Like a Horse and Carriage
May. 21st, 2004 04:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beetigerI 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.
-----
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.
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no subject
Date: 2004-05-22 06:59 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-22 09:12 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-24 10:14 am (UTC)