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 12:01 pm (UTC)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.