Man Bites Blog

Note to same-sex marriage advocates — you are winning, and will likely continue to win.  But you would probably be advised to avoid rhetoric like this from Dana Stevens, which I’ve seen more than enough of recently:

 I honestly think that in a matter of years, this kind of image will look to us like the 1963 photographs of George Wallace blocking the schoolhouse door as two black students attempted to enroll at the University of Alabama. Good Lord, we’ll say, can you believe it was just a generation ago that people were debating the pros and cons of institutionalized bigotry and publicly protesting the right of two octogenarian women to love each other?

You see, it’s not enough for Stevens and her side to win.  No, her opposition must be banished to the same place in history as George Wallace, the KKK, and Bull Connor.

As I’ve said before, what people fear is being banished into cultural irrelavancy.  People might accept same sex marriages.  What people will have a harder time accepting is that their opposition to it marks them as bigots who are not worthy of a place in the public conversation.

There are perfectly non-bigoted reasons to oppose same sex marraiges.  Marriage is about relationships rather than people.  Keeping marriage reserved for heterosexual couples means offering greater societal support for heterosexual couples than homosexual couples.  Why would we want to do this?   Because heterosexual couples produce and raise children, and homosexual couples do not.

Now, many developments, including no-fault divorce, contraception, and adoption by same sex couples have blurred these lines, perhaps making this rigid definition of marriage no longer operational.  But it doesn’t make those who believe in traditional marriage the modern day equivalent of George Wallace.

Same sex advocates are winning.  If they would like to win more quickly, they should offer their adversaries defeat with honor.  The impulse to punish those they believe have oppressed them is understandable, but will delay victory, and make the fight uglier.

Andrew Sullivan writes:

It’s For The Kids

14 Sep 2007 12:17 pm

Some data from Canada on why same-sex couples get married:

According to the census, nearly one in four lesbian married couples in B.C. (24 per cent) have a child living with them, compared with just 13 per cent of lesbian couples living common-law.

Gay men are far less likely to have children than lesbians.

But they, too, have a big marriage gap, with 6.8 per cent of gay married men living with kids, compared with just 0.5 per cent of unmarried gay couples.

How does this undermine civil marriage for heterosexuals? How does it harm society? Isn’t it better for children of gay couples to have the legal and social security of a marriage? Isn’t legitimacy better than illegitimacy? And doesn’t this pattern actually enhance the conservative argument that marriage is primarily for the benefit of children? I guess that argument doesn’t count for much with some when lesbians make it.

Leaving aside the paltry 6.8% number for married all-male couples, 25 % of married all female couples have children, and this leads to the conclusion that lesbian marriage is “for the kids?”  As Sullivan would say, Please.  I am quite sure that if heterosexual marreid couples had such low numbers, Sullivan would point to it as evidence that the connection between marriage and children is a bogus invention of the “Christianist” right, and thus there is no non-bigoted reason to oppose “marriage equality.”  But for same sex couples, it’s evidence that it’s “for the kids.”  Right.

Both raising children and getting married would be indicators of a committed relationship, so I would certainly hope that there would be some correlation between the two.  Contrasting numbers between married and unmarried couples doesn’t prove anything.

And are any of these children are the natural child of one of the members of the marriage from a previous heterosexual marriage?  If so, then I would hazard a suspicion that those marriages at least, were undermined.  But I guess that argument doesn’t count for much when “Christianists” make it.

Some more thoughts from the discussion I mentioned earlier…

Read the rest of this entry »

Per this discussion, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that continued opposition to same sex marraige is, while not wrong, imprudent.

Marriage ain’t what it used to be, and same sex marriage would solidify trends that have been in place for a long time.  Contraception and no-fault divorce have done more to change marriage than same sex marriage ever did or will.

Problem is, we let those developments happen, and now it is quite easy for opposition to same sex marraige to be dismissed as anti-bigotry.  So we spend most of our time defending ourselves from this charge rather than making our case.  Or we put forth arguments that appeal to the “base,” but turn off those on the fence or on the other side.

In essence, I think that if we’re interested in defending marriage, or in re-establishing its purpose, there are more important battles to be fought than preventing same sex marraige.

Penelope Trunk, writer of the Brazen Careerist blog, is having trouble in her marriage. How do I know this? Because she has blogged about it.

But that’s not the most interesting part. The intersting part is the comments. They seem to consist of:

• People telling her it might not be in the best interests of the marriage she calims she wants to save to do things like blog the contents of her mediation sessions.

  Trunk responded that this is perfectly OK because her husband had no problem with her writing about their sex life for her Master’s thesis 15 years ago, without saying that he has specifically approved these revelations.

• Accusations that she is only writing about this to drive up her hit counts.
• A lot of “Wow, thank you so much for your bravery and honesty in opening yourself up like that…”

It’s this last one that I find a bit hard to swallow.

Imagine a man running a blog called something like “Brazen Careerist,” whose SAHM wife wants to divorce him. He blogs about it, including:

• Divulging details about mediation sessions without making it clear that he had his wife’s permission to do so.
• Having no idea that his wife wanted a divorce.
• Not knowing the reasons why his wife wanted said divorce.
• Dropping another mention of how great his career is going, and that he mentioned this to the mediator.
• Refer to how her career “sort of stalled.”
• Mention how much better she is at details than he is, and that she’s good at making lunch boxes, whereas the kid rejects his.
  
  OK — I’ll tell you how this one would play out — the husband would be accused of passive aggressively screwing up the lunches on purpose so that it would be his wife’s responsibility, like everyhing else…
  
• Refers to himself as the “career expert in the household” and how he thinks this makes him “ten steps ahead” of his wife.
• Mentions that he “delegated” finding a therapist to her because he is too busy blogging

I can think of a few words women would use to describe such a man, and “brave” and “honest” aren’t among them.

The interesting thing is that it looks like Ms. Strunk is having to learn the same lessons an entire generation of men have had to learn — if your spouse is devoting their life to household work, they need you to honor and respect the work that they are doing.