It's nice to see some good news.
In a much-anticipated ruling issued Thursday, the California Supreme Court struck down the state's ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional...
[The ruling] said that the state law's language "limiting the designation of marriage to a 'union between a man and a woman' is unconstitutional, and that the remaining statutory language must be understood as making the designation of marriage available to both opposite-sex and same-sex couples."
Simply awesome news. Of course, leave it to me to find something to complain about.
"The government should promote and encourage strong families," said Glen Lavy of the Alliance Defense Fund. "The voters realize that defining marriage as one man and one woman is important because the government should not, by design, deny a child both a mother and father."
Dammit, journalists really need to call these people on this shit. I would love to hear an actual rational explanation on why the welfare of children should have any weight, let alone be the sole factor, when deciding marriage laws. You don't need to be married to legally have children. You don't need to have children to be legally married. There is no legal connection between marriage and childbearing. So in what way does allowing gay couples, who within the confines of a marriage contract are unable to conceive children, impact child welfare at all? What parenting situation is now legal that was not legal before? There isn't one. Period. So if you're going to interview bigots, I'd appreciate it if you made them be honest about their bigotry, instead of letting them slide by with more "It's for the children!" bullshit that doesn't hold up to five seconds of scrutiny.
11 comments:
You're totally right that, in a better world, marriage and children would be two separate issues.
But since they are getting lumped together anyway...
In a truly rational world, we'd be able to respond to Glen Lavy's paranoid "WHAT ABOUT TEH KIDZ" with the position that the government, by design, should not require that a child have both a mother and a father.
But no. You point how how sometimes parents fuck up their kids, and suddenly you're "anti-family."
Well, yeah, but not only shouldn't the law require a child to have both a mother and a father, in no way does it. Claiming that as a legal basis for anything doesn't make any sense, because the presence of a mother and a father has no legal bearing whatsoever.
The notion that legal marriage should be based on the concept of childbirth and rearing is not something we should keep letting slide by. If that concept actually reaches the point of unquestioned acceptance, not only will it affect gay rights, but it will affect rights of divorce, rights of widows, and rights of childless couples too.
And of course you're right... there are plenty of cases where having two parents just means the kids are twice as fucked up.
Well, it kind of has legal bearing, as I know from lousy personal experience. I was born to an un-married, separated couple, and my parents ended up before a judge who had a chip on his shoulder about single mothers. Many pleasant years resulted, as you can imagine.
Also, if you do some research into the single mothers by choice movement, you'll notice a trend where courts are virtually always willing to rule that a known sperm donor can assert his legal rights to a child, even if a contract explicitly states that the donor shall not be granted custody.
So no, there is no statutory law forcing a mother and a father on a child, but everything (I haven't even touched on marriage incentives here!!) is rigged in that direction.
Good points. I guess what I mean, though, is that there is no law that says you have to be married to have a child. It is perfectly legal in California for a gay couple to raise a child, either born naturally to one of them or adopted. So saying that allowing gay marriage puts children at risk by allowing them to be raised by gay couples doesn't make the first bit of sense.
I did not know that about sperm donors. That's terrifying. I'm going to have to go look into that now.
Also, Amy, you did not weigh in on the Wil Wheaton issue for me. You are my feminism sanity check, you know. Was I totally off base about that? Were you just being kind and refraining from tearing me a new one?
As far as I'm concerned, everyone missed the Official Feminist Issue with Wil Wheaton's original post. It more or less can be explained like this: Being able to use the "psycho ex" joke and find it funny means that (1) you're a guy and (2) you're naive.
Wheaton's insistence that the "psycho ex" joke would be applicable to both sexes is simply not true. Calling your ex at 3 a.m. is annoying, not psycho. If you're a female and you have a psycho ex-boyfriend, you need to get a restraining order and possibly a pit bull, because there's more than a casual correlation between break-ups and homicides. Wheaton, being a dude, can afford to find the "psycho" ex behavior funny.
Other than this huge absence of tact, his original post wasn't problematic. As an Obama supporter, he had every right to write about HRC getting out of the race. The part where he becomes a MAJOR asshole is in trying to justify what he said by claiming that identity politics are stupid. That's a statement of privilege, made by someone whose identity is not a liability. (Geeks are not a politically persecuted class. I should know, since I am one.)
As for Zuzu, I can't point a finger at her, because she perfectly matches the overall tone in Shakesville. Sometimes the tone is good, sometimes it isn't, but that blog has become an entity beyond the contributing editors.
I would like to justify using "hon" derisively in an argument, however. It is condescending and it does look kind of stupid; I've used it, and I'll admit those two points. But it allows me to mix it up a little, to be condescending instead of bursting into flame like the Human Torch when people tell me (for example) that rape "isn't a big deal." "Hon" lets me say "look how stupid you're being" without saying "go fuck yourself because violent crime is a big deal." (Using it against Wil Wheaton, however, was unnecessary on Zuzu's part. And her use of "pumpkin" was just annoying.)
Oh, also, Wheaton's original post was arbitrarily lousy. The starry-eyed, "Obama is the only one who can save our country" daydream is 100% manure. Obama isn't a knight in shining armor. He isn't Neo, Kara Thrace ("and her special destiny"), Aragorn, Jack Bauer, or Christ. He's a passably decent politician, so Obamacrats need to give it up already.
Okay, fair enough. Yes, it was the concept of physical threat that I overlooked when I first read it... you're right. Psycho-Ex girlfriends are funny, and psycho-ex boyfriends are potentially deadly. For that reason, it's not funny. I do tend to forget about the physical-threat aspect of feminism, because obviously I don't deal with it on a daily basis. Once it was pointed out to me, I completely understood, though.
As for Shakesville, I do generally enjoy the blog, but I think there's a sense of wanting to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be important and relevant, but they also want to be insular and unfettered with responsibility. I understand using inside memes, but they've outgrown being able to use them responsibly. By saying "Wil then tries to say that, sure, he called Clinton a bitch..." instead of "Wil then tries to say that, sure, he basically called Clinton a bith..." or ..."in effect called Clinton a bitch..." or anything to make it clear that she was paraphrasing, she was misrepresenting him. I reread Wil's post a few times, sure I was just missing where he used the word 'bitch'. That's not cool. That's the kind of semantic misuse they love to referee over there, and if they're going to hold others to that standard, I feel like maybe they should stick to it themselves. Fuck me for saying so, though. I was strung up within seconds.
I do consider sarcastic endearment to be infantalizing, which is why it always rubs me the wrong way. It crosses genders... men do the same thing, but they tend to use terms like "chief" or "tiger". Either way, it always bothers me, because it's dismissive. And while it's sometimes justified to dismiss someone, I kinda feel like you shouldn't be engaging someone and dismissing them at the same time. But that's just me. Your mileage may vary.
Thanks for the input on the matter, though. Seriously, you are always rational but uncompromising, and that really helps me try to navigate a philosophy that, thanks to the random distribution of chromosomes, I can't always parse on my own.
"I kinda feel like you shouldn't be engaging someone and dismissing them at the same time."
That's a really good point I haven't considered before. You're totally right.
I guess the blogger tendency to do just that -- engage for the purpose of dismissing -- is left over from when blogs weren't a valid medium for...well, anything. We act like we're participating in a massive flame war, and really, we aren't. Not anymore.
Anyway, you've sold me. I'll cut it out.
And thanks for the kind words. :) Not many people tell me I'm rational.
Well, I appreciate the agreement, though I have to be honest... it is certainly possible that I'm just rationalizing my own psychoses. I'm certainly not an exemplar of warm and fuzzy behavior.
And yes, I definitely think you manage to strike a perfect balance between maintaining rationality and refusing to suffer bullshit. That's helpful for someone like me, who is still trying to understand the progressive philosophy. This is all still rather new for me, and a lot of folks don't have time for you unless you've got a longstanding membership in the club.
I have no way of knowing if you're projecting or not, but in my experience, when something is bothersome, there's a real reason for it.
Also, the more I think of it, the more aware I become of how it just looks stupid.
My daughter gave birth to a beautiful depo-provera failure baby boy. She saw the father for what he is: a man 25 years older than her, a free-wheeling gun toting drug dealing pedophile. She refused to marry him and broke off the engagement. In the 2 years since, the father has planted drugs in her car, had her apartment broken into, had someone try to break into ours the same day; violated every court order continuously, quit his high paying job so not to pay child support, got people to lie, saying she is s drug-addicted prostitute,and on this past Father's Day he attacked and severely beat up my husband and put him in the hospital. We currently have restraining orders against him. This does not stop him fom stalking her, or from him telling the child support court how traumatized he is after he was attacked and beaten by my husband. It was pictures of my bloody husband that were stolen from my daughter's file box. We have more.
We want her to leave the state, but she wants to stay here with us. If she stays here it's only a matter of time before he goes into one of his rages and kills her. His whole thing is to make her as miserable as he can.
It's probably desirable for a child to be raised in a happy 2 parent home. I believe a child is better off in a happy one parent home than a miserable two parent home.
And the idea that if the government pays an incentive to an unmarried set of parents, they will marry, and forever be happy together, thus eliminating welfare and child support. STUPID.
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