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    Around the maypole

    It’s touching that Dean has the patience to keep coming up with new anagrams of his position on gay marriage, as if one day one of his gay friends might listen. But then, as someone’s bound to point out, I’m sitting here writing this post, so who am I to talk?

    Anyway, one thing he’s going off about in the comments is the epidemic of revisionist history among quite a few SSM advocates. I think it’s worth expanding backward on that point a little.

    People used not to understand fertility. I don’t just mean human fertility–they didn’t understand why crops grew and hunt animals were plentiful sometimes but not others, either, any more than they understood why sex sometimes produced children and other times didn’t. Further, the competition for precious resources was fierce. Even after the invention of cavalry and chariots and catapults and cauldrons of pitch, war essentially meant hand-to-hand combat; and there was a lot of war. There was also a lot of disease.



    What all this boiled down to was that human societies knew they desperately needed to keep replacing themselves and the things they subsisted on, but they were never quite sure what was going to work. Things like nitrogen-based fertilizer, filmstrips of sperm and ovum meeting under a microscope, and mechanical refrigeration are all very, very new in human history.

    You already know this, so why am I bringing it up? Because I think it’s easy to forget how the pressure to ensure fertility at all costs has shaped civilization. (Well, Japan, with its disorienting blend of super-modernity and raw primalness, has not lost a lot of its old rites.) When people oppose gay marriage because they assume there’s no love or commitment in our relationships, they’re being ignorant and need to be told so. Even in old times, there were people who reproduced and people who didn’t. There’s no reason gay people can’t contribute to civilization just because we’re not contributing children, and having two people willingly take stewardship over each other’s welfare has obvious benefits.

    But you can argue that, and argue that our ability to care for each other needs protecting in a world of competing interests, without necessarily concluding that marriage has to be expanded to do it. The ability to choose your own life partner is a pretty new thing. Maybe it needs a new institution. Maybe it would do better without any overarching institution but a range of contract options. Maybe, maybe, maybe. The point is, the debate is still going on, and not even all of us who are gay can agree that SSM should be legalized or why. Its advocates are not doing themselves any favors by acting as if the correct conclusion were obvious to, like, any fair-minded person with a brain.

    5 Responses to “Around the maypole”

    1. Dean's World says:

      Gay Marriage Poll

      A few days ago, Donald Sensing posted a news item about a new Gallup poll on the gay marriage question. I was going to post about it here, but after a lot of looking the only thing…

    2. Dean's World says:

      Gay Marriage Poll

      A few days ago, Donald Sensing posted a news item about a new Gallup poll on the gay marriage question. I was going to post about it here, but after a lot of looking the only thing…

    3. Dean's World says:

      Gay Marriage Poll

      A few days ago, Donald Sensing posted a news item about a new Gallup poll on the gay marriage question. I was going to post about it here, but after a lot of looking the only thing…

    4. caltechgirl says:

      The idea of a different institution is intriguing. For a long time I have been a proponent of the old French system, civil and religious marriage being separate. In Napoleonic France, civil marriage involved the signing of a very detailed contract listing the parties’ responsiblities, both domestic and financial. The religious ceremony was separate. It wouldn’t be hard to institute that here,and it would probably shut up a lot of these religious zealots, since their kind of religious marriage would be “gay-free”…. but then again, I know gay people who are having religious ceremonies without the benefit of civil marriage and many straights who have been married at City Hall without a church ceremony. I guess you’ll never please everyone.

      I especially liked your comment about how we need to protect out ability to care for each other. That’s under attack for straight people too, in many cases.

    5. Sean Kinsell says:

      Thanks. I don’t know that civil marriage would fly in the States, since what seems to get a lot of people het up (har-har) is the use of the word itself for gay relationships. I kind of like the bill that Montana was considering last month, partially because I’m not sure what who gets off with whom has to do with power of attorney.

      In any case, I’ll second your last statement: whatever gay advocates do is going to cause a backlash from some people, but the cause as a whole would advance much better if it were more frequently presented as how best gays can live and work as members of the broader society.

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