ALTERNATIVES TO MARRIAGE: Maggie v. Tom

Woke up in the middle of the night pondering Tom's question, or rather my reaction to it. Since I am about to answer Jon and Dale's two questions, this may seem moot. But I just do not acknowledge Tom that you are right. If the assumption is that, in proposing to retain the core, common, cross-cultural understanding of marriage, I am excluding a class of people to whom I therefore I am morally obliged give something else, I really do not think it is true. Neither as a matter of compromise nor of justice.

Rather, as I see it, there is one class of (not people) but type of relationship called marriage which we single out for special consideration because it carries a special and irreplaceable burden: we need to get not all but enough men and women into this kind of union for our civilization to continue. The alternative to marriage in my view is freedom and privacy and civil rights, and civility.

Gays and lesbians are working things out in the legislative process, with a quite-remarkable degree of success. The theory that whenever you confront people who disagree with you (which you Tom are calling anti-homosexuality) the thing to do is smash through them because you have elite opinion on your side is not very democratic or tolerant. Oh sure, let's do the hard work of convincing our fellow citizens, until we find it is not working as fast as we like: then we will just use power. No doubt all strong moral partisans would prefer to get the courts to do the job, faster and with a more satisfying moral putdown of the people who disagree with them.

Gays and lesbian people are deeply empowered in a number of ways that say, poor fatherless children, are not. I don't know what Martin Luther King, Jr. would think, and I wonder how African-Americans feel now about the insistence that affirmation of gay sexual and intimate relationships is the defining civil rights battle of our time.
posted by maggie at 8:12 AM | link

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