Like a Horse and Carriage

[beetiger]

I don't usually pipe in on this sort of stuff. But it's been all over my friends list for a while now, and I feel like I want to say something.
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Really, we jumped on the slippery slope the moment we believed that love was important at all in choosing a partner. I've met couples whose marriages were arranged, and they do indeed love each other, but the marriage came before and the love followed along as people built their lives together, just as it does when a child or a sibling or a stepparent comes into your life. Love grows where it's placed, when the culture tells it that it should.

But if you believe that not your caste, not your parents, not your money, not your social prospects, not your government, but your heart is the one who should choose the one (or more) with whom you will walk hand in hand in this life, then you cannot rule whom the heart will choose. Hearts are notably fickle, and incorrigible, and not very proper. People of different social classes, different colors, the same gender, fall in love willy-nilly. Sometimes more than once. Hearts break the rules.

There's no question that our culture believes happiness is about romantic love, and that romantic love – the real, true kind – culminates in marriage. Just turn on the television. Hearts don't always make the best choices, perhaps, but the heart-choice is the choice we venerate. Given this, and that we also have as a stated cultural value the freedom to pursue happiness, how is it sensible to build automatic failure into the lives of people who have succeeded in the heart-game by categorically denying them the prize?

I'd ideally like to see the government out of the marriage game, instead supporting families of every sort by making it easy to state our dependencies and interdependencies, and to share our financial burdens with the people we love best. To support fertility rather than children, and to support it in the form of theoretical fertility rather than practical, giving marriage benefits to DINK couples while not offering them to gays or lesbians with kids, is nonsensical. We're not going to run out of people, I promise.

But I don't think that will happen anytime soon. In the meantime, as long as our culture believes that the right way to build life partnerships is with the love coming first, and the commitment following behind, we've already made the critical jump in values. Gay marriage is just the logical next step.

Comments

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

This is not a snark or an attack, but a thoughtful offering.

We make the assumption that love is what should lead us into marriage, and that marraige should celebrate love. That our culture has moved that way--that I don't think I disagree with.

The question is whether this was a good move. That's what I'm not certain of.

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

You read what I said, and I really appreciate that.

I haven't actually addressed whether I think it was a good move, though I personally think it was. I'm just saying that culturally, we did this long ago, and the gay marriage battle is perhaps just an aftereffect.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I am always, always trying to read what people say, and to consider it as dispassionately as possible. It is, of course, a struggle. I have many stakes in this matter, on both sides of the equation.

I'm trying to continue to look at this from a social level--not just marriage, but what's happened to our culture since the 50s and 60s and 70s. I know I do not feel comfortable in what our culture has become, and I know the things that bother me: immodesty, and crudeness, and permissiveness, among other things. I may be too late to stem that tide, but at least I want to look at it and struggle to see it.

[hellesfarne.livejournal.com]

Thank you, 'bee! You have put all of this in perspective more eloquently than I could manage.

I'm not sure that what's happened to our culture since the '60s is wholly good or ill. In every qualitative sense I can think of we have more freedom, as Americans, than we had fifty years ago. We have not matched this with the responsibility that's supposed to come with freedom. The answer, in my reckoning, is not to reduce freedom but to increase responsibility.

Inasmuch as the government has any business being involved with marriage, it should be in encouraging the development of a well-educated, self-reliant and egalitarian society. Who you marry doesn't matter. It's not a choice the government should be involved with. If the government wanted to save marriage, it would be doing everything possible to end domestic violence, which is actually destroying marriages and harming our society. It isn't.

[lediva.livejournal.com]

DINK?

[lediva.livejournal.com]

Oh, right.

Double Income, No Kids.

(e.g. Chez Gargoyle pre-moth)

[heron61.livejournal.com]

This is definitely both a sensible argument and one that will appeal to most reasonable people in the First World. As a fairly strident individualist and a exceptionally foofy romantic, I have been horrified with my few encounters with people and cultures that support or abide by non-romance based marriage.

I am intrigued by your comment: and the love followed along as people built their lives together, just as it does when a child or a sibling or a stepparent comes into your life.

Being a childfree only child of two only children, I have literally never had to do this sort of love under these circumstances and frankly I am far from certain that I would. I might learn to love someone in that sort of situation, but I also very well might not - I am exceedingly picky about who I like, much less who I love - which is, I suppose one of many dozens of reasons why it is an exceptionally good thing that I am childfree.

[elven-wolf.livejournal.com]

That's a very interesting argument, I hadn't thought of it that way but it's true. And kind of hypocritical of those who want to preserve marriage's so called sanctity. Throughout history, marriage has been an economical arrangement more than anything else.

[redbird]

Well put, and a point that I hadn't thought about--oddly, given that I do know a bit about the history of marriage in our culture(s), as well as about how some other cultures do such things.

[cktraveler.livejournal.com]

Proposed: Marriage is a religious sacrament that must be protected.
Given: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

1. Marriage is a religious sacrament (Given).
2. Sacraments are ceremonies undertaken due to religious belief.
3. Therefore, marriage is a religious belief (1 & 2).

4. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion (Given).
5. Therefore, Congress shall make no law respecting marriage (3 & 4).

6. Marriages between homosexuals are held in Unitarian Universalism, Reform Judaism, and many other religions.
7. Marriage between homosexuals is a religious belief (3 & 6).

8. Congress shall make no law preventing the exercise of an establishment of religion (Given).
9. Therefore, Congress shall make no law preventing homosexual marriage (7 & 8).

Therefore, the proposal that marriage is a religious sacrament leads inevitably to the conclusion that Congress should make no laws to either encourage heterosexual marriage or to discourage homosexual marriage.

In fact, it is unconstitutional for there to be any federal law dealing with marriage in any way.

[cktraveler.livejournal.com]

And, of course, since the entire real argument against gay marriage boils down to "the Bible says queers are bad," if marriage is a civil institution and not a religious sacrament there is no reason to deny it to gays at all.

(The idiotic notion that marriage is "traditionally" between a man and a woman should fall apart by simple analogy to the argument raised against interracial marriage. Regrettably, religious fundamentalists are absolutely convinced that "Well, that's different" is an ironclad argument against anything, which makes them difficult to convince.)

[schitzie.livejournal.com]

Side note... "Bible says queers are bad"

I really gotta find this Bible that everyone keeps refering to. See, mine says things like "... that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life..." but nowhere do I see the added "... unless, they're GAY."

"... for all wave sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God..." Again, nowhere do I see the additional "... but the queers are WORSE than any other sinners."

It's not so much the Bible that says these things; rather, it seems more to be the people that preach it. (AN OPINION!!! Not neccessarily a fact)

As far as the intergender marriages go, marriage lost it's "holiness" long ago when it became a financially opportunistic contract. Naturally, either the church or the state (if not both) has to be an interested third party in everything, so until they are both, essentially, un-squeemed... it's gonna be very difficult for love to have any say in the matter. Very regrettable, and regrettably true.

[cktraveler.livejournal.com]

The problem, of course, comes from the loose usage of the term "Bible."

To a fundamentalist, the "Bible" consists of whatever words or phrases they can select from the Torah (ONLY -- ignoring the Nevi'im and Ketuv'im) and the New Testament (the Epistles, really, ignoring the Gospels ... fundamentalists love Paul but ignore the Gospels because Jesus is nothing more than a slogan to them).

They want God to justify their hate, so they go to parts where God, or Paul, seems to hate things, and pluck out exactly those things that match what they hate, ignoring all the rest. They don't particularly have any interest in anything Jesus had to say, because Jesus told them to love their fellow man and that doesn't particularly interest them.

Even there, of course, they want Paul and Moses to hate only what THEY hate. The wearing of 50/50 poly/cotton fabric or the eating of shellfish is as much an "abomination unto the Lord" by Mosaic Law as male homosexual sex. They ignore that, because they want the Bible to say only what they want it to say.

*shrugs* In the end, Christianity is exactly like Islam. You have a nice, friendly religion that forbids its followers to do horrible things, and then you have followers who want to do horrible things in the name of their religion and are willing to twist the holy writ into pretzels if that's what it takes to accomplish it. And they get away with it, not because they're right, but because they shout the loudest.

I think we'd be okay if the state either got out of marriage entirely, or established it as being just another kind of business partnership and reclassified it as contract law. If the Baptists don't want to marry gay couples in their churches, fine. It's only the legal benefits that matter, or count as oppression, as far as I'm concerned.

[schitzie.livejournal.com]

Entirely agreed.

[marram.livejournal.com]

Bard dropped by my new account (less than 48 hours old) and said, 'hi'. So, I thought I'd return the favor (he included your user name, as well).

As for your last posting, I couldn't agree more. But change frightens people, despite the fact that evolution, even social evolution, is inevitable and even necessary. It tests both the individual and the collective, reshaping us as needs dictate -- whether we fully understand those needs at any given time. Frustration and conflict will ever escort these changes, especially when they are blindly resisted. But when has Humanity freely done the reasonable or responsible thing, for the good of all? Special interest priorities have always found a way to gum up the works... Playing for time, then calling it the status quo.

You gave an excellent example in your post -- To support fertility rather than children... I'll encourage others to visit and read your thoughts and words.

I hope all is well with World Tree, and I also hope my cover art is still hanging magnificently somewhere in your home! Come visit out my way sometime!

[werellama.livejournal.com]

Right on Sistah!