Over thirty years ago, Larry Kramer, a Pulitzer-nominated playwright, screenwriter, author, and homosexual-rights activist, made a name for himself by criticizing the gay community’s culture of promiscuity. In a recent interview with Salon.com (warning: contains crude language), Kramer once again laments “meaningless sex.” But what exactly does that mean to him?
Salon:What has frustrated you about the move toward gay marriage in the country?
Kramer: Just that it’s taken forever. I don’t think we should have taken the state by state approach because it just makes it go on, and then you have to re-sue and defend. Things need to go to the Supreme Court as fast as possible. There were ways it could have gone to the Supreme Court a lot earlier. If we lose at the Supreme Court, which everyone was afraid of, you just come back again. These [state] marriage we have don’t amount to anything. They’re feel-good marriages. They make relationships stronger and all that, but they don’t amount to a hill of beans in terms of anything legal or financial. You still need to pay federal taxes and you don’t get any of these benefits the government pays you if you’re heterosexually married.
Salon: The play suggests that one of the reasons there was so much meaningless sex in the gay community in the 1980s was because there was no gay marriage. Now that state marriages exist, do you think there’s been a cultural shift away from that meaningless sexual culture?
Kramer: I think there’s still an awful lot of meaningless sex going on and the infection figures are still much too high and going up, so obviously there’s still too much careless sex going on. I don’t want to come out of this sounding like this prude.
Unfortunately, the rest of the quote is too explicit to excerpt. From this sample, though, you might get the impression that a man who supports same-sex marriage and opposes “promiscuity” and “meaningless “sex” would be in favor of monogamy. Of course if you’ve read the other entries in this series, you can guess what Kramer is going to say next:
Salon: Are you familiar with Grindr, the iPhone gay sex app?
Kramer: What?
Salon: It’s an iPhone application that shows you how far away other gay men are, so you can have sex with them.
Kramer: No. I’d be happy to use it now if I thought it would do anything. I get horny just like anybody else, and David [Webster, Kramer's partner] and I have been together a long time, so our relationship is now something else. I joined Daddyhunt or Manhunt and all those things, and posted my pictures, and filled out my questionnaire. And I got absolutely no response from anyone and it led me to wonder: What do older men do? It’s very sad that suddenly there’s no way to partake in all of this.
Salon: The interesting thing about Grindr is that it creates this map of your surroundings that’s really catered to gay men. You can log into it in your apartment and suddenly there are 100 people around you looking to hook up.
Kramer: It sounds wonderful. I’m not against sex, I’m against being irresponsible. We have bodies and we should enjoy them, but we shouldn’t treat each other as things. That’s what it came to be in the [1970s] height of Fire Island [the gay party mecca], and I guess you could say the same about this Grindr thing.
Kramer isn’t the exception in the gay community. He’s part of the norm in a culture that believes monogamy is a heterosexual construct. As I’ve asked before: Are religious supporters of same-sex marriage ready to redefine marriage in a way that leaves out monogamy?
April 26th, 2011 | 8:44 am
Joe’s writing on marriage has been totally off base for years now.
On one hand, he asserts marriage is fundamental, something like Ecudlian geometry. On the other hand, he acts like marriage can be defined willy nilly and therefore we must be very, very careful ‘redefining’ marriage least we break it. One wonders how an insititution could be so delicate and fragile and yet survive thousands of years through hundreds of radically different cultures at the hands of many humans who cared little for Joe’s social engineering concerns.
There’s already been plenty of challenges to monogamy in marriage. You had the ‘open marriage’ experiments in the 70′s. You have had sub-cultures that have also had partially open marriage for long periods of time (the ‘goumada’ is well known from pop-mafia culture, but many cultures have had a norm that tolerates men keeping mistresses, concubines or girlfriends ‘on the side’).
What’s interesting about all this is that it doesn’t really work. You can talk about society all you want but the fact is when you opt to get married you are taking on liability for the other person’s debts, letting the other person have access to your assets, your property, and your finances. Doing marriage casually only is a sure fire way of getting yourself really screwed badly.
This is why ‘open marriage’ has only survived in very limited circumstances. The Mafia goumada, for example, is only allowed to exist ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Her status is only secondary to the actual wife and the actual wife, while she may be aware the other woman exists, is always treated as if she doesn’t. Needless to say, men are only ‘allowed’ this indulgence if they are ‘super-bread winners’, able to keep the first wife with an excess of material goods.
Monogamy in marriage therefore does not exist as a norm because of its design. It exists as a norm of human nature. You can do open marriage, provided you are able to have relationships that are emotionally intense enough to justify marriage (why bother getting married if you aren’t serious about anyone) but are able to keep jealously at bay. To paraphrase Lincoln…..some people may be able to do this all of the time and many people may be able to do this some of the time but most people can’t do it most of the time. Gay marriage fosters a norm of gay monogamy just as straight marriage does. Larry Kramer and Hugh Hefner do not refute that fact. A gymnst can defy gravity for a while but he’s just the exception that proves the rule that gravity pulls everything to the ground.
April 26th, 2011 | 10:01 am
Larry Kramer was and remains a major figure in the gay-rights movement, but he is 75 years old, and I don’t think he has the authority to define what same-sex marriage is or ought to be. I am sure that most religious supporters of same-sex marriage will consider both heterosexual and homosexual marriage to require monogamy. I doubt that it will bother them to be in disagreement with Larry Kramer.
April 26th, 2011 | 10:20 am
All too true, Joe. All too true. Earlier in my life, before I became a Christian, I hung out socially with a group that included gay men (significantly, gay women don’t have the same kind of culture of promiscuity). Because we were all a fairly tolerant bunch, the gay men didn’t feel compelled to hide anything from us about the way they lived, and the way they socialized when they were in all-gay environments. We all tried to laugh about it and remind ourselves to be tolerant, but the promiscuity was shocking (and none of us, I should mention, were examples of chastity).
For me, the strangest thing about it all was the sense that all this promiscuity was not only seen as normal, but as virtuous, within the social norms of the gay male community. I was, and am, a straight male, and I don’t think I’ve ever known hetero males who behave like that. And it wasn’t like these gay friends of ours were sleazy creeps. They were solidly middle-class young urban professionals. Not one of us hetero males in the group would have dreamed of behaving like that, even though none of us considered ourselves to be morally conservative, and all of us were open to the idea of having sexual relationships. It was like our gay male friends were living on a different planet.
Strange to think about it now, but all of us back then (about 20 years ago) had internalized the dictum, Thou shalt not judge thy gay neighbor. None of us even talked about how weird and destructive we found the behavior of our gay friends — not even when, on an outing to the gay district of the city, we went to a gay bar and saw men, including one of our friends, openly having sex with each other in front of everybody. (That finally did it for me, at least; I knew from that that there was something deeply sick about that culture, and that was the end of my tolerance). A couple of years later, I was walking down the street during a gay pride parade, and I saw things in the parade so decadent that Pat Robertson could not have made up if he had tried. This kind of thing NEVER made it onto the news. The difference between the safe, sanitized, bourgeois version of gay male life, and what it actually is, is shocking. I don’t believe all gay men live this way, but the line between what constitutes normal in gay male culture, and in hetero-dominated culture, are in very, very different places.
Many people sense this, I think, but it is not permitted to speak this truth. The media won’t talk about it, and to speak publicly about it is to risk potential sanction in the workplace. A young gay male journalist for Salon recently wrote about a prominent gay male party he attended, and how the decadence he saw there freaked him out and frightened him. You should read the hateful remarks his essay drew from other gays. One isn’t supposed to notice these ugly truths. But they remain true.
I see no reason to doubt the sincerity of gay men when they say they want marriage rights. But I think there is every reason to believe that they don’t want to be bound by the exclusivity of marriage. I think they are ultimately going to get what they want, because that’s where our culture is going. But there is no excuse at all for the rest of us to be surprised when marriage fails to civilize and domesticate gay male sexual desire, but when instead gay male sexual desire works to destroy the meaning of marriage, completing a task that unbridled heterosexual desire has done such a boffo job on.
April 26th, 2011 | 11:08 am
Like I’m Surprised,
Could it be that the gay men who want to live the kind of life you object to and the gay men who want to get married are two different groups? I know a number of gay men in long-term relationships, among whom is one legally married couple. To the best of my knowledge, none are promiscuous, and all but one are monogamous.
April 26th, 2011 | 11:19 am
Like…:
I was thinking of a quote from the movie Kpax which summed up my thinking nicely and as luck would have it, it’s sitting right there on IMDB:
*****
Dr. Mark Powell: Uh, how is it that being a visitor from space, that you, uh, you look so much like me or, or anyone else from Earth?
Prot: Why is a soap bubble round?
Dr. Mark Powell: “Why is a soap bubble round?”
Prot: You know, for an educated person, Mark, you repeat things quite a bit. Are you aware of that? A soap bubble is round because it is the most energy-efficient configuration. Similarly, on your planet I look like you. On K-PAX I look like a K-PAXian.
******
For me, the strangest thing about it all was the sense that all this promiscuity was not only seen as normal, but as virtuous, within the social norms of the gay male community. I was, and am, a straight male, and I don’t think I’ve ever known hetero males who behave like that.
You don’t know hetero males that behave like that because for the most part hetero males cannot behave like that. We do know that hetero males will behave like that given the opportunity. Rock stars, movie stars, VIP’s in Hugh Hefner’s mansion….when givent he opportunity hetero males will induldge as often. But while many will indulge as much as they can for their whole lives, others will tire of the indulgence and seek a balance. The soap bubble is shaped like it is because it’s the balance between the internal pressure to expand and the external air pressure to contract.
I see no reason to doubt the sincerity of gay men when they say they want marriage rights. But I think there is every reason to believe that they don’t want to be bound by the exclusivity of marriage.
And this is totally irrelevant. If marriage’s monogamy depended upon the sincerity of young men to be monogamous it wouldn’t have lasted even a generation in human history. Yes many men and women enter marriage thinking they want to be monogamous, but that’s only because it works at that moment for them. It’s easy to be monogamous when your partner seems to be the most attractive and easiest to have sexual partner. The real tests come later on when others seem more attractive, possibly even easier to have while your partner seems the opposite.
Long story short, intentions, sincerity etc. here don’t matter for squat. People who want to be promiscuious simply won’t marry. Sure some here and there will but such marriages will peter out quickly and despite the claims of divorce being easy and cheap, it isn’t. It’s still expensive, time consuming and rather risky. The person who doesn’t really want marriage will not get married after being burned once or twice.
Fundamentally the argument for marriage can’t depend on fickle humans. It has to work because marriage strikes a particular balance between two opposing forces. For a balance to work, what is needed isn’t for the forces to be small or large but for them to be balanced perfectly to net out to zero. The idea, then, that you should base marriage rights on your perceptions of sincerity is absurd. The person who is really, really sincere is just as likely to flame out in a series of extra-marital affairs as one who is. In fact, I would think they might be more so because the force of their ‘sincerity’ needs to be contained by an equal counter force and if that force should fail all the great expectations that worked to create the marriage will become great disappointments that will be used to justify destroying it. At least a modest force allows the other side a little slack to counter it thereby increasing the odds of long term stability.
April 26th, 2011 | 11:20 am
David Nickol:
I am sure that most religious supporters of same-sex marriage will consider both heterosexual and homosexual marriage to require monogamy.
Assuming for the sake of argument that you are right, your remark brings to mind a quote from theologian John Milbank — something along the lines of, “Liberalism requires believing in the sort of person who has never existed, then pretending like all of us are that way.” It’s important to look at the way gay culture actually is, as opposed to how nice, middle-class, liberal-minded folks imagine it to be. When it is pointed out that gay male culture prizes promiscuity, or is at best neutral towards it, gay-marriage advocates tend to argue that gay male promiscuity is actually the fault of heterosexist society, because it denied to gays the possibility of being socialized according to bourgeois norms. I don’t buy that for one second. I think gay male culture is so highly sexualized and promiscuous because that’s how males are by nature. We have to be socialized, and civilized, out of it.
I think it is an open question as to whether marriage will change gay men, or gay men will change marriage. I’d bet money on the latter.
Even Andrew Sullivan has said that he thinks gay male marriages that survive will probably have built into them an understanding that the partners will stray from time to time, and that that’s okay.
Read the chaste lesbian Catholic Eve Tushnet explaining why Americans are so naive about sex, and why that screws up our thinking about marriage, especially gay marriage.
April 26th, 2011 | 11:30 am
“You still need to pay federal taxes and you don’t get any of these benefits the government pays you if you’re heterosexually married.”
Dude, this is so true! I get checks from the government every month made out to “Heterosexually Married Person”–it’s totally awesome!
Also, did you know that no one in America got married before the income tax was created? I mean, why would they have, since without those sweet, sweet deductions (and those awesome “payments” too!), what possible reason for marriage is there?
April 26th, 2011 | 11:46 am
Like:
Assuming for the sake of argument that you are right, your remark brings to mind a quote from theologian John Milbank — something along the lines of, “Liberalism requires believing in the sort of person who has never existed, then pretending like all of us are that way.” …
yea yea but what’s missing here is that it’s irrelevant what ‘society’ or ‘supporters’ expect of your marriage. What counts is what the person you marry expects of you and the fact is someone you marry has a lot of potential to cause you all sorts of harm, choas and headaches. Now given that’s a fact of marriage, is it possible to square the circle and bring non-monogamy into a marriage while at the same time keeping the emotions balanced so neither side lashes out at the other with all the potential tools/weapons at their disposal? Possibly but it makes maintaining the balance exceptionally more complicated IMO.
April 26th, 2011 | 12:02 pm
Boonton,
“it’s irrelevant what ‘society’ or ‘supporters’ expect of your marriage. What counts is what the person you marry expects of you”
I think many here would disagree with this basic premise of yours about the nature and definition of “marriage”. Marriage is, by its very nature, a public as well as private institution. Society does, in fact, “expect” certain things from married persons. If marriage isn’t public as well as private, then why is there such clamoring for me or anyone else to “recognize” a same-sex “marriage”? Recognition comes with expectations, doesn’t it?
April 26th, 2011 | 12:07 pm
yea yea but what’s missing here is that it’s irrelevant what ‘society’ or ‘supporters’ expect of your marriage. What counts is what the person you marry expects of you and the fact is someone you marry has a lot of potential to cause you all sorts of harm, choas and headaches.
I’m sorry, but that is naive in the extreme. What society expects of marriage is enormously important! I am comfortably into middle age, but when I was a young newlywed, it meant a lot to me that having decided to marry, there were certain things that society now expected of me (as did my wife, of course). The support, even passive support, of society helped move me along toward the kind of self-giving, and self-denial, that all successful marriages require. Marriage is NOT AT ALL a purely private matter, like a mere contract between two people. The fact that we’ve come to see it as such in this society is a big reason that it is failing to have the power to bind reckless individual wills.
Wendell Berry has written beautifully on marriage as a covenant both between the marriage partners, and between the couple and the community.
April 26th, 2011 | 12:30 pm
Steve,
What is public is the public ‘tools’ or ‘weapons’ your spouse is given. For example, if Donald Trump’s wife shows up on line for food stamps, the state can order her away on the grounds that her husband has ample income. If her husband refuses to provide her with food, she can go to court and the court will order his assets frozen and given to her. Note in that one little example, I’m not even talking about divorce but what types of tools the woman (or man) has as a spouse. Note that even Donald Trump’s own children don’t have such an easy route to ‘attack’ him publically.
So here’s the question for Mr. Playboy or Mr. Let’s_Have_Lotsa_Random_Gaysex: How willing are you to hand over this virtual loaded gun to someone you’re ‘just’ sleeping with? Can you construct a ‘balance’ between serious emotional commitment and trust so the person won’t misuse the ‘weapons’ against you and the powerful emotions that jealously ignites?
Joe’s concern, supposedly, is that gay marriage will result in non-monogamous marriages becoming a new norm. I would say that’s as unlikely as soap bubbles suddenly becoming a different shape. That is an unstable equilbrium for most people most of the time. The result will be some people affirming themselves as non-monogamous and others affirming monogamous with marraige as the ideal place to implement a monogamous lifestyle. Why? Because it’s the ‘most energy efficient configuration’ so to speak.
April 26th, 2011 | 12:35 pm
Like:
The support, even passive support, of society helped move me along toward the kind of self-giving, and self-denial, that all successful marriages require. Marriage is NOT AT ALL a purely private matter, like a mere contract between two people….
You are aware that contracts are private in the sense only that they are between two people but what gives them ‘teeth’ is public enforcement. The mafia employes violence because their ‘private contracts’ are truely private. You can’t go to civil court over one crime family infringing on another family’s turf or failure to pay the bounty on a ‘hit contract’.
It’s nice that you had people who supported your marriage to your wife. Yet the fact remains the ‘teeth’ is that your wife can rain hellfire down on your head if you made her angry enough. The sweet imagry should not distract from the fact that in many ways you sleep with a loaded gun pointed at your head as does she. Both of your behavior and development would have been different if the guns had no bullets and all you had were well wishing friends and inlaws.
April 26th, 2011 | 12:40 pm
Boonton, the human heart is not rational, and human beings are not robots. If people always chose rationally, based on what was best for them, on what is the “most energy efficient configuration,” the world would be a very, very different place.
April 26th, 2011 | 12:41 pm
Just to clarrify here, I’m not using the libertarian argument that marriage is just a creative private contract between X number of people that can be written any which way like some post-modern novel that doesn’t even have to be a novel but could be a splash of paint on a wall…..
The analogy to the soap bubble is ‘public’. If soap bubbles suddently started being shaped as triangles, it would get noticed pretty quickly by the public. When a magician blows a cube shaped bubble it’s cool because it’s an impressive trick given the nature of bubbles.
The bubble is the way it is because that’s it’s natural configuration as a balance between forces. There is no need for people to pass laws against blowing triangle bubbles or cube bubbles not because blowing bubbles is a ‘private affair’ but because trying to maintain a triangle bubble is simply too much work for just about any normal human who wants to blow bubbles. Maintaining a non-monogamous but serious marriage may be possible for a few most of the time or many some of the time but simply isn’t possible for all the people all the time.
April 26th, 2011 | 12:45 pm
Boonton wrote: On one hand, he asserts marriage is fundamental, something like Ecudlian geometry. On the other hand, he acts like marriage can be defined willy nilly and therefore we must be very, very careful ‘redefining’ marriage least we break it.
Perhaps you are unaware that things like institutions can be both fundamental and yet fragile.
The right to free speech is fundamental, yet redefining freedom of speech would break it.
We have already gotten a glimpse of what it means to decouple marriage from its purpose. We have already begun allowing people to define marriage in terms that exclude family obligations, focusing exclusively on the sexual and emotional fulfillment of the two adults involved. The results have not been good:
- children are more likely to be abandoned by one or both parents
- women are more likely to be abandoned when they are financially vulnerable
- men who do not want children have lost the ability to signal (via their disinterest in marriage) that they do not intend to be good fathers, with the result being that women somehow “don’t get” that “if the man wanted to have a baby with you, he’d have married you”. (The child – and the larger society – are the biggest losers here).
- men who do want contact with their children are more likely to experience obstacles blocking their ability to have a healthy relationship with their children.
Traditional marriage is good for families.
If we want an institution that is about celebrating sexual pleasure, we should invent a new one – and recognize it as distinct and separate from the act of founding a family.
(Of course, all those financial and social benefits people lust after are there to support the act of founding a family. People want to have it both ways.)
April 26th, 2011 | 12:47 pm
Boonton, the human heart is not rational, and human beings are not robots. If people always chose rationally, based on what was best for them, on what is the “most energy efficient configuration,” the world would be a very, very different place.
Very true, you are free to try to blow cubic shaped bubbles all day long and maybe you’ll even suceed. So what! That still means anyone who spends even a minute arguing that we need a campaign to protect the spherical shaped soap bubble is a fool.
Read my argument carefully. It doesn’t depend on humans being ‘rational’. That’s actually your argument. You seem to be saying that good people who really want to be monogamous is what makes marriage work. Nonesense, people aren’t good and most only want to be monogamous when it works for them. If this is what marriage depended on it wouldn’t have survived a dozen years let alone centuries.
It works because the forces favoring monogamy balance the forces pushing against it inside a marriage. Stability may be possible without monogamy just like the ‘square bubble’ is possible but the balance is much more precarious.
April 26th, 2011 | 12:58 pm
Blake,
Your post doesn’t really have much to do with gay marriage but the failures of many straight ones…which I think is what most of the argument about SSM is about. Diverting attention from personal failures by holding others up to an ideal that critics are unwilling to hold for themselves (there’s a word for that…can’t think of it at the moment though….).
Question: Is Hugh Hefner’s marriage(s) about ‘celebrating sexual pleasure’ or about founding a family? Before you answer too quickly note that I believe one of his marriages was pretty long term that produced children that he raised to adulthood. I believe the most recent is to a very young woman. I can’t really be sure myself what he was thinking either when he got married or during his marriages. Probably he thought about both things at the same time to different degrees at different points in his marriage. Since even he probably can’t honestly judge himself exactly where did you get the idea that you could judge other people?
Manufactured institutions are fragile, fundamental balances are not. You can say capitalism is fragile since tomorrow or a generation from now some collectivist revolution could overturn it. But even in Stalin’s prisons people created ‘stores’ and ‘lending institutions’ trading smokes and bits of food so the nature of humans to barter and trade with each other is not fragile but fundamental. You’d have an easier time eliminating all the bacteria from a large area than you would eliminating barter and trade from a large population of people.
April 26th, 2011 | 1:07 pm
Boonton,
“Monogamy in marriage therefore does not exist as a norm because of its design. It exists as a norm of human nature. You can do open marriage, provided you are able to have relationships that are emotionally intense enough to justify marriage (why bother getting married if you aren’t serious about anyone) but are able to keep jealously at bay. To paraphrase Lincoln…..some people may be able to do this all of the time and many people may be able to do this some of the time but most people can’t do it most of the time. Gay marriage fosters a norm of gay monogamy just as straight marriage does.”
Well put.
—
Like I’m Surprised,
“But there is no excuse at all for the rest of us to be surprised when marriage fails to civilize and domesticate gay male sexual desire, but when instead gay male sexual desire works to destroy the meaning of marriage, completing a task that unbridled heterosexual desire has done such a boffo job on”
I’m more optimistic than you are about the ability of gay marriage to tame male hedonism. You can hear evidence of it in Kramer’s comments and in the article you cite. Kramer and his interviewer, Thomas Rogers, agree that younger gays are having less hedonistic sex, do not identify first as gays, and inhabit the straight world more.
The article you referred to was written by the same Rogers who interviewed Kramer. He describes himself as “monogamist by nature,” and he sees gay men “marching” into the mainstream and thus making scenes like the one he witnessed “increasingly uncommon.” He thinks it’s a good thing that such hedonism “makes people uncomfortable.”
Underneath the continued value placed on sexual freedom in both pieces, I hear a generational longing for normal, straight fidelity. That is a longing that Christians can grab and guide toward the wisdom God provided us. Clergy in all congregations need to clarify that sex was made for the union of two, and straight Christians need to be unafraid to witness to the importance of true monogamy. Your story about the silence of straights in the face of such atrocious behavior is all too common.
“Liberalism requires believing in the sort of person who has never existed, then pretending like all of us are that way.”
I’m not being facetious when I say that Milbank’s way of putting it captures quite well our faith in Christ, who asked us to be as perfect as our Father in heaven is.
“It’s important to look at the way gay culture actually is, as opposed to how nice, middle-class, liberal-minded folks imagine it to be. When it is pointed out that gay male culture prizes promiscuity, or is at best neutral towards it, gay-marriage advocates tend to argue that gay male promiscuity is actually the fault of heterosexist society, because it denied to gays the possibility of being socialized according to bourgeois norms. I don’t buy that for one second. I think gay male culture is so highly sexualized and promiscuous because that’s how males are by nature.”
While it may be true that all men tend to be more promiscuous, it’s only a tendency, and because it’s only a tendency, cultures can be built that discourages that tendency by enlisting those very men who aren’t promiscuous. Chastity, especially clerical chastity, has been prized in Christianity for that very reason. If Christians are going to accept gay couples as full members of our communities, we are going to promote even more actively traditional Christian morality concerning fidelity.
—
David,
“I know a number of gay men in long-term relationships, among whom is one legally married couple. To the best of my knowledge, none are promiscuous, and all but one are monogamous”
I see the same thing you describe in my Methodist reconciling congregation, a lot of conventionally Christian monogamous behavior. It helps that there are many young, idealistic couples, especially lesbians. Last summer, the young adults launched a bar witness, pledging to drop into the conversation on Saturday nights where they were going to be Sunday mornings. There’s still a lot of work to do, however, in ensuring that the message of fidelity doesn’t get lost.
April 26th, 2011 | 1:13 pm
“I was, and am, a straight male, and I don’t think I’ve ever known hetero males who behave like that.”
Sounds to me like you don’t get out much.n Straight men wish they could be as promiscuous with women as gay men are with men. The ones who manage to pull it off, because they are either so good looking, or rich and famous, brag about it.
April 26th, 2011 | 1:29 pm
- men who do not want children have lost the ability to signal (via their disinterest in marriage) that they do not intend to be good fathers, with the result being that women somehow “don’t get” that “if the man wanted to have a baby with you, he’d have married you”. (The child – and the larger society – are the biggest losers here).
You must really hate Joe to toss up examples that so entirely devastate his thesis.
Look a bit closer at the decline of marriage in the black community and you’ll see it reinforces my argument and flattens yours to dust.
What happened in the black community? The supply of marriage worthy men fell dramatically. With norms opposed to interracial dating, the ‘terms of trade’ were against black women. Whereas before in order to secure a family, a woman had to demand that a man produce for her sex, a husband, providing as a husband and providing as a father…now the ‘trade’ is firmly in favor of men. Sex can be had by providing only the first and little beyond that. It’s not about ‘signals’. Are many women really, really honestly shocked that their men don’t stick by them after the baby? Can it really be that shocking when it’s seen over and over again going back multi-generations? Come on, I may believe that people aren’t good but I don’t buy that everyone is that stupid.
What predictions would be made by our differeing theories on marriage? Yours would say that marriage would be ‘redefined’. Women would accept marriages to non-monogamous men (and themselves would probably entertain non-monogamous affairs) and we’d have a new norm of non-monogamous marriage. That’s your theory’s prediction and the essence of what you’re claiming for gay marriage. Own it man, it’s yours!
My theory would predict that marriage would remain the same balance in favor of monogamy. If monogamy’s stock fell in price in the ‘market’, then marriage would as well. If you’re in the middle of hurricane, you don’t blow saop bubbles that are as strong as steel reinforced concrete, you simply don’t blow bubbles period! When you can’t get forces to balance, the balance disappears, it doesn’t get redefined because it can’t be redefined. The result is my prediction is vindicated. Rates of non-monogamous marriage didn’t rise, marriage rates fell. A husband caught cheating is still greeted with hoots and howels on the daytime talk show….even from a community that has a lot of non-monogamous activity outside of marriage going on.
April 26th, 2011 | 1:44 pm
Michael
I’m more optimistic than you are about the ability of gay marriage to tame male hedonism. You can hear evidence of it in Kramer’s comments and in the article you cite.
I notice here that the standard being presented isn’t really the ‘real’ standard. The standard that keeps getting talked about over and over is hedonism. But is that really it? If so then why is the discussion always limited to males? Since lesbians have rates of monogamy even higher than many straights, why not talk about marriage for gay women, no marriage for gay men and conditional marraige for heterosexuals? Think about it, Blake raised the issue of promiscuous men in the black community. Well if hedonism is the bar then pass a law banning marriage for black men and any other ethnic or sub-group in the larger population with rates of ‘hedonism’ above a certain level.
But if you entertained that Swiftian proposal for a moment, the folly of the argument would be clear. If you banned some men from marriage, they wouldn’t respond by being less hedonistic, they’d respond by being more. The ban would practically serve as a green light for even less monogamy (why bother if the law bans you from marrying!).
This leads to the question why is this argument even being made here? Are these glaring flaws not so over the top obvious that everyone sees them? Are the people making this argument really dishonest or really that blind?
April 26th, 2011 | 1:54 pm
“Wendell Berry has written beautifully on marriage as a covenant both between the marriage partners, and between the couple and the community.”
This is no doubt true. Yet, we are a pluralistic nation with various “communities” and I still don’t think “the state” gets a monopoly on the “community” part. Which is why I still favor, in principle, the libertarian, marriage as a private contract solution.
My advice to gay folks in the meantime is, if you can’t get married legally, get married in a church and say you are married. Introduce your same sex spouse as your “husband” or “wife” regardless of whether the state validated your marriage.
If people think you are metaphysically confused, then you’ll be just like Mormons claiming they are “Christians” when, of course, metaphysically, they are not. Mormons don’t need a permission slip from a state government declaring them “Christians.”
April 26th, 2011 | 2:17 pm
“Wendell Berry has written beautifully on marriage as a covenant both between the marriage partners, and between the couple and the community.”
Interesting, were Adam and Eve not married as there was no community of people for them to make a covenant with?
If aliens attack and destroy the entire earth leaving only one married couple to esacape in a space ship, are they no longer married as the community has disappeared? For that matter, why are you still married when you leave the community and go somewhere else? Am I, a member of a community, in some type of partnership with all marraiges on the globe?
April 26th, 2011 | 2:21 pm
Boonton,
“I notice here that the standard being presented isn’t really the ‘real’ standard. The standard that keeps getting talked about over and over is hedonism.”
I don’t follow your use of “standard” in your statement. Which standard are you talking about exactly?
“If so then why is the discussion always limited to males?”
I usually raise the same question myself, but I haven’t raised it yet in this thread. I haven’t used your Swiftian proposal before, though it has crossed my mind!
April 26th, 2011 | 2:46 pm
I don’t follow your use of “standard” in your statement. Which standard are you talking about exactly?
Well the argument seems to be “gay marriage should be rejected because gay men won’t be monogamous”. Yet if that is a ‘real standard’ the people making it would accept gay women getting married. Yet women are written out of the gay marriage discussion, it seems.
What I mean then is that the true argument is something like:
“I dont’ like gay marriage for various reasions (I assume religious but no doubt others are at play here too), therefore I want the law to frustrate attempts at gay marraige for those who don’t share my beliefs. Hence I’ll toss any and all arguments I can find at gay marriage in hopes that something, anything, will stick”
As a result people are running around trying to refute arguments that SSM will cause more illegitimate kids, more divorce among straights, more non-monogamy, will force churches to hold ceremonies for SSM, will have people who don’t like SSM locked up and put in jail etc. etc. and the people whose arguments are countering may not even believe them themselves! Is that the case? If so I think it merits a serious discussion.
April 26th, 2011 | 3:33 pm
I find it alternatively funny and sad that Larry Kramer, at his advanced age, can’t believe that no man wants to have anonymous sex with his wrinkled old self. Has he really not been paying attention all these years, to what gay culture is (male culture, that is), and what it values?
Male hedonism is vicious to the aged and the unlovely. Among heteros, look at Hugh Hefner. Would any sexy young woman go anywhere near his geriatric bag of bones if not for his wealth and celebrity? Would he be the least bit interested in having sex with a woman his age? Some poor young fool might kiss Larry Kramer’s HIV+ lips, and more, if they knew they were hooking up with a minor celebrity gay playwright, but if all they knew is that they were being offered an anonymous hydraulic exchange with Grampa, who can blame them for going, “Ewwww”?
April 26th, 2011 | 4:34 pm
“ and say you are married. Introduce your same sex spouse as your “husband” or “wife” regardless of whether the state validated your marriage.”
Yes, if the law will not recognize that you are a black man, just because you were born a white woman, just say you are, and that makes it so. Then get mad and throw a temper tantrum every time someone refuses to play along.
Or, you could try honesty. You could seek out a traditional term or coin a new one for “same sex lover”, instead of trying to pretend a man can be a “wife”.
All the good financial and economic benefits of marriage are there because of the procreative aspect of marriage. If we really redefine marriage to get rid of its procreative links, those benefits are doomed to disappear sooner or later, because their justification will be gone.
April 26th, 2011 | 4:44 pm
There is a curious emptiness to this comment chain. The government recognizes marriage but doesn’t create it. Marriage preexisted bureaucratic government. So what exactly is marriage? And why do some in the gay community think they need the government to have it? Boonton’s arguments about soap bubbles are particularly suspect. If true, shouldn’t monogamous SSM already exist? How would we know if it did? Which brings us back to “what is marriage?” Shouldn’t that be the center of the discussion?
April 26th, 2011 | 4:57 pm
I don’t understand how “gay marriage” can foster anything: its basis is an idea, a notion, a fantasy. To say that it would foster anything is pure speculation. I don’t doubt, and indeed, have seen many examples of committed gay relationships. But among gay men, that’s exceptional. In any case, has anyone noticed that marriage became attractive to the homosexual community when it was so deeply devalued by society generally? When no-fault divorce and cohabitation became completely normalized, society generally perceived “marriage” as something less than a contract, and much less than a holy thing. As a thought experiment, everyone here who knows gays who want to get married and be committed, imagine (or ask them) how eager they would be if getting out of a marriage were as difficult as it used to be, or as difficult as getting out of any contract, with no guarantee of a 50-50 split of assets.
April 26th, 2011 | 5:51 pm
Wrinkle,
I don’t read Kramer to be saying he can’t believe it. He just doesn’t like it. He’s more than a decade older than I am, and I personally am not thrilled about growing older. And he doesn’t like the “gay scene” (or lack of it) today. He tells the interviewer he wouldn’t want to be the interviewer’s age (27) again.
I note that you call Hugh Hefner a “geriatric bag of bones.” Is that how you view 85-year-olds? Aren’t you being vicious to the aged and unlovely yourself?
April 26th, 2011 | 8:16 pm
I think you’re making a mountain out of a mole hill. Kramer might have been trying to shock the interviewer. More importantly, Kramer said: “We have bodies and we should enjoy them, but we shouldn’t treat each other as things.” This is a lesson for heterosexuals too. Anti-marriage equality activists may want to take note. “One-man-one-woman” sounds like code for two “things”.
April 26th, 2011 | 9:11 pm
I think Western marriage has for the most part (always?) been a public institution rather than just a private arrangement. Isn’t that why there are witnesses? I’ve understood that to be because the community has an interest in the children that will be born of the union—future citizens, building blocks of society and all that. I don’t know what interest the State has in same-sex marriages.
April 26th, 2011 | 10:59 pm
Blake
Yes, if the law will not recognize that you are a black man, just because you were born a white woman, just say you are, and that makes it so. Then get mad and throw a temper tantrum every time someone refuses to play along.
Hard to imagine that since the last time we had laws in the US that ‘defined a black man’ they defined it as 1/16th of blood. Kind of an odd hypothetical you presented there, not sure why you choose it. Maybe you don’t have any but if you do ask some black friends about it, I’m sure they could tell you about the legal goodies their grandparents got for being definied as legally black.
Mike
Boonton’s arguments about soap bubbles are particularly suspect. If true, shouldn’t monogamous SSM already exist? How would we know if it did? Which brings us back to “what is marriage?”
The question being raised is would monogamy be defined away from marriage by having SSM. My soap bubble analogy is akin to saying would roundness be defined away from bubbles if a blockhead like you started blowing them (don’t take that too harshly, just joshing around a bit). Or maybe phrasing it a different way, if you don’t want round bubbles, you’re not going to blow bubbles. OK maybe you’ll get the book on stage magic and learn how to blow that square bubble or spend years figuring out how to blow some new type of bubble like a triangle one or something….either way though for the most part the round bubble is safe from your anti-round fetish.
If SSM exists, Same sex monogamous couples will utilize it. Non-monogamous couples may use it, but then again non-monogamous straight couples also get married. For the most part, though, they don’t. If you don’t care for monogamy, marriage is a lot of work….like blowing a square bubble. How do we know if SSM already exists? Well if a same sex couple can walk down to city hall and get a marriage license it exists, if not it doesn’t. That question is pretty easy to answer. The more open question is will same sex couples seek monogamy at a rate equal to heterosexual couples? I’d be willing to bet on not, I think male couples would be less prone to monogamy (although maybe older men might be) while female couples would be more prone. In reality it’s impossible to say and no one here has shown why its relevant. Consider Blake raising the issue of the decline in marriage in the black community. Are we considering then eliminating the right of blacks to get married? Why not?
Barbara
As a thought experiment, everyone here who knows gays who want to get married and be committed, imagine (or ask them) how eager they would be if getting out of a marriage were as difficult as it used to be, or as difficult as getting out of any contract, with no guarantee of a 50-50 split of assets.
Physician heal thyself. Ask yourself would your husband have married you if ‘getting out’ was made much harder? On the other hand would you have married your husband if the law made it super easy for him to ‘get out’ without leaving you with any rights? If you’re not married or if you think the answer is yes then just imagine that the answer is no….say your husband wouldn’t have married you if the country, say, had the death penalty for trying to leave a marriage. Say you wouldn’t have married your husband if the law said, say, your husband had the right to take all your money, beat you and divorce you by just saying “I divorce you” three times in a row. Would that somehow make your marriage today invalid?
David
I note that you call Hugh Hefner a “geriatric bag of bones.” Is that how you view 85-year-olds? Aren’t you being vicious to the aged and unlovely yourself?
You forget that Winkle has eternal youth and lovelness. For him, old people are all yucky and ugly and their only value is to remind him how wonderfully youthful he is and will always be. What a wonderful blog this is. I can debate my old blog nemisis Joe Carter and also get to meet Dorian Gray in real life!!!! It’s amazing!
AB
I think Western marriage has for the most part (always?) been a public institution rather than just a private arrangement. Isn’t that why there are witnesses?
Here’s a question then, kind of goes in line with my question about whether Adam and Eve were married if there was no ‘community’ for them to partner with….why was overturning the laws in the south about interracial marriage wrong then? If the ‘community’ is a party to the marriage contract then shouldn’t the community get a veto? If a white woman doesn’t want to marry a black man, we recognize that she can say no. Likewise if a black man doesn’t want to marry a white woman he has a right to say no. So then if the ‘community’ is a partner in this too and the community just doesn’t like white-black marriages (and the south certainly DID NOT in the 50′s, 60′s, and 70′s) then doesn’t it have a right to say no too? While we are at it what about other marriages that the ‘community’ just doesn’t like. Examples, Hugh Hefner’s marriages to young chicks. Marriages that are perceived as ‘gold digger marriages’ like the late Anna Nicole Smith? I mean if you want to open this door to reject gay marriages there’s no reason the door isn’t open enough to get the gov’t engaged in lots of questionable marriage decisions that individual people make.
Marriage is public in the sense that contracts are public. If I make a contract to sell my Star Wars figure collection to Joe Carter, that’s a private contract. But if something goes wrong, say Joe’s check bounces and he refuses to pay, I have access to public institutions to seek redress. That doesn’t mean the ‘public’ is in any way a party to our contract or has some say in it. The question is how does the public behave when I seek out the tools the public has made available for such contracts. The ‘public’ doesn’t tell me that I’m too old for Star Wars toys and must sell them, nor does it tell Joe $50,000 is too much to pay for such silliness. When you married your wife, you married your wife only…you didn’t marry the mayor, the town dog collector, your Representatitve, your Senator, your Governor, President Obama and Job Biden too and you certainly didn’t marry the guy down the street who votes in every election but keeps his yard cluttered with tin foil to keep out the ‘brain control beams’.
April 26th, 2011 | 11:22 pm
Boonton,
“Well the argument seems to be “gay marriage should be rejected because gay men won’t be monogamous”.”
I see. I hope you understand that I don’t buy that argument.
—
Mike Melendez,
“The government recognizes marriage but doesn’t create it. Marriage preexisted bureaucratic government. So what exactly is marriage? And why do some in the gay community think they need the government to have it? Boonton’s arguments about soap bubbles are particularly suspect. If true, shouldn’t monogamous SSM already exist? How would we know if it did?”
I agree that marriage predates both the government and Christianity for that matter. Christianity didn’t get around to thinking of marriage as a sacrament until the 800s and governments didn’t get involved until Luther removed the church from it and put the state in charge of it instead. Only then did the Roman Catholic Church require that couples get married publically and in the church.
The very notion of common-law marriage indicates that, in some cases, the state recognizes what neither it nor the church recorded.
In effect, gay marriage approaches a common-law arrangement. Gays live as couples, share households, share expenses, take care of each other when sick and aged, and sometimes raise children.
Thus gay marriage already exists in a nearly common-law sense, and if by it we mean a same sex couple that thinks of each other as the center of their emotional life, then it has existed under the radar for centuries. Exclusive monogamous gay marriages also exist. Most lesbian marriages are exclusive, and many gay male ones are as well.
Gays are asking for their common-law arrangements to be recognized by the law and formalized.
—
AB,
“I think Western marriage has for the most part (always?) been a public institution rather than just a private arrangement.”
It has been public in the sense of having a couple of witnesses present, or in common-law marriage, presenting yourself publicly as a couple.
“I’ve understood that to be because the community has an interest in the children that will be born of the union—future citizens, building blocks of society and all that. I don’t know what interest the State has in same-sex marriages”
The community’s interest has always been more than just children. When individuals become a couple, they separate from their birth families and form a new social unit, a new family of their own, with or without children, which is why we recognize infertile and aged couples as married. As a new family, the couple is expected to be independent of and yet in relationship to their birth families. This network of related families predates both the state and the church.
What’s new at this moment in history is the widespread emergence of communities in which gay men and lesbians can live openly and normally, holding jobs at all levels of society, being accepted at all levels of society, and even raising children. Although gays have appeared in every society and have gained some acceptance in some pockets at particular times and places, their widespread appearance and acceptance in the last half century is new and unprecedented. This is what is fueling the push for gay marriage.
April 27th, 2011 | 8:49 am
I see. I hope you understand that I don’t buy that argument.
I do, just exploring the argument that’s being presented by others here and wondering if we aren’t being yanked around by a non-serious argument presented by people who feel their real argument can’t be presented.
April 27th, 2011 | 10:23 am
I quote this passage from John L. McKenzie’s Dictionary of the Bible in every discussion of marriage:
I have always found it interesting that when Jesus prohibited divorce (as Catholics believe he did), the marriages were arranged marriages.
Later on, under Christianity, the contracting parties were the bride and groom, and it was not until the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century that the Church put a stop to clandestine marriage, where the bride and groom married themselves alone, in secret, with no witnesses. Such marriages were considered unlawful but valid. That is, people weren’t supposed to marry clandestinely, but if they did, the marriage was nevertheless valid in the eyes of the Church.
April 27th, 2011 | 12:02 pm
Thanks, David Nickol, for the information on clandestine marriage. But why, then, were people not supposed to marry secretly? Why the need for witnesses? I imagine some of it has to do with inheritance, but surely much has to do with the protection of children (and parental rights/responsibilities).
Well, I don’t wait to derail this discussion into a “what is marriage for anyway?” talk, although in our Brave New World I increasingly wonder exactly that. I do ask what interest the State has in same sex marriage, or childless marriage, or why it makes any difference to society whether gay partners are monogamous or promiscuous. Will it matter if gay marriage is not monogamous? I don’t see why it should.
April 27th, 2011 | 12:04 pm
It’s interesting that both the Bible and history seem to support the idea that marriage was not a creation of society or ‘the public’ but exists independent of it. This leads back to my first criticism that Joe’s argument seems incoherent. On the one hand marriage is fundamental to human nature. On the other hand marriage is so dramatically changeable that the slightest alteration by human society….even the font used on marriage licenses…could blow the whole thing up! Makes you wonder why such a fragile house of cards could have ever made it so long through so many cultures…
Likewise people here who advocate ‘the public’ taking a direct interest in the nature of marriages are opening the door to a lot of troubling things. This blog certainly should have a lot of Chesterton readers and Chesterton wrote at a time when ‘men of science’ were floating the idea of ‘scientifically arranged marriages’ and needless to say he wasn’t too keen on the concept.
April 27th, 2011 | 1:29 pm
@Michael, You said much but your argument comes down to this quote.
“In effect, gay marriage approaches a common-law arrangement. Gays live as couples, share households, share expenses, take care of each other when sick and aged, and sometimes raise children.”
I gather that is your definition of marriage. I suggest others disagree.
I note you do not take up Boonton’s soap bubble argument, i.e. that marriage and monogamy go together as the lowest energy state.
April 27th, 2011 | 1:41 pm
Boonton claims: “Likewise people here who advocate ‘the public’ taking a direct interest in the nature of marriages are opening the door to a lot of troubling things.”
I find this amusing. That “We the people”, i.e. the government, should recognize SSM seems to be what Boonton is advocating. So has he changed his mind? Maybe the government should get out of the marriage business entirely? Or.. is he arguing that the government merely should have no say in what constitutes a marriage, that the contracting parties, for lack of better words, get to say that marriage is whatever they want it to be and the government should recognize that?
I still say we should go back to first things, like just what is marriage. Michael has taken the first step. I’m interested in hearing more from others. Maybe we can then engage in a meaningful discussion.
April 27th, 2011 | 2:21 pm
In terms of ‘we the people’ yes the gov’t should recognize SSM, or more properly phrased allow SSM couples access to the same public tools that married couples have. As to whether or not SSM will ‘work’, that’s irrelevant (the core of the soap bubble argument if you wish).
I still say we should go back to first things, like just what is marriage.
Well if you want to really go to first things, we can ask what role ‘our’ discussion has in this affair? For example, a team of very deep people may have discusssed interracial marriages for hours sometime in 1950 and concluded they can’t exist. Yet they did and do. If such marriages can’t work, well those that try them will fail at marraige (as will those who try to blow triangle bubbles). The question then properly falls to what merits the gov’t frustrating such attempts for good or bad?
Here ‘we’ do get some proper say. I can see why, for example, ‘we’ may refuse to recognize child marriages, forced shotgun marriages, even some arranged marriages. Kind of for the same reason a civil court would refuse to enforce a contract to sell Star Wars toys that I made Joe sign with a gun pointed at his head. The gov’t, though, is not presuming to declare that it will make it is business to decide when Star Wars toys get sold or for what price.
Right off the bat by declaring that ‘we’ are going to decide the ‘nature of things’ you’re really implying that ‘we’ get to ‘dictate’ the nature of things. But if the nature of things are, well, the nature of things then ‘we’ don’t decide anything.
April 27th, 2011 | 9:52 pm
An interesting argument on the DOMA thread regarding this theory that the state can/should/must ban SSM because it has an ‘interest’ in children. Consider:
Beautiful young fertile woman wants to marry old, obnoxious and infertile man while spurning young, good looking highly educated man who wants her hand.
Sounds like this should be banned. The woman may have her reasons but the state has its ‘interest’ in the production of children and she is spoiling the state’s ‘interest’.
Or reconsider the bans on interracial marriage. The south felt that interracial marriages were bad because they produce interracial children and interracial children were not well treated as well as subverted social norms that called for racial segregation by creating numbers of people who could not easily be classified as one race or another. If you’re going to take this ‘interest in children’ argument seriously then why was the south wrong? Even today most people consider it OK for a state to try to place foster children with like race adoptive parents.
Or….
Two different couples want to marry. Each couple carries a certain recessive gene for a pair of horrible diseases and both couples (A and B) will produce children who will suffer. However, if the couples cross marry (i.e. wife A marries husband B and wife B marries husband A), they can have all the kids they want with none suffering from the dieases.
By the state’s ‘interest’ in children, it seems like it can say to the couples “You may both marry, but not each other.”
The ‘public interest’ argument opens the door to a real lot of stuff that almost everyone would have thought had been rejected. Do those who want to open that door really want it open? Not at all, they would claim that the door opens only enough to ban SSM, but all the other cases the door closes for….even though objectively there is no difference. In the last case, the interests for ‘protecting children’ are even greater as SSM do not produce children to begin with while the proposed intervention above would assure the production of healthy children!
April 28th, 2011 | 12:22 am
Boonton: Again, I’m not sure your argument is very clear. You are arguing the State should be disinterested but, as it happens, it is not disinterested: the State prevents a marriage of one who is already married. Are you proposing that the state accept the “natural” way of its constituents?
April 28th, 2011 | 7:33 am
That’s a good question, I would say that the state should generally leave people alone who are polygamists. I wouldn’t prosecute people who are living in groups, ala the series ‘Big Love’.
I think though that wannabe polygamists have a legal problem that SSM advocates don’t have. Marriage has, in developed countries, no male-female roles in law but it is built on a two person partnership. The moment you take it beyond that you start raising a lot of questions that the law can’t answer. For example, in a 2 person marriage if one person dies the marriage is over. For a 3 person marriage, though, does the marriage die and the 2 remaining people have to marry each other again or does the marriage remain as a 2 person marriage? How does a 2 person marriage become a 3 person marriage? Do both people have to agree or just one?
You could write a law that answers these questions but then you have answer whose polygamy? In terms of SSM, these questions don’t really come up. How does divorce work with SSM? The same as it does with straight marriage.
I do think the soap bubble argument stands, though, in regards to polygamy. Polygamy is a ‘square bubble’. The difference in dynamics from 2 to 3 or more people goes up expodentially making it a less stable relationship than two person marriage. Where polygamy has survived it has done so by compensating for this instability. Examples of compensation would include very strict gender roles, allowing the ‘state’ to allocate marriage (in the form of a tribal leader). Even then, it’s usually a minority among marriages for the simple reason that if you have a 50-50 split between men and women and only a fraction of the population with any interest in same-sex sexual activity you can’t mathematically ‘pair’ everyone up so that anything but a small portion of men get more than one wife.
April 28th, 2011 | 7:51 am
Question: Didn’t this blog used to have the comments numbered? I thought I saw that some time ago?
Anyway, refer to my 2:21PM post from 4/27:
This addresses the polygamy question. What ‘tools’ are there that polygamists can access? You have a 3 person marriage, the husband goes into a coma. One wife says don’t put him on a respirator, the other says put him on it. The marriage law here lacks any mechanism to resolve this because it was built with giving a single spouse rights to make medical decisions for the other spouse, when the other spouse is a committee any resolution a judge makes will be ad hoc and arbitratry.
To use an analogy, the public tools that we have in law today are like a playground that has a seasaw. From an engineer view, the seasaw works for any two people (male-male, male-female, female-female) but more than two isn’t going to work. Maybe you could design a 3-way or 4-way type of seasaw. It would no doubt be more complicated than the standard one but it could be done. But that’s not the same as ‘access’ to the playground. If you don’t like the toys on the playground, you can lobby for the construction of other toys but you don’t have a right to demand the production of novel toys.
I think it’s kind of ironic then that those who want to see more and healthier straight marriages tend to be the ones who advocate a ‘solution’ by the production of ‘new toys’….(civil unions, or Joe once advocated ‘civil contract’ type building blocks that people could use to cobble together any legal union they wanted like they were lego blocks). If you create a lot of versions of ‘marriage-lite’, you’re going to peal away a lot of people from regular straight marriage into them. You’re probably better off just letting the same sex couples use the ‘seasaw’ and concentrate on the straight couples that you’re concerned with rather than building a brand new swing/jungle gym/slide which is just going to ensure that different sex couples make less use of the sea saw to begin with.
April 29th, 2011 | 12:15 am
For those who do not follow Broadway theater, let me note here that the revival of Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart just opened to rave reviews.
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