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 Friday, October 28, 2005
More Cathy Talk/Maggie Gallagher
Cathy, if I'm not mistaken the Vermont study on fidelity intentions looked at straight siblings of gay people as the comparison group, no? If you ask a nationally representative sample of American men you get an even higher moral commitment to sexual exclusivity in marriage than 79 percent. I'm in Phoenix, not at my desk, I'll get you some data on that next week. Here's my problem with your analysis: it presumes what is under discussion. Is Social Security age discrimination? No, because the whole purpose, which is a legitimate purpose, is to provide support for old people who we do not expect to work (even though some younger people may be more in need of retirement than some older people). Advocates of SSM try to go straight to the equal rights discussion without answering the first question: why marriage at all? You need to have an answer before you can decide whether SSM is a right. If hospitals are mistreating gay people, gay marriage is going to be a pretty inadequate response btw. Even gay people who are not married have a right to have anyone they want in their hospital rooms, and making medical decisions if they are incapacited. A discussion of benefits and a discussion of marriage just aren't the same thing posted by maggie at 5:03 PM | link 
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"A discussion of benefits and a discussion of marriage just aren't the same thing"
I don't think it's the pro-SSM side that fails to understand this in this context. Of _course_ marriage in the broader sense isn't just a bundle of benefits. It's a bundle of benefits bestowed on a relationship in recognition of its significance. I'm just floored that you would be so tone-deaf as to pick the issue of hospital visitation rights and medical power of attorney to make this point because it undermines your whole case. It suggests you've never thought about why hospital visitation rights and medical power of attorney are in the package of marital rights in the first place. As anyone with a touch of empathy can see clearly, it has precious little to do with kids and everything to do with the fact that a spouse is typically, hopefully, the single person in the entire world with whom the sick person is most intimate - the person best able to offer comfort and sympathy and most trusted to make decisions. But gay relationships are commonly just as important to the people in them in this way as marriages. The reason gay people sometimes still get grief in hospital waiting rooms, even with the correct forms filled out in triplicate, is that a lot of people either can't imagine or don't want to acknowledge that.
Now if you feel you need to argue that gay people shouldn't get medical rights as part of marriage _despite_ the fact that they're marriage-like in their need for such things, then you've got to do what you got to do. But please spare us the offensive and hypocritical insinuation that this is just an unmotivated seeking-after of benefits.
Even gay people who are not married have a right to have anyone they want in their hospital rooms, and making medical decisions if they are incapacited.
And sometimes the homophobic relatives of a gay person don't want to acknowledge that, and prefer to override their relative's wishes, using the legal force that says that without marriage, a sibling or a parent is assumed to be the next of kin, able to make medical decisions if their relative is incapacited.
Relatives have taken advantage of the inability of same-sex couples to give each other the rights and protection of marriage, in various ugly ways - from banning a lover from the funeral, to demanding the right to make medical decisions and cut their relative's partner out of the loop, to even challenging their sibling or their child's will.
Hospitals (in my experience) generally do not wish to mistreat people (the odd bigot notwithstanding): most medical staff, in my experience, genuinely do want to do the best for their patient, to let their patient's partner in to see them, and to go along with the patient's wishes, not those of their homophobic relatives.
But the cruelty that the law permits in many states - that the law enforces in the state of Virginia, where it is not allowed for a same-sex couple to make legal contracts with each other that resemble marriage - is that a homophobic family can decide to sever their child or sibling from their partner, and without marriage (or a civil union with all the rights of marriage) they can do so.
We've argued how the state benefits from supporting marriage: and so it does, primarily through the nurturing environment that marriage creates for rearing children (which I believe exists, though you spend a fair amount of time denying it). Another way in which the state benefits is through the support that partners give to each other.
But the fact is: marriage also benefits the couple who get married. And if you're pro-marriage, as I am, there seems no reason not to point this out.
I think only someone who was profoundly anti-marriage would prefer that the benefits of marriage to the couple who marry should not be discussed or referenced in a discussion on marriage.
Are you so anti-marriage that you'd rather people just didn't think at all of how they themselves will benefit from marriage?
Advocates of SSM try to go straight to the equal rights discussion without answering the first question: why marriage at all? You need to have an answer before you can decide whether SSM is a right.
Look, the answer to that is so obvious, and so simple, that I am astonished that you actually need to have it pointed out to you. But since I've seen statements like this more than once, I'll assume you really do, and have a go at it.
Human beings are social animals by nature, and all societies need some rules for how its members are going to live together, and how and to what extent individuals within a society are going to be bound to one another. The family, however defined, is one of the basic structures by which societies order that set of responsibilities: a set that certainly includes who's responsible for the family's children, but will also include matters like who's responsible for supporting a disabled individual, who's in charge of making certain kinds of decisions for the family, and so forth.
What responsibilities members of a family have to one another, and how far those responsiblities extend, can and does vary widely among societies. In some places and times, rules about who's a member of your family will govern whether you need to go out and try to kill somebody over an insult to an uncle whom you never thought was any damned good to start with. By contrast, in some places and times they may not extend to a responsibility to actually bring up one's or one's family's children: old Europe shows us examples of cultures that have sent infants out to wetnurses whenever possible, and sent young children off to be raised by unrelated adults, whether as apprentices or as young ladies and gentlemen.
Variation aside, though, all these family structures benefit society in a global way, by relieving society as a whole of the first-line responsibility for the things family members are expected to do for each other. And marriage is the way in which unrelated individuals and families enter into new familial relationships with one another, and take on these desirable responsibilities to one another.
The set of rights and responsibilities having to do with procreation and children are important, of course. But they're merely one instance of the more global array of responsibilities families have toward one another, and have always had. That's why the benefits thing always comes up when we talk about SSM: without what you tend to dismiss as "benefits," partners in a same-sex relationship cannot form families and take on the responsibilities associated with familial status in the same ways as opposite-sex couples. (That they may be able to form relationships that look like, say, sibling relationships in our society is irrelevant to the problem, because under our current rules, sibling status is no longer an important bond in terms of rights and responsibilities.)
By trying to make marriage and family all about procreation, it's you anti-SSM folks who're taking the radical and historically-unprecedented position. We on the pro or neutral side are actually taking the conservative view, in practical if not in emotive terms.
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