| Who does Gay Marriage harm? | | Date Created: 14 Aug, 2004, 04:56 PM |
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The bitter disappointment experienced by American and Australian supporters of gay marriage in those respective communities in many ways represents a breach of trust between them and the community in which they choose to live.
This comes at some cost, borne directly by those discriminated against, as well as indirectly by their supporters, in terms of their health and well-being. A few weeks ago, the American Psychological Association's working party on gay marriage advocated that such unions be permitted, citing the health costs of discrimination as a major reason.
It also made reference to the paucity of any research showing the harm gay unions bring to the community, and the children of such unions. Certainly there is no research that shows heterosexual unions by definition produce healthier children, despite those who suggest these unions are the bedrock of modern society.
Somehow those who are most opposed to homosexual marriage tell us that if allowed such unions will harm heterosexual marriage, and thus by extension, society.
My understanding of this opposition is that somehow the importance, sanctity if not mystery of marriage will be tainted or diluted if "anyone can do it". That is, marriage is so special that only the sanctioned union of a man and woman should be legitimised as a marriage.
But what is unique about a man and a woman marrying that cannot be reproduced in a same sex marriage? One thing only: that any children of this union will have the genes of the parents who married.
This is certainly a unique outcome of heterosexual marriage, until science develops the knowledge to allow human parthenogenesis, or equal genetic contribution of both sexes, and in the case of males, a means of incubating a child created in vitro.
The dominant model of child reproduction in Australia and America appears to be within heterosexual marriage. Marriage does not guarantee the former will occur, and certainly reproduction frequently occurs outside of marriage.
In other words, there are many childless heterosexual marriages. How this may happen can occur for a variety of reasons which challenges the notion that marriage is just for heterosexuals.
A couple who marry may decide they wish to be childless. It may be the case that one or both are unable to reproduce. Or either may have come from previous marriages, have produced offspring, and now have married with no desire to further reproduce. Should marriage be denied any of these variations of heterosexuality?
To some extent, homosexual marriage may look similar. Two people without children who decide to legitimise their union. Yet they may also choose to extend their lives by the addition of children, by virtue of adoption, or one or both contributing their genetic material and the use of others to assist in the pregnancy and birth process. Both gay and lesbian parents could easily structure their families such that two children could be half-siblings, or full siblings. There are numerous permutations of genetic distribution but regardless, there is no research data available that suggest children - howsoever they came to be in a same-sex family - are disadvantaged or worse off than children in heterosexual families.
The argument then that marriage is about constructing a crucible for child-rearing - and the best one we know - is unsupportable. There are numerous examples of nonconformist and successful unions, and many examples displaying the failure of heterosexual marriage (with a divorce rate approaching 50%) to adhere to outmoded notions of how people should live.
Why outmoded? Clearly current concepts of marriage are based on religious concepts - literally on faith.
Conventional religious groups have not enjoyed growth of popularity in recent years, and despite considerations of separation of state and church, it is the legal concept of marriage that binds the two together more than any other.
One might ask who is advantaged by marriage for it to be so tightly controlled through both religious and civil means.
Even psychologists have attempted to answer this question, with often cited "statistics" on the mental wellbeing of married men compared to single men, at least in heterosexual marriage. Marriage is meant to be "good" for men. The same statistics are quite variable when it comes to the advantages of heterosexual marriage for women.
So did men invent marriage for their benefit? Those of a religious persuasion will cite texts of historical relevance which describe marriage in terms of the extension of a covenant with a monotheistic god. This is certainly the case of the three modern religions all of whom refer to their god in their texts in the male vernacular.
Prior to their existence, earlier religions had many gods and a high proportion of these were female. Somehow, as the monetheistic religions garnered more followers and power, with the resultant non-separation between Church and State, marriage was strictly limited to that between men and women; and goddesses became a part of history.
Moreover, procreation was seen as central to the purpose of marriage, in the sense that two families at the minimum merged, and lineage would continue especially with regard to property ownership, which of course includes people, such as slaves or "employees".
For centuries of course, marriage was very much a male-oriented institution, constructed, and enshrined in law for his benefit not her's. After all, until recent times, many married women could not obtain bank loans without their husband's signature, nor could they obtain credit cards or mortgages in their own names.
Nor did marriage elevate women's status so as to allow them to vote in elections until the early to mid-20th century in some parts of the world.
How is it that marriage was so male-dominated? Especially since for so long books, film and television have portrayed women as husband-chasers, rather than men as wife-chasers.
It does remind me of the off-the-cuff phrase of the late psychologist, Hans Eysenk, who said tongue in cheek: "Unattractive men get married to have sex; unattractive women have sex to get married."
He said it in the 1970s which reflected the thinking at the time, but occasionally I am reminded that he may have had his tongue in his cheek, but he really meant it!
After all, when you go into your magazine seller, do you see magazines entitled, "Bride" and next to it, do you see "Groom"? No, contemporary weddings are about it being the woman's day, not the man's. He has the night before - the buck's night - where he and his mates mourn his loss of freedom for the deal he gets in marriage.
What is the deal that he gets for which he spends time going through the motions on his buck's night of acting like an out of control single man?
He "gets" a wife who will risk her life to bear him children and carry on his name - that's the tradition. And it's this tradition that gay marriage so threatens for those who adhere to it, citing it as the bedrock of civilised life: a place to safely raise children and continue the line.
This was the model of marriage for centuries, and why the State sanctioned it, since it involved the inheritance of property and rights. It wasn't about falling in love, and marriage being the crucible in which you expressed that love. That's a comparatively modern concept, which received its first mention from French balladeers, but which received its biggest boost via late 19th century literature, and reinforced in early 20th century via movies, radio, and later, television, who in their own ways were hungry for material to portray.
Before that, and in many countries it remains the norm, marriages were arranged. Eligible adults were introduced and chaperoned, and if there was sufficient "chemistry" and the families approved (with appropriate dowries arranged) marriage would follow. If the couple eventually "fell in love" it was almost an artifact of living together and becoming parents, and not considered essential; respect for the correct role of husband and wife within marriage was the central focus, together with adherence to religious values and activities. In this sense, marriage was certainly seen in a contractual sense, what each partner would bring to the relationship and agree to do for the other and the marriage unit.
Looked at dispassionately, for centuries men were far more advantaged by such an arrangement than women were, and in the monotheistic religions, men still play a central role in the conduct of the religion in a far more powerful way than women.
How then can I say, despite media stereotypes of women chasing men as husbands, that marriage was invented by men for men?
It has a lot to do with the supposition that human beings didn't always know the origins of pregnancy and childbirth. What was known was that women became pregnant and gave birth and men didn't.
I wonder who it was that first discovered that sexual congress nine months before led to childbirth - was it a man or woman?
Is it reasonable to guess that in those very early times of human development that no connection was made at all between acting out sexual urges, and the arrival of children as a result? Moreover, in pre-agricultural times, when early humans experienced feast and famine, it is possible that poor nutrition and extreme conditions may have meant that becoming pregnant would have been very difficult indeed, thus delaying any sense of pattern formation: have sex, produce offspring nine months later. Moreover, if there was no pair bonding and sex was a random activity, how would they "know" of a cause and effect relationship between sex and childbirth?
Of course at some point, the connection was made. Children of a certain age looked like their fathers, so a connection was there to see. But not before it was recognised that childbirth was a huge risk for women, unlike our animal friends, where the pregnant female would slink off and give birth away from dangerous predators and in safe places. There are no animal "midwives" as far as we know, although higher order animals clearly possess an extended family structure and share in the nurturing of the young, since their births often occur seasonally.
Human births do not occur by season, and males and females don't have a rutting or mating season for that matter. So women were at risk for random childbirth all year round, and there would have always been other women around to help in the birthing process, another unique feature of human reporduction.
So once women learnt to connect sex with a male with becoming pregnant then running the risk of dying in childbirth, it would not be a large step to think that many women would want to avoid sex entirely, since it was dangerous to their health.
Men of course had no need to consider sex dangerous, and since their capacity to impregnate a woman was always associated with a pleasurable orgasm via ejaculation, the more sex the better. Especially since one might assume men took no or very little role in very early child-rearing.
So at some point women more than men would have recognised the inherent dangers in their role of reproducing the species. They would have spent time in their small communities, helping their womenfolk prepare for childbirth, knowing there was a high chance of both maternal and infant mortality.
One might be tempted to say that women had a far more profound understanding of their relationship to death than men did. Women died because of their primary role of childbearing, in addition to other forms of dying including warring tribes, famine, beasts, and natural events, like floods, and storms. Men also suffered these means of dying, but death through childbirth was a great separator of roles for which there wasn't any choice.
Given that sex for women was risky, and men wanted it for their own pleasure, it's not surprising that evolution eventually allowed women to also experience orgasm, regardless of whether impregnation occurred or not. Again, another area of human uniqueness in the animal kingdom, including a sexual organ, the clitoris, which appears to serve no other purpose than sexual pleasure.
For men, dying became an intriguing yet frightening event. History shows that except for a few exceptions, most wars are fought by men, although women have been as much a victim of these wars as men. And of course, men have used rape in war, as much for the demoralising effects on the enemy, as for their pleasure between skirmishes.
Once men learnt that their sexual acts with women gave rise to offspring, men had the opportunity to contemplate "defeating" death by virtue of the survival of their children to whom they could pass on their genes and property as a legacy. However, while women could be sure they were the mothers of their children, men could not be certain. Unless of course, their woman who was the mother of their child had no other sex partners. Otherwise, you could be passing on your legacy to your enemy or some stranger.
Thus to secure certainty of offspring identity, it became important, once property was a central feature of human existence, to be sure the woman had not had sex with anyone else. Hence the primacy given for centuries of female virginity prior to marriage.
Moreover, it was necessary for marital fidelity to be part of the marriage contract, otherwise, there was no point to it, hence the stigma attached to those borne outside of wedlock. In some cultures, the rape of a woman was her shame, not the rapist or the community's that didn't protect her. She was now tainted and unlikely to ever be chosen as a marriage partner, destined to be single and childless: unfulfilled and empty.
So here was the deal for both parties. Men offered women the opportunity to "marry" them, together with vows of fidelity and insistence on pre-marital virginity, and women offered men an extension of their mortal lives by their fathering of children within marriage, a risky deal for women. Hence, the need for men to offer women vows of protection and provision of house and home to sweeten the deal.
Now for many this implicit contract is too far removed from modern day concepts of meet, fall in love, marry, have kids, and whatever else then happens. It is far too pragmatic and lacking in spirituality.
It is not a romantic notion at all, but it's an arrangement that has allowed the human species to propogate.
Now along come gays and lesbians who do not wish to adhere to these contracts. Their reasons to marry have nothing to do with propogating the species, nor with giving themselves vague feelings of their lifelines being continued after their death.
Their desire for marriage might be said to be far purer in some respects. To choose to marry is not about raising children to carry on the family lineage, and their continuation of property ownership, including family businesses. Gay and lesbian advocates of marriage have put forward many reasons for their desire to marry, including economic, political, and philosophical reasons, to which psychologists may wish to add health benefits, as the APA has.
So when opponents to gay marriage argue that "marriage is only to be conducted between a man and a woman", it is not just based on religious teachings, but on fundamental and very ancient human rituals, beliefs and behaviours.
But in a world of overpopulation, where the advances of science can explain and control natural phenomena which religious teachings explain on faith, the need for children to be raised only in the context of marriage is questionable. If marriage is only about creating the crucible for child rearing, and is not the sole provence of a loving lifelong relationship, I am at a loss to fathom the intensity of opposition to gay marriage.
Given that marriage is an almost universal human phenomenon, most likely constructed by men primarily for men, yet sold to women as their domain of purpose, it's not surprising that something like gay marriage which challenges these constructions will cause deep yet irrational anger and resentment. Opponents of gay marriage then need to ask themselves the source of their anger rather than saying that such marriages debase, defile or dilute concepts of their own marriages. Of course, if you adopt a "gay is less than straight" philosophy, where you believe gayness is a choice preference rather than orientation, and where you believe that it is inherently abnormal or pathological, then you will not want to share in an exalted human endeavour as marriage has been constructed for fear of contamination; of making it less than something special.
And of course, by contemplating what gay marriage might mean, it calls to mind whatever contemporary deals heterosexual couples may have made in the construction of their lives, and how gay marriage harms those deals, by shining a light on them. This is how gay marriage is conceived of harming heterosexual marriage.
(Portions of this entry were informed by a recorded interview with surgeon and author Leonard Shlain, available via the Massive Change website here. To read more of his provocative ideas, visit his webpage and look for his book at Amazon.com.) |
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