ALTERNATIVES TO MARRIAGE? Maggie (cont.):

So anyway, as I see it, there are three distinct meta-questions embedded in this urgent call for Maggie's 8-point plan. Dale, Jonathan, correct me of course if this is wrong.

1. Jonathan's question: Everyone, including gay people, need social supports for monogamy and serious relationships. If you exclude marriage, Maggie, what is your suggestion for an alternative set of legal supports to encourage permanent bonds among gay lovers and partners?

2. Dale's question: Marriage is a civil contract that carries a set of legal benefits. It is wrong and discriminatory to deny these benefits to gay people. If, as you say, redefining marriage as unisex has too many negative consequences, how will you provide legal equity to gays and lesbians in obtaining key benefits distributed by government, which is funded by all of us, including hardworking gay and lesbian taxpayers?

3. Andrew's meta-question: Is Maggie a good person or a bad person? Only a bad person would be unconcerned about the urgent plight of gay and lesbian people which is the great civil rights struggle of our time. How can you, Maggie, demonstrate this moral concern to me, Andrew?

Let me answer Andrew's question, since he isn't here, and get some feedback from Dale and Jonathan about whether I have characterized their concerns correctly and which of the first two questions we want to tackle first.

The answer, Andrew, is that I do not know how I can do that. To me the changes towards gays and lesbians are not the great civil rights struggle of our time but a mixed bag. Some of it seems good and just, some of it seems very wrong. I distrust the reigning theory of sexual orientation, which was a word and a category invented by 19th century Freudians seeking to replace ideas of sin or immorality with mental illness (the great failed project of the last century of psychology). This stigmatized identity was in the last thirty years reclaimed and celebrated by its inhabitants, quite a feat, but the core framing of homosexuals as a kind of "third sex" as the Victorians called it, was left intact, and indeed is driving the current debate and your argument in deep ways.

Moreover, the idea that traditional Christian sexual ethics represents the moral equivalent of racism is just wrong.

It is sort of hard for me to take this question seriously because while I am of course aware of all my various sins and shortcomings rather intensely, it is hard for me to see how the fate of our most basic social institution should hinge upon them.

This subject (Maggie's virtue) comes up surprisingly often as I go around making the marriage argument, children need mothers and fathers. People stand up and say things like "I am a single mom, and I am a good person! How can you say that children need fathers. You are judgemental! You meanie!"(Okay the last is often just implied. Often but not always).

There is no moral ticket that needs to be paid as the price of admission to the marriage debate. A reader of MarriageDebate.com wrote in to say she thought refusing to redefine marriage for gays and lesbians was selfish. I told her what I think: That at a time when roughly 25 million kids go to sleep in fatherless homes, it is morally short-sighted to be messing with this institution's core role in connecting mothers, fathers and their children in order to meet adult desires for anything.

Dale, Jonathan?










posted by maggie at 11:23 PM | link

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