Maine Voters Repeal Law Allowing Gay Marriage
This seems to be attracting much less attention in Australia than the Californian Proposition 8 vote, but it's interesting to see how, when Americans get to vote on it, they reject gay marriage.
I also note how this is framed in many newspaper reports as "heartbreaking". (It seems that an AP writer is behind a lot of the reports, and his sympathies are clear.)
Whatever your views on the subject, surely you can accept that some people are heartbroken by this outcome. It would be nice if people didn't need to have their lifestyles validate by official acceptance, but straight couples simply don't have to face that issue because our relationships have official sanction in our culture.
ReplyDeleteIt was a narrow thing too, that vote.
Perhaps only people directly affected by the issue should be allowed of vote in such cases.
(ie have a plebiscite of gay people and ask them if marriage is an appropriate description of their committed relationships)
The AP report uses the words:
ReplyDelete"Maine voters repealed a state law Tuesday that would have allowed same-sex couples to wed, dealing the gay rights movement a heartbreaking defeat in New England, the corner of the country most supportive of gay marriage."
That, to me, sounds too much like partisan journalism.
By the way, I assume you're entirely comfortable with the fact that exactly the same arguments for extending marriage to gay relationships (it's a right to have a loving relationship culturally validated) apply to polygamous relationships? Just checking....
ReplyDeleteOh, and I assume by your proposal that it will just be those in polygamous relationships that will get to vote for their recognition? Heh heh heh.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the way to approach this is to see what potential for abusive relationships with inequalities for power exists in the relationship. I suspect that polygamy can only exist where such an abuse of power exists. I'm not sure that is any more likely in committed gay relationships than straight ones.
ReplyDeleteYou only have to watch SBS documentaries to find examples of modern polygamous families where the women strongly deny that their arrangements are inherently detrimental to them. (And although I never watched it, I assume that HBO fictional series did a fair bit to normalise the idea of polygamy in America too.)
ReplyDeleteIf your going to pick "inequalities for power" as a criteria for judging state recognition, you would probably have to allow for about 90% of marriages throughout history to not really be deserving of recognition.
Gay marriage advocates, being mostly of the left, usually do have feminist concerns about equality and power relationships in marriage. As such, like you I assume, they are not entirely comfortable with the idea of state recognition of polygamy. Yet the emotional argument they run (the State should recognise our love; why can't the State validate it) is ideally suited to the aims of recognition of polygamy.
Of course, some feminists argue against gay marriage on the grounds that all marriage is arcane and unnecessary. At least that's a consistent position to have.
Gay marriage advocates, however, seem to try to walk with legs on either side of the razor wire fence. (Yes, I heard that saying again today on the radio.)
If anything, polygamy has much stronger historical and cultural grounds for full recognition in the West.
Would I be happy if my daughter wanted to enter into a polygamous marriage? No, but I am a conservative from a Western background who thinks that heterosexual marriage, regardless of power relationships, has worked pretty well in my culture for thousands of years, and its inherent feature of the potential for procreation (without the need of a laboratory or turkey baster) makes it deserving of State recognition.
Perhaps in a culture where men dominate power relationships straight marriage is a risky proposition and perhaps should not be recommended nor state sanctioned.
ReplyDelete... or perhaps if marriage as an institution can survive the abuse it has been put through by straight culture it can survive gay relationships.
Whatever the cultural grounds for recognition of polygamous relationships may be, they just magnify the potential for abuse of women inherent in our culture already. They seem as a phenomenon to limit womens' education as a prerequisite for prolonging their acceptance of that particular status quo.
I take the point that a lot a gay people could care less about marriage and not even consider it. What I find troubling is that there are some gay people who plan a committed life long relationship who wish to use a sacrament to express that commitment and feel that they are obstructed in doing this, whether by the state or the church. I still can't see who they harm and I think they deserve some empathy for their heartbreak. Perhaps they shouldn't care about these things, but they do and, as I suggested, it simply is something that straight people are not ask to cop from their governments.
An interesting discussion, Steven, with little chance of us convincing each other!