. Here is a British documentary on zoophiles. As you might imagine, it’s rough stuff. But they are hardly mainstream and usually much reviled, ridiculed, or pitied. In addition to the general rubric of ‘unnatural acts’ (the same broad blanket which covers homosexuality and non-reproductive heterosexual acts), bestiality invokes the ire of animal rights activists, proving that opposition to the practice is not the sole providence of one end of the political spectrum.

But by equating bestiality with homosexuality, anti-gay rights advocates are literally dehumanizing gays and lesbians. It defines all homosexuality as a perversion of the highest order. This is thankfully now a minority view.

The mere engaging in homosexual acts has been protected since at least Lawrence vs. Texas. The primary reason gay rights advocates want gay marriage for the legal protection it entails. It is the legal benefits of the 1138 legal rights and responsibilities which marriage confers. They include:

Property inheritance without probate
Military and veteran benefits
Medical visitation and decision rights
Legal status in adoption and step-parenthood

If it were only about sex, there would never be an issue. Nobody can prevent you from teaching your dog to lick peanut butter off your genitals, but that is no reason to need to get married. Marriage is about forming legal and permanent and loving bonds. And that is something you can’t do with a dog, cat, horse, sheep, chicken, or gerbil. You can will a pet your entire fortune but you cannot give it a medical power of attorney.

Marriage creates a relationship that cannot be easily duplicated by other means. When one creates a life-bond with a partner it should supersede other previous relationships. The cases where estranged parents make life or death decisions for their gay adult children just because the person’s life partner has no legal standing are heartbreaking. To deny these rights to any couple just because of the gender of who they choose to love just doesn’t make sense.

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First in a four-part series.

The implementation of same-sex marriage has been accompanied much gnashing of teeth, mostly along slippery slope lines, about the impending collapse of civilization while not noting that civilization has been collapsing just fine without it. This Saturday my cousin will be in some sort of ceremony with her girlfriend of several years. I really don’t know whether it is a legal marriage since the Maryland marriage equality law does take effect (barring a referendum challenge) until January.

Regardless, the entire family including my very conservative father will be there to celebrate this happy occasion. This seems to be a good time to ruminate on the various arguments which have been arrayed against gay marriage.

One is that once gay marriage is allowed, it will shortly allow pedophiles to marry the objects of their affections and for incest to run rampant. One such subscriber to this fear mongering is Vicky Hartzler (R-Missouri) who worries:

Why not allow an uncle to marry his niece? Why not allow a 50-year-old man to marry a 12-year-old girl if they love each other and they’re committed?

The National Organization for Marriage raises the concern this way:

When you knock over a core pillar of society like marriage, and then try to redefine Biblical views of marriage as bigotry, there will be consequences. Will one of the consequences be a serious push to normalize pedophilia?

Notice the way that both of these quotes are in the hypothetical because nobody is seriously proposing this. When pushed to extremes, groups will cite the North American Man-Boy Love Association aka NAMBLA, a nearly apocryphal group not unlike the New Black Panthers which seems to exist only to serve as a strawman. No serious statement has been issued by the groups since the late 90s when they were driven out of GBLT umbrella groups out of genuine outrage.

As the recent Sandusky case attests, nobody is out there defending the right of adults to sexually exploit minors. Even in cases which would seem to push the boundaries such as Mary Kay Letourneau (afterall, what middle school boy hasn’t been hot for teacher, amirite?) the social approbation has been nearly universal.

Several issues get conflated, but several broad bullet points need to be always mentioned.

Few gay men are pedophiles.
Most pedophiles, even those who abuse boys, are straight.
Most pedophiles were victims of sexual abuse themselves.

Frankly , most revulsion towards gay marriage is simply thinly veiled homophobia over the fact that gay sex is icky. That is why lesbian couples such as Mary Cheney and Heather Poe, as well as my cousin, are much more palatable to the public than the male variety. But that is why straight men watch ‘lesbian’ porn and women write slash fiction.

But to say that same sex marriage is going to release the floodgates for pedophiles eager to use this as a camel nose under the tent is simply false. And the key difference is one of consent. Minors are not considered able to consent knowledgeably. And while the laws vary widely from state to state, there are key broad assumptions about how and when minors can engage in sex and/or get married, and the rules are often different. For example, Maryland had an age of consent exemption allowing a marriage to women as young as thirteen provided the bride was pregnant (thus making Hartzler’s argument above moot). And by simple biology this situation can’t possibly be gay. It’s the straight abusers of children who were being legally protected.

Letting adult gays and lesbians marry isn’t going to make pedophilia socially acceptable as long as parents love and protect their children. And adult homosexuals fucking each other in their own marriage beds is not something kids need protection from.

Filed under: gay marriage | 112 Comments »