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I just had a realization. It was (and is) always so confusing when The Bad Straights claimed “gay people getting married will ruin the institution for everyone.” But I think they always meant that if two men or two women can get married, then marriage must not be defined by a man obtaining a woman as servant/property & securing exclusive rights to her labor, identity, & body. And without that, they can’t even imagine what purpose marriage could ever serve. 96 comments
 @skiles @Catvalente Absolutely. When most conservatives say "family," they mean patriarchy. It's a code term. @Catvalente Woah. I’d never considered that but it sounds frighteningly plausible.  @nolsen311 Yeah but people were saying this in the late 90s, and in that time there were TONS of straight marriages past the 30 year point. Because divorce used to be way harder than it is now, but they still pointed to those as the successful ones  @Catvalente @nolsen311  @nolsen311 @Catvalente straight here and rooting for marriage to be saved this way, cause nobody else knows how.   @Catvalente Sure. Similarly, the whole "hurf durf Imma gonna marry my dog!" bs makes me want to ask how they're going to get the dog to sign health care proxy paperwork. @rmd1023 It’s the same terminal thought though. If marriage isn’t about owning a woman & rights to her, then it must be meaningless, because to them, that servitude & captivity is totally bound up with the very concept of romantic love. And if marriage is meaningless then it makes just as much sense to marry your dog etc. They just can’t imagine a meaning outside man leads/woman serves/woman can’t get away @Catvalente Sigh, yeah. I think also, "marriage is about where I can put my dick" (coupled with "queer sex is unnatural and akin to bestiality"), rather than "marriage is a societal contract creating a social unit" or some wacky woke shit like that. @argv_minus_one @rmd1023 @Catvalente Because that implies a woman has the right to consent of her own accord. @Catvalente @rmd1023 @rmd1023 @Catvalente I just assumed that people making that argument were likely potential rapists, because they clearly have no concept of consent. @rmd1023 @Catvalente One Tory peer here came out with a spiel about how he's fond of his son but doesn't want to marry him. You can fill in the obvious response.  @Catvalente @abucci summed it up in a pithy formulation that's stuck with me: "A man can't own a man, and property can't own property." @JulieB @Catvalente @abucci I would like to clarify, in case it isn't sufficiently clear to begin with, that this was a position he was characterizing, not one he endorsed. @KeithAmmann @Catvalente @abucci Absolutely. Never thought for a minute that he endorsed it. He just defined the hell out of it! @KeithAmmann @Catvalente @abucci This. The whole line of thinking never made sense - unless you view it through this lens.  Maybe that's what they mean when they say that same-sex marriage "redefines" marriage, as if it redefines marriage as a freely chosen partnership, rather than as their unspoken definition of chattel slavery with gifts and cake. I have always, too glibly, said that if gay marriage affects your marriage, then one of you is gay. But maybe The Bad Straights saw something I didn't think of, that The Gays are modeling what marriage could be, for anyone.  @Catvalente And also, if they don't get to define marriage, maybe they don't get to define other things, and that power to define what is right and good and normal is both large and materially valuable. "What harm does it do?" being straight up materialism, and they have to be against that, it takes away the power to enforce a prescriptive norm and the great grift collapses. @Catvalente As far as I'm concerned they can keep it.  @Catvalente @Catvalente @Catvalente  @CaptBobbers @Catvalente The whole thing about sports not withstanding, I actually used to feel like this was the other way around, that the men were attempting to *raise* their value by becoming women.  @Catvalente I always thought the basic reason for marriage was that a man could obtain exclusive ownership of a woman and thereby guarantee that any child she had was his, so he could be sure that his property would belong to his descendants and thus, metaphorically at least, belong to him in perpetuity.  @Catvalente ties into the asinine "So, which one is the man/woman in that relationship?" i.e. Which one has power over the other.   @Catvalente More like "this is the way it's supposed to be done, we don't like change." People get upset when their world views are challenged.  @Catvalente Can't speak for all bad straights, but: I was brought up as a religious conservative, and the goal was always delegitimizing gay people and advancing theocracy. Gay marriage was seen as a way for the secular world to make gains on territory we saw as "ours," and as a barrier to our goal of reversing the acceptance of gay people. We believed that our country succeeded or struggled in accordance with how much God favored us. Ergo, enforcing religious law would benefit everyone. @Catvalente N.B.: I am not this at all anymore, I just remember what I'd been taught and what was said by the people around me. The core belief on all subjects political was that we must force people to follow what we believed was "God's law" or risk the ruin of our country. There was never a deeper rationale than that. Fundamentally, these people are not living in the real world.  @lykso @Catvalente @leeloo @Catvalente I mean, you're already failing to understand that logic didn't enter into any of it. You can't really argue with theofascists. There weren't facts; there were articles of faith, to which the facts would be fit or discarded as necessary. Edit: That said, the primary goal was always reversing the acceptance of gay people. It was always about forcing adherence to our religious beliefs, by hook or by crook. Rhetoric around defending "turf" was mostly in service to that. Then it would appear that God is sick and tired of being worshipped, because the influence of #religion has been waning for centuries. I suppose I would not want to be worshipped, either, if it meant I had to constantly watch my beloved creations horribly murder each other in my name… @argv_minus_one @Catvalente I mean, that trend would have fit my beliefs regarding the "end times" perfectly. Never did I ever come across an argument or observation that I couldn't rationalize away or incorporate. Only thing that got me out was finally understanding that I had to prove my positive claim and then realizing that none of the arguments it seemed anyone had ever made in service of that actually worked. Out of curiosity, how would you have rationalized away life in the US getting better, despite widespread atheism, for the last several decades? @argv_minus_one @Catvalente In all likelihood, I'd have argued it was in fact worse today in many ways than, say, the 1950s.  @Catvalente As Roy Zimmerman put it, "It's the Lord's holy word @Catvalente and this explains also why people ask “who’s the girl?” As it can’t be that a marriage is a meeting of equals.  @Catvalente Yes. That's the unspoken secret, because when they speak it people realize how dumb it sounds.  @Catvalente as someone who has been married three times (by my mid 50s, I finally learned to be assertive & say no 😂) I now *only* support gay marriage. Well, I think the entire institution is stupid, particularly hyper consumerist marriages (my last longest lasting was at a music festival and cost $25 for the dress and the celebrant entry ticket…10,000 guests none of whom we knew) but gay people haven’t had the ability to get married, so go for it Maybe there’s a broader purpose? Ownership of children is also part of the same system. (The word ‘paterfamilias’ has some history...) But maybe also, cishet (and depending on specific culture, mono) marriage reinforces the broader system of social power. (They call it the foundation of society.) Which of course they (including many ‘high-status’ wives) insist on their entitlement to lead. That way even unmarried and widowed high-status traditionalists can stay privileged. But of course the less privileged ‘bad straights’ may not be in a position to imagine that particular outcome. I suspect it runs more on instinct than imagination anyway... Rub these ideas together and you remise why Republicans activly defend the legality of child marriage @Catvalente  @marnanel @Woodswalked @Catvalente ONLY men getting to define what is ethical and what is not isn't somehow …relevant? I don't mean to sound snarky, but the connections are completely there. It's the preservation of males in charge, even if they don't personally marry. @Catvalente Years ago, some yob in Florida said my hetero marriage isn't legit because we didn't reproduce, and he couldn't see any other reason to wed. Dumb ol' peckerwood. 🤪 @Cotopaxi @Catvalente  @Catvalente @cstross Precisely. It's probably dated now, but there was a book called "What Is Marriage For?" by E.J. Graff that approached forms of marriage through history to try to find the thing that made it exclusive to hetero couples. (Spoiler: a lot of it has been about who gets your stuff when you die.) @Catvalente What if two straight men get married for the benefits and continue to be misogynistic?  @Catvalente I have always wondered why anybody would want to get married. I think marriage is a very stupid thing, something that belongs in the past. @Catvalente @Catvalente I posted something similar a few weeks back. A lot of it, aside from the property/inheritance stuff, is also because if marriage is for love rather than breeding more souls for white Jesus, then their own miserable marriages were/are meaningless. No two people hate each other more than a married cishet conservative couple. @Catvalente Lot of these people see marriage as a privilege from which flows privileges. Such as my ex-wife said the right of married women to be rude to her when she worked as a waitress. As opposed to a right and a duty which is the other way people think about it. You can guess which ones are opposed to gays getting married.  @Catvalente The only thing I see being ruined is US. Ruined by the GOP, MAGA, KKK, Nazies, Trump and Putin?  @Catvalente @Npars01 @Catvalente @Npars01 @Catvalente Garland hired Jack Smith, an expert in mobs, despots, and their finances. That's pretty astute. Until the money behind Trump's fascist movement is investigated, prosecuted, and finally legislated, American democracy isn't safe from the billionaires frying the planet & democracy. @Npars01 @Catvalente Yes, but hasn't been able too, is not an excuse. The FBI is rotten to the core. @GatekeepKen @Npars01 @Catvalente @Npars01 @Catvalente add in replacing political discourse with violence and a lust to expand and you've got textbook fascism.* Good thing the GOP isn't about violence in place of political debate and hasn't talked about invading Mexico and Canada. Oh wait. *If there was such a thing as a textbook definition of fascism. Most scholars agree there isn't. It's too amorphous. @Catvalente Yeh my mom and dad were married unto death (about 30yrs, cancer) and despite my mom being an extremely outspoken feminist and my dad supporting her in his way, labor tended to fall in gendered divisions. I am sadly, hopelessly, mostly attracted to men. So I will never marry, because F that noise. It has only backslid since the 70s.  @Catvalente Dan McClellan on TikTok is a biblical scholar who said that the original Hebrew states male on male sex (and only that) was an abomination because in society at the time men should only be the dominator, not the dominated, and this ruined the proper hierarchy. They had no concept of homosexuality otherwise. So basically you are right, it is screwing with the patriarchy. I think this is right, AND that there is a second motivation. The prominent right-wing homophobes are gay men who do not believe in straight men. To them all men are gay, but only the weak admit to their desires. Projection means they believe everyone’s experience is like theirs, ie men wanting men. Therefore if society were to allow men to marry each other, it really would mean the destruction of humanity because literally no one would choose to have hetero sex.  @Catvalente oh yes, Stephanie Coontz was very clear about this in Marriage: A History, that gay marriage is the product and culmination of marriage as a union of equal and consenting adults as opposed to a property, economic, and reproductive arrangement.  @Catvalente I always liked the New Yorker cartoon when same-sex marriage was legalized in the US: as the man reads the news to his wife she says "oh, those poor people - haven't they suffered enough?" @Catvalente My theory is that one of its primary purposes is as a tax wheeze. Letting gay people get married can then be seen in the context of meaning straight couples then only have that advantage over an even smaller group, consisting of singletons, cohabiting siblings etc… |
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@Catvalente
Yup, this is what they actually mean by "traditional marriage." The traditions are misogyny and obedience.
Gay marriage threatens this by providing a counterexample.