A thoughtful post by HuffPo’s Bob Ostertag on the Whole Big Frakkin’ Rick Warren Brouhaha and the general topic of gay marriage.
I’m seeing this perspective expressed more and more these days. I think Ostertag has some good points to make. And like most perspectives (including mine), it doesn’t reflect the whole picture — I can certainly empathize deeply with the commenters whose personal lives have been trashed by Prop 8 and all the intolerance that nurtured it. Maybe there are just too many differing individual experiences and “goals” to draw them together into one neat package and say Here’s the last word on gay marriage.
We’re fond of single perspectives in this culture. We like it simple. We like rules and solutions. But most things involving identity and feelings just aren’t that simple. I wish that the culture could learn to make room for the variety of human experience.
And yet — is injustice wrong? Absolutely. Is intolerance stupid? Definitely. Is this the world we live in? It sure is. So what do we do about it?
No easy answers here, just more to consider.
Even for the church, marriage has always been about protecting childrenwhose going to pay fot them?). I have always felt somewhat uncomfortable piusing the issue of equal rights based on marriage. Equality is an idea and an ideal. Marriage is only a status. I know that there are rights and priveleges attached to marriage that should be attached to other types of relationships. I just don’t think you have to be married to have them.
Yes, there are no easy answers.
This is not about some philsophical concept. This is about real people with real lives. Have a look at this slideshow.
I am single, and I can say that I agree with some of his points – there are definitely biases in our culture that benefit married people and couples. Makes me wanna puke sometimes. It is wrong. But that is a different fight. Rights for single people is a whole separate issue. I am single, and I’m Still Pissed Off, and I’m not alone..
I just think that this about more than gay marriage. it is about equality. I think that with same sex marriage other stuff (rights) fall into place. I would rather see quiltbag rights won on some other topic, but that’s not where we are. This is where we are, and we have to speak up now. I don’t give a crap about religion or civil marriage or any or that stuff, but our society and our govt. does. This is where I live, and I have to speak to them on their level. I know that blog post is referencing Rick Warren, but he’s also speaking to bigger issues.
No, this is not where the struggle for sexual freedom ends. Not by a long shot. It’s just a big step along the way. In my mind there are a lot of reasons to stand up to evangelicals. And this is just one of them. Yes, there are other even bigger problems staring us in the face; that is not a reason to let this one slide by us.
Even in our democracy, the majority doesn’t dictate rights to others.
What do we do about the world we live in? I certainly am not pretending to have the answer. Much of the time, It’s all I can do to worry about what’s happening in my own little square of it. And right now, this is in my front yard.
Jennifer, I am with all of us who stand up for gay marriage. Fighting for equality is essential, no matter what the venue. The evangelicals are a bunch of door slammers. I’m not saying don’t fight. I’m just saying that’s not all there is. I’m single too. Friendship is the most important relationship to me right now.
I agree with you Barbara, that’s not even close to all there is. I was responding more to the blog post Kelley linked to than to you directly.
I’m with you on the friendship thing.
“Even for the church, marriage has always been about protecting children.” Well, no. For the churches, as for the rest of society (and it’s not limited to ‘western’ culture as far as I can tell), marriage has always been about establishing and maintaining men’s authority over, and ownership of, women and children. Protecting children it most certainly is not, since it does not protect “illegitimate” children and is meant to exclude them from protection.
Which is why I’m increasingly skeptical about marriage, gay or straight. Nancy Polikoff’s very fine book Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, published by Beacon earlier this year, argues a good case for making marriage matter less. Including same-sex couples in marriage won’t create “equality”, it will simply redistribute inequality, and it is meant to do so. Inequality between married and single people, and between married couples and unmarried couples.
Polikoff shows that from the 60s on, a great deal of progress was made in making marriage matter less — decriminalizing sex outside marriage, protecting the children of unmarried parents from legal and other disability, decreasing the power of husbands over wives — and that this was a good thing. What she calls the marriage movement, the right-wing and mostly religious backlash against this trend, was meant to shore up marriage and men’s authority over women and children. She also gives good reason why gay people should work, not for marriage, but for legal protection for all families, married or not. This would protect same-sex couples too, and it would give us much-needed allies, as well as allowing us to (ahem) stand by others.
P.S. I didn’t even read Ostertag’s post until after I’d written that rant; I’m pleased to see that he’s saying basically the same thing I did. Polikoff’s book would be a good next step for those who are interested by Ostertag’s argument.
I disagree with him on a few points, though. I think he’s being too soft on evangelicals in general and on Warren in particular — it doesn’t appear to me, yet, that Warren or other evangelicals are putting global warming, poverty and AIDS above same-sex marriage in their list of concerns. If they’re pushing abstinence in AIDS education, for example, they’re going to do more harm than good, and I haven’t yet seen any indication that evangelicals generally are ready to let go of abstinence as their magic bullet for all sexual ills. (There’s a good comment here on Warren’s praise for Bush’s (nonexistent) achievements against AIDS, which is enough to make me very wary of Warren’s vaunted social conscience.)
Second, it isn’t only gay people who are displeased with Obama’s invitation to Warren. See Avedon Carol’s post here, for example. I agree with Ostertag that we should pay attention to other issues in addition to those that seem closest to our concerns, which is what I’ve been doing all along. But I notice that even Ostertag has nothing to say about Warren’s endorsement of the assassination of Iran’s president Ahmadinejad, though I’ve noticed that most gay progressives either are unaware, or positively approve of Obama’s foreign-policy continuity with Bush. As I said over at Nicola’s blog, I’m less concerned about the unintended “harm” that Obama’s invitation to Warren will do to me (and I’m not losing sleep over it) than about about the real and intended harm that Obama says he wants to do to poor brown people the world over. Which doesn’t seem to have bothered Obama’s glbtq fans, just his symbolic slap in the face to them.
Sorry for one more, but:
“Is intolerance stupid? Absolutely.”
Well, no. It depends on what you’re intolerant of. I’m intolerant of bigotry, for example, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.
The trouble seems to be that words like “intolerance” and “discrimination” are really shorthand for bigger concepts, but many people have boiled them down to one word and forget the larger concepts involved. For example, “discrimination” is not a bad thing in itself; bad discrimination is unjust discrimination in certain carefully defined domains based on things like race, sex, religion, place of national origin, marital status, age, etc. There are many things we should be intolerant of, too. I’m intolerant, for example, of people who attack fundamentalists for “ignorance” about the Bible while exhibiting even greater ignorance of the Bible themselves. (“Ignorance” is another buzzword people should use more carefully if they want to be taken seriously.) And so on.
Good grief, Duncan. Well done.