Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
When I invited a friend to join me to see The Kids Are All Right, I sensed that he wasn’t persuaded by my description. It’s a satire about a lesbian couple whose teenage children go in search of their biological father. When found, Dad enters the picture and disrupts family relations. I thought my good friend might at least be persuaded by the presence of Annette Bening and Julianne Moore co-starring as the mid-life lesbians navigating the entry of a sensitive but testosterone fueled male into the geometry of their family configuration. No deal. I had to see the movie on my own.
I understood my friend’s hesitations. For those of us who came of age after Stonewall but before AIDS, gay liberation didn’t mean entering into middle-class institutions like marriage. In fact, the idea of marriage seemed foreign if not inimical to notions of sexual freedom.
Yet The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko’s rueful look at the blessings of gay/lesbian family life, is interesting for what it tells us about the way we live now. Well, the way some of the LGBT bourgeoisie do. And the truth is that gay men and lesbians who have children together by whatever route look shockingly like every other middle-class family. Tell this to the constipated right-wing moralizers who support DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act), which includes a roster of politicians who argue that same-sex marriage is an attack on the institution of the family and marriage itself.
Au contraire, Mary. Today, same-sex marriage is a mirror of the heterosexual version, with the exception that same-sex parents might raise their children to be tolerant of, and perhaps even welcoming to, people who are different in any way. This, happily, is true of some straight parents as well.
So it is galling to be on the side (at least on the principle of equality before the law) of same-sex marriage—only because too many rights attach to marriage which LGBT people miss out on: from rights of inheritance to Social Security benefits. It is galling to have to oppose an act of the 1990s which was passed by so-called upholders of family values. Might we conduct a survey of how many of the 342 in the House of Representatives and how many of the 85 in the Senate who voted for DOMA in 1996 had at least one divorce to their “credit,” how many were in fact serial monogamists, how many adulterers, how many closet cases, etc.? To say nothing of this same Public Law No. 104-199, 110 Stat. 2419 (DOMA in legal speak) being signed into law by none other than Bill Clinton, hardly a model citizen when it came to marital fidelity. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) Here are DOMA’s most crucial provisions:
1. No state (or other political subdivision within the United States) needs to treat a relationship between persons of the same sex as a marriage, even if the relationship is considered a marriage in another state. (DOMA, Section 2)
2. The federal government defines marriage as a legal union exclusively between one man and one woman. (DOMA, Section 3)
My own indifference to the issue of same-sex marriage was longstanding, and in many ways it was a response to the zeitgeist of my youth, when the Bloomsbury Group of the early 20th Century, Virginia Woolf chief among them, was being rediscovered. Having read Nigel Nicholson’s remarkable Portrait of a Marriage, which recounted the bohemian union of his queer parents Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West (one of Virginia’s inamorata), I could hardly have responded otherwise. If being gay meant you couldn’t marry, and if (straight) marriage meant a lifetime of compromises both social and sexual, then you had better marry for companionship and put sex in its proper place: outside the domestic setting.
Here is Nigel Nicholson in Portrait of a Marriage writing of his mother’s love for Violet Trefusis:
Now that I know everything I love her more, as my father did ... She was a rebel ... and though she did not know it, she fought for more than Violet. She fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything. Yes, she may have been mad, as she later said, but it was a magnificent folly. She may have been cruel, but it was a cruelty on a heroic scale. How can I despise the violence of such passion?
Let’s watch what happens next. Now that Judge Joseph L. Tauro of United States District Court in Boston has declared it unconstitutional for the federal government to discriminate against Massachusetts same-sex citizens who are legally married within that state, we find that the Obama administration is likely to appeal. Must it?
If it does, we can be sure that bastion of propriety, the Supreme Court, will take up the matter. Uh-oh. All bets are off.
Admit impediments.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
When I invited a friend to join me to see The Kids Are All Right, I sensed that he wasn’t persuaded by my description. It’s a satire about a lesbian couple whose teenage children go in search of their biological father. When found, Dad enters the picture and disrupts family relations. I thought my good friend might at least be persuaded by the presence of Annette Bening and Julianne Moore co-starring as the mid-life lesbians navigating the entry of a sensitive but testosterone fueled male into the geometry of their family configuration. No deal. I had to see the movie on my own.
I understood my friend’s hesitations. For those of us who came of age after Stonewall but before AIDS, gay liberation didn’t mean entering into middle-class institutions like marriage. In fact, the idea of marriage seemed foreign if not inimical to notions of sexual freedom.
Yet The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko’s rueful look at the blessings of gay/lesbian family life, is interesting for what it tells us about the way we live now. Well, the way some of the LGBT bourgeoisie do. And the truth is that gay men and lesbians who have children together by whatever route look shockingly like every other middle-class family. Tell this to the constipated right-wing moralizers who support DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act), which includes a roster of politicians who argue that same-sex marriage is an attack on the institution of the family and marriage itself.
Au contraire, Mary. Today, same-sex marriage is a mirror of the heterosexual version, with the exception that same-sex parents might raise their children to be tolerant of, and perhaps even welcoming to, people who are different in any way. This, happily, is true of some straight parents as well.
So it is galling to be on the side (at least on the principle of equality before the law) of same-sex marriage—only because too many rights attach to marriage which LGBT people miss out on: from rights of inheritance to Social Security benefits. It is galling to have to oppose an act of the 1990s which was passed by so-called upholders of family values. Might we conduct a survey of how many of the 342 in the House of Representatives and how many of the 85 in the Senate who voted for DOMA in 1996 had at least one divorce to their “credit,” how many were in fact serial monogamists, how many adulterers, how many closet cases, etc.? To say nothing of this same Public Law No. 104-199, 110 Stat. 2419 (DOMA in legal speak) being signed into law by none other than Bill Clinton, hardly a model citizen when it came to marital fidelity. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) Here are DOMA’s most crucial provisions:
1. No state (or other political subdivision within the United States) needs to treat a relationship between persons of the same sex as a marriage, even if the relationship is considered a marriage in another state. (DOMA, Section 2)
2. The federal government defines marriage as a legal union exclusively between one man and one woman. (DOMA, Section 3)
My own indifference to the issue of same-sex marriage was longstanding, and in many ways it was a response to the zeitgeist of my youth, when the Bloomsbury Group of the early 20th Century, Virginia Woolf chief among them, was being rediscovered. Having read Nigel Nicholson’s remarkable Portrait of a Marriage, which recounted the bohemian union of his queer parents Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West (one of Virginia’s inamorata), I could hardly have responded otherwise. If being gay meant you couldn’t marry, and if (straight) marriage meant a lifetime of compromises both social and sexual, then you had better marry for companionship and put sex in its proper place: outside the domestic setting.
Here is Nigel Nicholson in Portrait of a Marriage writing of his mother’s love for Violet Trefusis:
Now that I know everything I love her more, as my father did ... She was a rebel ... and though she did not know it, she fought for more than Violet. She fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything. Yes, she may have been mad, as she later said, but it was a magnificent folly. She may have been cruel, but it was a cruelty on a heroic scale. How can I despise the violence of such passion?
Let’s watch what happens next. Now that Judge Joseph L. Tauro of United States District Court in Boston has declared it unconstitutional for the federal government to discriminate against Massachusetts same-sex citizens who are legally married within that state, we find that the Obama administration is likely to appeal. Must it?
If it does, we can be sure that bastion of propriety, the Supreme Court, will take up the matter. Uh-oh. All bets are off.
In a perfect (or even just better!) world, government wouldn't be involved in the business of marriage (which would be an individual and private matter) and the state's role would be limited to granting certificates of civil union to gay and straight couples alike, ensuring everyone equal legal rights. If marriage is "sacred," what business is it of government in country where there is supposed to be separation of church and state?
ReplyDeleteYou are right, Roberta, but even granting certificates of civil union will involve the state to some extent. Marriage equality is a civil matter, and the LGBT community is not demanding religious institutions to bless same-sex unions. Of course, some people will only behappy with the sanction of their church/synagogue/mosque. That is a separate fight.
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree with you, Allen. My preference would be for the state to transfer all of the legal rights that now pertain to marriage to something called "civil unions," and to make that available to all adults, straight or gay. The thing called "marriage" could then be treated as a much more individual, private matter, separate from any legal consideration. Since there seems to be much less opposition to same-sex civil unions than to same-sex marriage, it makes sense. But then it is probably utopian to expect public policy to make sense!
ReplyDeleteYes-I've thought about the proximity of Century-21 and, as you say, the hedge fund managers. It seems the moneychangers rankle less than the temple this time.
ReplyDeleteRob J