Gay Marriage

I knew once I started this blog that I would end up debating gay marriage, but I had hoped it wouldn't have happened quite this soon. I recently got into a debate on the topic over at Marriage Debate. You'll find me in the comment section of the post titled "Garriage?" among others.

I started learning more about the institution of marriage after I got into one myself and decided I would need more education and direction on the subject if I hoped to avoid ending up divorced like my parents, in-laws, and so many others around me. In the process, I stumbled into the gay marriage question, and was surprised to find myself changing my mind.

I attended my cousin's gay wedding before I got married, and even though it did feel funny, the thought of not supporting the marriage hadn't even crossed my mind. I was raised to believe that people should do whatever makes them happy. I've come to question that simplistic mindset as I've gotten older, especially when coming up against the challenges of making a happy marriage. The fact is that taking care of myself makes me happy, but being taken care of makes me happier, and taking care of others makes me happiest. So, it's complicated. An individualistic approach hasn't been very functional for me. But even though gay marriage is not my primary interest in the marriage debate, it is on the forefront of the debate nowadays. Therefore, over the last few years, I have been developing a set of opinions about it that I might as well lay out here, at least to get it out of the way. Of course, I'm always open to revising my own views if persuasive evidence or arguments are presented to me.

Perhaps my favorite resource in developing my thoughts on gay marriage has been The Opine Editorials, because as they put it, they are "defending marriage on the firm ground of reason and respect for human dignity." Even though the folks over there are religious, they don't argue against gay marriage on religious grounds. This is key for me. I'm one of those spiritual-but-not-religious types.

I've especially enjoyed their Defend Marriage Resources, which can be found in the upper right corner. My favorite read was this one here by Lee Harris, which Opine describes as follows: "A gay man discusses the fragility of social customs like marriage from a historical/philosophical perspective."

It's lengthy and academic, but I've read it several times over. It's absolutely the best explanation of the value of traditional marriage that I've ever read. But it's so much more than that. Lee Harris breaks down the concept of tradition, and the various defenses of it, to give the reader an understanding of what tradition really is. Traditions are complex and fascinating things. Ultimately, he compares a tradition to a recipe:

"Tradition, then, is the only possible mode for transmitting a community’s habits of the heart, and it does this by providing the recipe for making the kind of human beings who will viscerally feel and respond to the same habits of the heart as the community to which they belong.

"Yet these recipes, like those used for cooking, do not by any means demand to be rigidly or mechanically followed. To make pasta, for instance, you need the essential ingredients — Italian noodles and sauce — but otherwise you are free to experiment. You may vary the sauce as you wish, from tomato to cream, adding mushrooms or black olives or spinach, or you may mix the sauce with different types of noodles, like spaghetti or angel hair or vermicelli. But all in the end have the same essential nature and accomplish the same pragmatic purpose — a satisfying bowl of pasta.

"This allows us an interesting new way to appraise a tradition. We can look at it as if it were a recipe and say, 'This is what you must do, if you are to create a certain type of community — and these are the options you have, once you have done this.'

"To see institutions and traditions as recipes is to grasp at once how pointless it is to debate their truth or falsity. Is Julia Child’s recipe for Bouillabaisse true or false? The question sounds absurd because it is."

Later, he extends this idea of traditions as recipes onto the issue of marriage:

"Marriage was something that, until only quite recently, seemed to be securely in the hands of married people. It was what married people had engaged in, and certainly not a special privilege that had been extended to them to the exclusion of other human beings. Who, after all, could not get married? You didn’t have to be straight; you could be gay. So what? Marriage was the most liberal institution known to man. It opened its arms to the ugly and the homely as well as to the beautiful and the stunning. Was it defined as between a man and a woman? Well, yes, but only in the sense that a cheese omelet is defined as an egg and some cheese — without the least intention of insulting either orange juice or toast by their omission from this definition. Orange juice and toast are fine things in themselves — you just can’t make an omelet out of them."

I don't think I could explain it any better. It feels odd to even be discussing marriage as being "defined" as between a man and a woman. Marriage is something that married people engage in. Loving committed relationships between two people of the same sex may be beautiful things, but what they're engaging in is simply not marriage.

The core purpose of marriage is to channel procreative potential into responsible childbearing. Although I don't yet have children, as a wife, I know this all too well. So many times have I worriedly hovered over a pregnancy test thinking, please, not yet. No birth control method is 100% effective. I personally know of two couples who were told they were infertile only to be surprised to find themselves pregnant later on down the road. If I were to get pregnant at an inconvenient time, our marriage would be the bedrock for creating a happy family in less than ideal circumstances. Procreation, even just the possibility of it, is a huge responsibility. This is why marriage developed, even before civilization itself. To redefine marriage so that procreative potential no longer has a role seems reckless to me.

The core of marriage is simply the fact that the love between a man and woman, their act of passion, their physical intimacy, can produce a new life. This simple beautiful fact is the reason marriage exists in the first place. It's the reason that some species of birds mate for life. It's a natural thing. Now, of course I understand that homosexuality is a natural thing as well. But it's a different thing. It's a natural deviation from the norm. Deviations happen, and they are by and large good things. Healthy deviation is absolutely required for a vibrant culture and civilization. Too much conformity stifles and suffocates. I love the homosexuals in my life, and I believe they should not only be tolerated, but embraced and celebrated. But that still doesn't make their relationships marriages.

Many who advocate for gay marriage say that the main purpose of marriage is love. Of course, love is extremely important. Responsible procreation includes providing a stable and loving home to the offspring of the union. The problem with making love central to the definition of marriage is that love is none of the government's business. I can think of so many future scenarios where this new definition of marriage could be used to abuse the institution, and ultimately get government involved in the most intimate details of our lives.

For example, suppose the next generation, being very clever, decides to start marrying their college roommates to get certain legal or financial benefits, planning to divorce once they've found a true love and are ready for a "real" marriage. This would of course undermine the concept of marriage being about love. Then what happens if these loveless marriages are costing taxpayers more than they had intended to pay for these programs aimed at people in "real" marriages? Do the taxpayers demand that the government do romance or sexuality tests? Do we have to start enforcing love in marriages? Do you want to be required go to a government psychologist every year to prove that you're still in love with your spouse?

And what is our response when these kids say that they do love each other, just not sexually, and what does sex, or even love for that matter, really have to do with marriage anyway? After all, it's just an economic partnership of rights and responsibilities.

The whole line of reasoning reminds me of the view of sexuality I was taught growing up. I was taught that sex is a natural beautiful thing. I was not taught that it should be saved for marriage, or for a certain age or time in my life. I wasn't even explicitly taught that it should be with someone I loved. The love part was just assumed. Sex is something people who love each other just do naturally.

Of course, this view of sex was already discarding a number of previously assumed premises for sexual activity from past generations. Of course, lots of people had premarital sex in the past, but the belief that it was wrong set up an ideal that was generally respected, if not always achieved, and it guided sexual behavior into being relatively responsible. The view that I was taught had tossed out that ideal in order to make sure I would never feel ashamed or afraid of sex.

It was a well intentioned effort, and it worked, at first. I naturally started having sex, several years after puberty, with a person I loved. Then another person I loved. Then a person I didn't really love, but really liked. Then a person I just kinda liked. Then a person that I wanted to like me. Then a person I didn't really know. It went on like this for a couple years. I had no "shining example" that Lee Harris describes in the piece I linked above. Pretty soon, I was feeling ashamed and afraid of sex, and I didn't even know why. I was doing what made me happy in each given moment, but it was making me more and more unhappy in the long run.

I worry that the generation that grows up with the idea that marriage is just a thing that two people who love each other do naturally will end up with the same driftless and painful experience I had with sex. If it was so easy to detach love from sex, it will be just as easy to detach it from marriage. Sex without love can still be pleasurable. Marriage without love can still bring about plenty of economic benefits.

It all comes down to making babies. It's the reason the sex act exists in the first place. It's the reason marriage exists in the first place. What a wonderful blessing to be human and take joy in these things, joy that goes above and beyond their primary function. But it would be a dangerous social experiment to redefine marriage so that its primary purpose is no longer recognized. How could detaching an institution from its core function improve it in the slightest? I have yet to hear a persuasive response to this question.

Generation Divorce

How many times have you gotten something like this forwarded to you by email?

Another Goody for the Old Timers

It's another one of these tracts that glorifies the Baby Boomers' childhoods because they didn't have seatbelts or video games or remote controls, and they got spanked, and their parents didn't have to worry about child abductions or food poisoning. The worst part is this end quote:

"LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA, AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T- SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED."

These things almost feel like a slap in the face when I get them (always from a Baby Boomer) because of the hypocrisy of it. My father introduced me to video games, and my mother was ecstatic when she bought our first TV with a remote control. She always made us wear our seatbelts on every car ride. They made us latch-key kids and taught us how to avoid being abducted or abused. They didn't believe in spanking. There was a huge salmonella outbreak when I was a kid. The list goes on and on. All the things they deride in these emails came on the scene under their watch. Yet they don't appear to grasp this. They simply say, "Sorry for what you missed!" And notice they don't offer up even a whiff of a thank you to their parents for providing this wonderful childhood to them.

I've seen other pieces like this that don't just glorify the 50's and 60's, but are also derisive of Gen Xers on down. They practically take credit for the wonderful childhoods their parents worked so hard to give them, while blaming us for our chaotic childhoods that left us apathetic and detached. The same derision is reflected in all the nicknames they've given our generation(s) highlighting our selfishness and apathy. Where do they think we learned it?

The Divorce Generation ended their marriages in record numbers, and not just because of abuse or infidelity. The majority of those marriages were low conflict. They just weren't "fulfilling" enough. The love that created us wasn't important enough to them to keep it alive. So they blamed each other for their problems and gave up on their marriages to try to find that perfect spouse with whom they could live a fairytale life of neverending romantic bliss. Funny thing is, none of the ones I know ever found it. In fact, they found mostly a life of more heartbreak. The Baby Boomers I know who stayed married haven't had storybook marriages, but they've had more security, success, and happiness than the divorced boomers I know. And the differences between the grown children of the married parents and the divorced parents is striking.

I've read in a number of places that people my age generally support a return to more conservative values regarding marriage and divorce, and they are deeply afraid of experiencing divorce themselves and putting their own children through it. Nonetheless, the divorce rate hasn't moved much. Too often, we still have this fairytale version of marriage in our heads, where finding the right person means that keeping the passion and romance alive will be easy. Well, five years into a happy marriage of my own (after 5 years of cohabitation), I can testify that it's not. There are boring parts. There are annoying parts. There are frustrating and infuriating parts. Sometimes you just have to weather the storm. But once you get past it, things are better than they have ever been. Your commitment is stronger, your history is richer, your story more dramatic. Ironically, my divorced mother-in-law's advice to me on my wedding day for a successful marriage was, "Just don't ever give up." She learned her lesson the hard way, and my husband and I intend not to repeat it.

We won't be able to give our future kids a childhood without fear of abduction or food poisoning. In fact, there is much more for parents to fear today than there was when we were children. And the passive entertainment options are seemingly infinite and getting more numerous all the time. It will be quite a challenge trying to figure out how to parent in this world of cell phones, the internet, and incredibly violent and sexual video games. But whatever mistakes we make, at least we'll be able to give our children the benefits of commitment and stability. We'll show them what marriage really is, and that the love that created them is a beautiful thing worth nurturing and honoring.

Sexually Inspired by Women

Gay Expecations Make for Complex Relationships

"If I was in a monogamous relationship, how much I love Jennifer would break some rule, I just know it. Even though we're not lovers, our friendship feeds the bisexual part of me, the part that is sexually inspired by women."

Seems to me these women want their sexual partners to be all things to them. It naturally follows that they would find themselves rejecting monogamy. I find it especially fascinating that in the quote above, Higginbotham calls herself bisexual because she is "sexually inspired" by women, and that the bisexual part of her is being fed by a friendship with a woman who isn’t her lover. It deeply disappoints me that she feels that loving a woman in a non-sexual way would be breaking some rule of a monogamous relationship, even though she can’t identify exactly what that rule is.

When my girlfriends and I get together to scrapbook on a Saturday afternoon, we talk about a lot of things, but the number one topic is our husbands. After all the complaining and bragging, we go home really feeling like women. And the sex with our husbands on those Saturday nights is mind-blowing. So it seems we've been "sexually inspiring" each other for years without getting naked in the process. I’m pretty sure we’re not breaking any rules, and our husbands certainly aren’t complaining. I suspect that women have been inspiring each other, sexually and otherwise, for generations.

I haven’t read Baumgardner’s book, but it appears that she has touched on a profound truth about the importance of female relationships to a woman's emotional health and even her sexual identity. However, I get the sense that Baumgardner and her ilk have sexualized female friendships in an unconscious effort to compensate for the deficiencies that plague the modern state of Sisterhood. I've long been saying that the worst consequence of the feminist movement isn't that it has exacerbated the Battle of the Sexes (although it has) but rather that it has disordered and sometimes destroyed the female support networks that used to be our source of sanity and, indeed, power. We’ve lost touch with the unwritten wisdom of our grandmothers.

In modern marriages, instead of relying on the accumulated wisdom of women through the ages, we’ve decided the best way to get what we want from men is to act like men. Our marriages become competitions. We nag and argue rather than charm and persuade. We sacrifice our greatest womanly strengths and gifts on the alter of equality.

A wife can make up her husband’s mind for him without him ever knowing she did it, but my generation has never been shown the way. Instead, we’ve been taught to bargain as equals, to hammer out a deal for the management our day-to-day life in a 50-50 partnership with our husband. Marriage used to be something unique, something greater than the sum of its parts, but now it’s viewed as a contractual partnership for householding and childcare. No wonder people tire of it so quickly and so often. No wonder so many of our parents are divorced.

As a wife, I’m striking out in a new direction. Not exactly traditional, not exactly modern. I’m learning as I go. All I really know for sure is that, as the saying goes, women who aspire to be equal to men lack ambition. It’s not that we’re better than men, but we are different, and we have a crucial role to play. I’ll let you know if I ever figure out what exactly that role is.