Gay Marriage to Alfred: Your Thoughts

To further bolster my "lol Maine, who cares" hypothesis, here is the lead story on CNN.com, over coverage of the signing of this bill:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/05/06/florida.chinese.drywall.family/index.html

...Really? This is the most important story you have today?

haha i love how often the word "chinese" is used in that article

gotta make sure we remember that the great drywall scare of '09 was caused by the yellow menace

i'm going to just look at that URL and make up my own story involving florida, chinese food, and drywall

meanwhile, the RI House just passed legislation prohibiting indoor prostitution (not just outdoor solicitation, as was previously the case) in a regressive response to (i'm guessing) the craigslist killer; i know that doesn't have anything to do gay marriage per se but taking that development as a social barometer, my hopes for RI gay marriage are pretty diminished

Theoretically that would still allow for indoor/outdoor gloryholes.

well--fewer prostitutes indoors means fewer deaths from the menace of chinee drywall

you can't get married through a gloryhole, ned.

lol ned

Building a bit on what I noted earlier in this almost starting to seem normal -- I had wondered if/when Sullivan would post anything about this, and he did but only after about a couple of hours (which for him and this issue is the equivalent of an eon), and briefly. I'm not surprised to see this as a follow-up with this introduction:

I'm sitting here, after renting a tux and grabbing a sandwich at Starbucks, and realize I just posted a brief note on the fifth state in the US to grant marriage equality. As if this were now routine. As if it were no big deal. As if what was only recently a pipe-dream hasn't become a reality.

Pity about the Starbucks sandwiches though.

I love their toffee bars!

sweet

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/13/new.york.same.sex.marriage/index.html

http://www.slate.com/id/2218774/

makes sense to me, except for california?

the religious right has never been a force in New England (I dunno about Iowa).

no on 8 coalition just totally fucked it up/shot themselves in the foot didn't they. lol california

yeah they didn't count on the strength of out-of-state organizers (thx Utah! fucking Mormons)

beware the west, where people are still crazy and make $$$ from it

California gays should pour a bunch of money into fucking with Utah's ridiculous liquor laws and/or prosecuting polygamists

lol :/

http://www.youtube.com/v/haVqcPfeqKI

the religious right has never been a force in New England

evangelicals, no. catholics, a little bit (which goes towards explaining RI slow moving on this issue)

this is sort of amazing. i can't possibly summarize his argument because i'm not entirely sure what it is, but he says some sort of astounding stuff along the way:

The first is the most important: It is that marriage is concerned above all with female sexuality. The very existence of kinship depends on the protection of females from rape, degradation, and concubinage. This is why marriage between men and women has been necessary in virtually every society ever known. Marriage, whatever its particular manifestation in a particular culture or epoch, is essentially about who may and who may not have sexual access to a woman when she becomes an adult, and is also about how her adulthood--and sexual accessibility--is defined. Again, until quite recently, the woman herself had little or nothing to say about this, while her parents and the community to which they answered had total control. The guardians of a female child or young woman had a duty to protect her virginity until the time came when marriage was permitted or, more frequently, insisted upon. This may seem a grim thing for the young woman--if you think of how the teenaged Natalie Wood was not permitted to go too far with Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass. But the duty of virginity can seem like a privilege, even a luxury, if you contrast it with the fate of child-prostitutes in brothels around the world. No wonder that weddings tend to be regarded as religious ceremonies in almost every culture: They celebrate the completion of a difficult task for the community as a whole.
This most profound aspect of marriage--protecting and controlling the sexuality of the child-bearing sex--is its only true reason for being, and it has no equivalent in same-sex marriage. Virginity until marriage, arranged marriages, the special status of the sexuality of one partner but not the other (and her protection from the other sex)--these motivating forces for marriage do not apply to same-sex lovers.

so, basically ... because gay marriage isn't concerned with protecting female virginity, if we make it legal ... all women will become child-prostitutes?

anyway, there's much, much more in there. and it is published in a real actual magazine!

Anything to keep them happy.

I think the California decision tomorrow will likely not overturn 8 but we'll see.

I like how that argument seemingly assumes that there aren't any gay women.

'sexual access' pretty neatly sums it all up.

Few men would ever bother to enter into a romantic heterosexual marriage--much less three, as I have done--were it not for the iron grip of necessity that falls upon us when we are unwise enough to fall in love with a woman other than our mom.

I mean

I like how that argument seemingly assumes that there aren't any gay women.

among many other bizarre assumptions. it's like he gives kind of a history lesson of all the horrible things that have been involved in traditional marriages (and still are some places, obv). and then says, "well, so, we don't do those kinds of things any more. but if we did, none of them would apply to gay marriage. so ...." and then i just lose whatever thread of argument he's trying to make. but it seems like it's part of the current phase of the anti-marriage brigades (which i would characterize as a rear-guard action, if it didn't make me snicker), where they know they're losing traction and they know it's important not to come across as bigots or zealots, so they have to come up for ever more baroque and impenetrable framings for arguments that of course remain bigoted and zealous at their core. it's kind of entertaining, although obviously it would be more entertaining if actual people's real lives and rights weren't at stake.

come up with, not for..

xxpost: yeah, that line did make me wonder if the whole thing was a parody. but that's not really the weekly standard's style.

that whole guy is a parody

he's apparently been beating this drum for a while:

Yes, marriage tends to regulate or channel the sexual appetite of men, and this is undoubtedly a good thing for women. But it is not the ultimate good. A husband, no matter how unfaithful, cannot introduce a child who is not his wife's own into a marriage without her knowledge; she alone has the power to do such a thing. For a woman, the fundamental advantage of marriage is thus not to regulate her husband but to empower herself--to regulate who has access to her person, and to marshal the resources of her husband and of the wider community to help her raise her child ren.

Every human relationship can be described as an enslavement, but for women the alternative to marriage is a much worse enslavement--which is why marriage, for women, is often associated as much with sexual freedom as with sexual constraint. In the traditional Roman Catholic cultures of the Mediterranean and South America, where virginity is fiercely protected and adolescent girls are hardly permitted to "date," marriage gives a woman the double luxury of controlling her sexuality and, if she wishes, extending it.

otoh, there's ... this ...

Cal decision is no change -- Prop 8 stands but so do the 18,000 marriages already performed.

That's unfortunate. Hopefully all of San Francisco up and moves to Des Moines.

It's unfortunate but also utterly unsurprising -- basically the court's said, "Well, stays as is." If anything I wonder what sort of prompt this will add to the rumblings about rewriting the state's constitution, as has started to kick in to high given the current basket case that is California's fiscal situation.

Goddamnit

:(

My friend in San Fran is bummed, but he looks at it this way: now "middle America" will get a chance to observe how sane and boring the existing gay marriages are.

well, it sucks. but otoh i really do think it'll be better to overturn it on another referendum vote -- which i totally think californians can and probably will do -- than for it be done by the court. i think the court did everything it could, really.

Yeah, that's sort of how I took this one too. Court was all, you took it out of our hands, so you now have to live with yourselves while all these other states show you up.

tipsy and Eric OTM

Yeah - unfortunate, but predictable.

Here is my friend Steve's report, live from city hall in SF:

it was weird there. all this chanting, then one long-haired dude came out with this thumbs down, all the gays started shouting "shame on you" and the pro-prop 8ers cheered, then the gays crossed the street to chant somewhere else, and it was over.

traffic being blocked now, apparently.

Lame that the courts didn't strike this down, but they didn't really have a legal rationale for doing so. You can't rule constitutional amendments unconstitutional.

back to the ballot box.

it'll happen

the ruling is pretty interesting tho:

Proposition 8 reasonably must be interpreted in a limited fashion as eliminating only the right of same-sex couples to equal access to the designation of marriage, and as not otherwise affecting the constitutional right of those couples to establish an officially recognized family relationship.
Ruling, pg. 37. And:

Accordingly, although Proposition 8 eliminates the ability of same-sex couples to enter into an official relationship designated “marriage,” in all other respects those couples continue to possess, under the state constitutional privacy and due process clauses, “the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage,” including, “most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish — with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life — an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage.” (Marriage Cases, supra, 43 Cal.4th 757, 781.) Like opposite-sex couples, same-sex couples enjoy this protection not as a matter of legislative grace, but of constitutional right. Page 41

so it seems like they're explicitly saying prop. 8 isn't (and can't) take away rights, only the designation of the word "marriage." wonder how that will play out. is there an existing civil unions law in the state?

I... think so?

It's a slippery answer to a tough question. They're talking out of both sides of their judge holes b/c they don't want to be pinned down.

I haven't read the decision (in whole) but this fits w/ the idea that marriages that were performed are still valid but that no new ones can take place. Everyone has the right the constitutional rights and responsibilities associated with marriage, but Prop 8 forbids "official" marriage.

Blech.

I finally read Sam Schulman's article and this
Now to live in such a system, in which sexual intercourse can be illicit, is a great nuisance. Many of us feel that licit sexuality loses, moreover, a bit of its oomph.

reminds me a lot of Kirk Cameron's dad's assertion re gay sex

“It’s pure sexuality. It’s almost like pure heroin. It’s such a rush. They are committed in almost a religious way. And they’ll take enormous risks, do anything.”

He says that for married men and women, gay sex would be irresistible. “Marital sex tends toward the boring end,” he points out. “Generally, it doesn’t deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does”

Man, I need to use this line of reasoning on straight buddies.