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 Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Is Marriage Doing Fine? Academic Promises, HipHop Realities/Maggie Gallagher
My column this week. Maggie IS MARRIAGE DOING FINE? ACADEMIC PROMISES, HIP-HOP REALITIES I'm holding in my hand an amicus brief filed in the New Jersey same-sex marriage litigation. With their distinguished academic pedigrees, a group of highly credentialed scholars want to send a message on gay marriage to the New Jersey Supreme Court: Don't worry, no matter what you do to it, marriage will always do just fine: "The ongoing evolution of marriage throughout New Jersey's history renders implausible the suggestion that marriage, which has survived so many changes, is too frail to endure the revision" of what these scholars refer to as "the anachronistic different-sex eligibility rule." Implausible? Who are they kidding? Sure, after 40 years of social experiments on marriage in the name of sexual liberty, Princeton professors are doing just fine, thank you very much. But to find out whether marriage is doing just fine, the New Jersey judges might learn more listening to Kanye West. His latest hit, "Golddigger," is the quintessential postmodern love story told from the male side, full of fantastic need and longing, punctuated by the grim reality of sexual betrayal and gender mistrust: "If you f---in with this girl then you better be paid/You know why/It take too much to touch her/From what I heard she got a baby by Busta/My best friend say she use to f--k wit Usher/I don't care what none of y'all say I still love her." On the other hand, "... If you ain't no punk holla, 'We Want Prenup'/WE WANT PRENUP! Yeaah!" As Kanye matter-of-factly points out, "It's something that you need to have/Cause when she leave yo a--, she gonna leave with half." Not "if" she leaves you, but when. Men and women have to protect themselves from each other, from the foolishness of their own desire to love. Moral ideals like sexual fidelity to a good man, or a good father who is not rich, are just ridiculous: "He got that ambition baby look in his eyes/This week he moppin' floorz, next week it's the fries." Kanye gives her the straight dope: "But you stay right girl/But when you get on he leave yo a-- for a white girl." Faith, hope, trust, love are dreams. The reality is sexual barter. Men and women need each other but are destined to betray each other in pursuit of the satisfaction of that need. Children are innocent bystanders in this perpetual erotic warfare. Marriage is civilization's great attempt to integrate opposites: male and female, mothers and fathers, parents and children, love and sex, heart and pocketbook, masculinity and dependency, eros and the vow. When a marriage culture fails, sexual desire no longer unites; instead it fragments. Kanye West offers us a personal portrait of what happens when the fragging is done: Gender doesn't disappear, but the one institution -- marriage -- that bridges the gender divide largely has. This is not a racial issue, it is a human one. So call me dubious: Right smack in the middle of this unprecedented marriage crisis, what should courts do to marriage, according to these distinguished scholars? Why, gut it of the presumption that marriage has something to do with joining the man and the woman who make the baby. Why? In order to affirm "its core purpose of recognizing committed, interdependent partnerships between consenting adults." These scholars do not seem to recognize the carnage this very idea -- that marriage is infinitely adaptable and primarily about adults' needs -- has unleashed. But I remember how the people who tried to protest this last round of social experiments on marriage, as it was happening, got called bigots too. Perhaps it is possible that New Jersey judges can eliminate the one feature of marriage that has been universal in human history with the stroke of a pen, and marriage will do just fine. But here's my message to the New Jersey Supreme Court: Don't bet the future of our children on it. (Readers may reach Maggie Gallagher at MaggieBox2004@yahoo.com.) posted by maggie at 10:58 AM | link 
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Perhaps it is possible that New Jersey judges can eliminate the one feature of marriage that has been universal in human history with the stroke of a pen, and marriage will do just fine.
I had always thought that marriage's ability to either make non-relatives kin, or to make distant kin (like cousins) close kin, was universal. Clearly you don't agree with me, but what cultures do you know of that have marriages that don't have anything to do with kinship? Where can I read documentation of these cultures?
I had always thought that marriage's ability to either make non-relatives kin, or to make distant kin (like cousins) close kin, was universal.
Where I think you err is in imagining that this characteristic of marriage can just be magically applied to whatever arrangement of people you wish, just by calling the arrangement "marriage".
That's not my point, Holmegm (and what you say I imagine, certainly isn't my argument).
My point is when Maggie says op-sex is "the one feature of marriage that has been universal in human history," logically she must mean no other feature is as universal. I don't think it's unfair of me to ask her to back up this claim with a reference or two.
So the question is, is this the only unversal feature? There may be near-universal features, that are directly related to combining both sexes.......
But the starting point is clarification about the quoted remark.
Don't you mean marriage make unmarried people married? What do you mean it makes them "kin"? What does that mean? Is my brother-in-law "kin"? Is a spouse "kin"? Marrying a woman doesn't make her your sister, and a sister is definitely kin. What does being "kin" entail?
And what she says (i think) is the 'one universal feature' is that "marriage has something to do with joining the man and the woman who make the baby." That's the nearest reference to something that she might be referring to, and it is pretty murky, with that "something to do with" in there. And I would have to say, since married couples stay married when the husband has an adulterous affair that makes a baby, it is a pretty sloppy way to put it, since the marriage in that case does NOT join the man and woman who make the baby, rather, in that case, it prevents them from joining together. The one universal feature is that it conveys the RIGHT to make a baby together. It says, universally, "you may now make babies".
It seems to me that treating marriage as just another close relation, and not about kids, reflects the larger (narcissistic? materialist?) cultural change which threatens to create actual population decline in the whole industrial world.
>>>I had always thought that marriage's ability to either
>>>make non-relatives kin, or to make distant kin (like
>>>cousins) close kin, was universal.
>>Where I think you err is in imagining that this
>>characteristic of marriage can just be magically
>>applied to whatever arrangement of people you wish,
>>just by calling the arrangement "marriage".
>That's not my point, Holmegm (and what you say I imagine,
>certainly isn't my argument).
How not? In the context of the SS'M' debate, you are clearly looking for something "universal" about marriage that wouldn't depend upon the participants being a man and a woman. You have found something: the way that marriage makes non-relatives "kin" (BTW, I'm with John that something's a bit off there, but whatever).
What I'm saying is that in so doing you are making the unstated assumption that this kin-manufacturing characteristic of marriage will automatically be there, if we call something that has never been called marriage "marriage". You are just assuming that this characteristic comes with the word "marriage" (and the legal status), instead of being intrinsically part of what the institution actually has been (man and woman).
Why, gut it of the presumption that marriage has something to do with joining the man and the woman who make the baby.
As you want to gut it of the presumption that marriage is about the joy of two people who love each other agreeing to stick with each other for the rest of their lives?
As you want to gut it of the presumption that marriage is about providing a nurturing and stable environment within which to rear children?
Glass houses. Throwing stones.
Is joy a new requirement in marriage law? A lifelong commitment is now mandatory? Nurturing? No requirements, no dice. Throwing.
Is joy a new requirement in marriage law? A lifelong commitment is now mandatory? Nurturing? No requirements, no dice. Throwing.
For people opposed to SSM, court procedures like this would seem to bolster the case for the FMA. Why has there been no movement on the FMA, even though this was touted as a big issue during the 2004 election?
What exactly is "stable" about a family with two daddies and no mommy? It's unbalanced, assymetrical, and far from "stable", having already severed a Mother from the naturally stable Triangle of the natural Family.
It also trades blood kinship, which is eternal, for "legal kinship" which is a purely manmade legal fiction.
Marty: What exactly is "stable" about a family with two daddies and no mommy?
Read about one such, and find out.
It also trades blood kinship, which is eternal, for "legal kinship" which is a purely manmade legal fiction.
Ah: so marriage, which creates legal kinship, is only a "purely manmade legal fiction".
If you think so little of marriage, Marty, why do you waste so much of your time attacking it here?
Marriage is man-made. Legal marital status is a legal fiction. That has been the SSM argument from day one. Marriage is what the court decides to make it.
Chairm, Marty is arguing that marriage is a purely manmade legal fiction, not me: and he's not and never has been one of the pro-marriage crowd: he's always been consistently anti-marriage.
So you disagree with Goodridge and most SSMers.
Marty's comments have been consistently pro-marriage, as far as I have read them. Yours have been for a marriage alternative that you would label "marriage".
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