Gay Marriage Sucks!
The recent decision by the California Supreme Court overturning a ban on gay marriage has, once again, thrust this issue into the malestrom of political debate, and, simultaneously, revived the sagging fortunes of groups on both sides.
On the liberal left, the gay marriage movement is stoking up its engines for a major push to legitimize–so they believe–homosexual relationships in a social as well as a civil sense, and make the final push for gay “equality.”
On the right, particularly the religious fundamentalist right, the scaremongering direct mail fundraisers are enjoying a major bonanza, frightening tens of thousands of little old ladies in Middle America to cough up $10, $20, and even $50 contributions to the Religious Right’s ongoing campaign to Save Marriage From Godless Queers.
Both sides are seriously deluded, albeit in different ways. Let’s start with the Godless Queers…
Marriage is all about children: otherwise, there is no real reason for it, and especially not in the modern world, where internet hook-ups, de facto polygamy, and rampant promiscuity are widely accepted. It is, in short, an economic institution, a financial framework for the bringing up of a new generation. Marriage is an agreement between two adults that they will, together, provide for the needs of their offspring, and, indeed, when the time comes, pass on their accumulated wealth.
This is not to say that childless marriages aren’t really marriages, or that all the emotional and psychological trappings of traditional marriage–monogamy, commitment, and, yes, love—are irrelevant. I am here talking about the civil institution of marriage, as it has evolved in the English-speaking world, and not the cultural phenomenon that has evolved over many millennia—something not created but rather co-opted by the State.
As Camille Paglia points out:
I think [gay marriage] is a flash point for antigay backlash…. That’s the problem: calling it a marriage. If you ask the working class guy on the street, ‘Do you believe in gay marriages?’ it makes him absolutely have a convulsion of revulsion. Marriage was traditionally meant for male and female. It was a bond for the raising of children, so it always had a procreative meaning too, and it has a long sacred tradition behind it. I hate any time that gay causes get mixed up with seeming to profane other people’s sacred tradition. The gay activist leadership has been totally clumsy about that. Rather than treating it in a serious way and saying ‘We respect the tradition of marriage,’ gay activism is associated with throwing balloons of blood at the steps of St. Patrick’s.
Pagilia is right. Marriage is not a civil institution but a religious-cultural tradition that the State has (so far) been forced to respect and recognize—and it is centered around procreation, which is not an issue most homosexuals have to deal with.
Which brings us to the central argument against gay marriage, which is that it is based on a heterosexual model of sexual and emotional relationships, one that just doesn’t fit the gay lifestyle. The whole idea of getting gays hitched is derivative of the central error of egalitarianism, the counterintuitive conception of human beings as being “equal” and, therefore, interchangeable—and therefore one-size-fits-all. Egalitarianism isn’t really a political ideology: it’s a religion, one quite capable of withstanding a sustained assault of clear evidence to the contrary.
I direct your attention to anecdotal yet telling evidence of this misconception by pointing out that, in the rush to the altar by many gay couples in California, the most prominent, and, I’ll bet, most numerous, were female couples. Women, of course, love the idea of marriage, and an old lesbian joke illustrates this penchant for connubial bliss:
What does a lesbian bring to a second date? —A moving van
The sequel to this knee-slapper, however, illustrates that the procreative principle works both ways: What does a lesbian bring to a third date? —A turkey baster ….
Lesbians can, and do, get pregnant: they raise children, thousands of whom are presently alive and kicking. In San Francisco, they make up a significant—and growing—part of the public school population. Lesbians, therefore, fit into the procreative model of marriage, even though they cannot reproduce without the passive participation of men who donate sperm. Gay men, on the other hand, are … men, and no man really wants to get married.
Promiscuity and its attendant attitudes go hand-in-hand with maleness: it’s our genetic and socially constructed legacy, imprinted on our very nature and invincible to the assaults of both politically correct feminists and puritans of the Right. Monogamy and maleness are opposites in a dichotomy: the idea of sexual fidelity is distinctively feminine, linked as it is with an overwhelming (and inherent) need for security and certainty – that is, the certainty that the father of her children will assist in their proper rearing. The collapse of this socio-sexual compact, which undergirds our civilization, is behind the inner city’s descent into barbarism, where roving bands of undisciplined fatherless males have been unleashed, wreaking havoc and filling the prisons.
Marriage, in the context of male homosexuality, isn’t just a contradiction: the very idea of two males getting “married” evokes such protest precisely because it parodies heterosexual unions. A parody, after all, is a take-off on the original, one that apes the form but denies or mocks its essence. This mockery is what the anti-gay marriage crowd bristles at—and rightly so.
Yet it isn’t just this threat of an antigay backlash, which Ms. Paglia rightly points to, that is the most objectionable aspect of the proposal to “legalize” gay marriage. The worst victims of the gay marriage proposal won’t be straights, in spite of the ridiculous cries that marriage will be “devalued,” and will therefore become less popular, if two queers are allowed to get hitched. The ones who will really be hurt by admission to the temple of Hera will be gay men.
With gay marriage comes the inevitable gay divorce—and, believe you me, it’s going to be ugly. If gay activists think that marriage is going to somehow legitimize homosexuality in the eyes of Middle America, then they have yet to imagine the new hit “reality tv” show, “Gay Divorce Court,” which will make the heterosexual version seem like a Sunday School picnic. Indeed, I predict that, given the nature of the male animal, the gay male divorce rate will soon outstrip the rate of new gay male marriages. Gay marriage—in the gay male community, that is—is prone to self-abolition.
This gay male aversion to marriage is prefigured in the rate of domestic partnerships—intended as a precursor of gay marriage—in urban gay ghettos. Even fewer will sign up for that trip to the altar, especially when it dawns on them that with the right to marry comes a few responsibilities, particularly of a financial nature.
This is where the propaganda of the right-wing anti-gay marriage movement goes completely off the rails: the alleged “threat” represented to marriage as an institution by the prospect of gay unions ranges from nil to nonexistent. The idea that gay people, given the opportunity, are going to rush to get married is a fantasy shared by both sides in this debate. But what about states where sexual infidelity is grounds for divorce? Lots of factors no one’s even considered will lead to the big fizzle of “gay marriage.”
Do gay guys really want to have half their incomes claimed by their spouses? With gay marriage comes gay alimony, and that is what is going to make “Gay Divorce Court” such a tawdry tale of twinks on the make and sugar daddies paying through the nose. Gay marriage is going to go out of style rather quickly as a whole series of high-profile divorce cases make their way through the courts.
The very phrase “gay marriage” is an oxymoron. Homosexuality, after all, is really all about the avoidance of marriage – and the responsibility of raising a family. It is the embrace of sensuality for its own sake, as an instrument of pure pleasure rather than procreation. Do gay guys really want to give up what is most attractive – to males, at any rate – about their recreational activities, the tremendous sense of freedom it implies?
Today’s gay activists are embarked on what is truly a futile mission, to make homosexuality seem “natural.” But they really ought to take their cues from their predecessors among the ancients, who took the opposite tack. In ancient Greece, philosophers debated the merits and demerits of homosexual behavior–although “gayness” was a concept unknown to them, thank the gods–and the defenders of this practice were, then as now, confronted with the argument that homosexuality is “unnatural.”
Pausanias, in Plato’s Symposium, answers that homosexuality is the “heavenly love” precisely because it is divorced from earthly carnality and centered around an idealized conception of beauty. It is purely aesthetic, and not at all procreative, that is, completely unnatural and artificial. To Pausanias, and his classical Greek comrades, this made it superior to the crassness of “the meaner sort of men,” exclusive hetereosexuals, who lacked the “higher” capacity to appreciate beauty in all its forms, including the male form.
Far from arguing that homosexuality was the equivalent of heterosexuality, the ancient advocates of same-sex love emphasized the great gulf that separates the two. Rather than aping heterosexuals and relentlessly lobbying for the “right” to marry, Plato’s crowd sought to distance themselves from the mundane and underscore their singularity. Pausanias argues that the choice of younger men over available women is indicative of a superior moral quality, evidence of a purity that defies and transcends biology. Homosexual love, he averred, represents an improvement over nature – which is, after all, the signal characteristic of human civilization.
To the gay activists of the modern era, with their dogma of biological determinism – the “gay gene—and their ingrained egalitarianism, such an argument is inconceivable. For them, there is no choice involved: they fervently believe they are genetically determined to engage in homosexual acts. In this view, sexual orientation is like gender and race. In the context of the society in which we live, this means that it is—or ought to be—illegal to “discriminate” on the basis of sexual orientation, in the same way and for the same reasons it is now a hate crime to consider matters of race, religion, and gender in the realm of housing, employment, and socio-economic relations in general.
This orthodoxy sits atop a mountain of pseudo-science mixed with moralizing, one that asserts—without convincing scientific evidence—that sexual “orientation” is genetically determined. It is the Left-liberal version of Lysenkoism, in which ideology determines political conclusions in advance of the facts (except that Lysenko, and his Stalinist sponsors, were expressing the leftist orthodoxy of the day that men could be engineered through the power of the State.)
The irony is that while most organizations of the Left (and Right) are allergic to the very notion of inheritable differences, the gay rights lobby sticks to a dogmatic genetic determinism that is otherwise relegated to the outer bounds of political incorrectness.
Aside from the lack of scientific evidence, common sense weighs in against this kind of crude genetic reductionism when we’re talking about an area so rife with subtlety, nuance—and variety as human sexuality. After all, what about bisexuals – are they genetic freaks, or are they just making different choices at different times in their lives?
The Kinsey Report, which was hailed by liberals at the time of its release – and damned by conservatives—showed that the great majority of homosexual activity takes place between men who identify as primarily heterosexual: their “gay” activities are furthermore limited to certain periods in their lives. The category of exclusive homosexuals was in the low single digits—although, again, sexual behavior was shown to change over time – another powerful argument against the theory of sexual “orientation,” which insists on rigid allegiance to certain behaviors.
And in the end, genetics is merely a ploy. The entire gay rights movement is based on the most unattractive, indeed pathetic motive imaginable—the need for acceptance.
A true libertarian position on gay marriage is very simple: libertarians seek to prevent the incursion of the State into private affairs. This means that any libertarian worthy of the name must oppose “legalizing” the very real marriages that do exist in the gay community, albeit not in a form most “straights” would find either familiar or acceptable.
The State, after all, has already made a strenuous and largely successful effort to regulate and intervene in the natural life of families, as well as the relations between women and men—the advent of gay marriage would mean extending the reach of the State over the private lives of individuals. Surely no libertarian could agree to such a thing, and would certainly do everything to oppose it.
Yet all sorts of alleged “libertarians” and fellow travelers simply assume that support for gay marriage—and, indeed, for the homosexual lifestyle—is a central principle of libertarianism. It simply isn’t so.
Libertarianism is only a political and economic theory. It has nothing to say whatever about what “lifestyle” a person chooses or the subject of quantum physics: it isn’t an all-embracing moral-metaphysical system that purports to explain everything and has a prescription for living one’s life. Libertarians neither endorse nor damn homosexuals and homosexuality: we simply say that sexual activities between consenting adults are no business of the State – period.
That old leftist slogan, “the personal is the political,” expresses the supremely anti-libertarian instinct that today politicizes even the most intimate social interactions. The irony is that this serves, in turn, to de-sexualize the behavior it seeks to legitimize. As George Orwell put it: politics is merely sex gone sour. In the end, the campaign to “legitimize” homosexuality could very well end up reducing its appeal, and, in a kind of rough justice, reducing the number of homosexuals.
It used to be that the gay world was a kind of underground club, the sort with a big brawny doorman who looked you up and down real good before he let you in the door. Nowadays, just anyone can just waltz right in, without so much as a “by your leave.” It’s all part of a general leveling trend, the tendency toward ordinariness and uniformity that characterizes modern life.
Ostensible conservatives such as Andrew Sullivan and Bruce Bawer, who jumped on the gay marriage bandwagon early on, make a point of emphasizing this ordinariness, pushing the meme that gays are just like straights – only their wedding cakes have same-sex figurines atop them.
In yet another irony, it looks like the gay “liberation” movement has turned into its opposite. Instead of rebelling against the bourgeois social order, and asserting and celebrating their “liberation” from legalistic and moral norms, gay activists seek to reinforce those norms by “broadening” them. What started out as a movement for “gay liberation” has turned into a campaign to make gay society as restrictive of sexuality (particularly male sexuality) as the straight world – and even more boring.
Is nothing sacred anymore? It used to be that the American State had invaded every other aspect of American life: there was hardly a nook or a cranny left unoccupied by our army of bureaucrats, lawyers, judges, and elected politicians. The gay subculture was once largely outside of this system, and therefore homosexuals enjoyed enormous freedom and flexibility in their personal lives, a happy condition that marriage – and any form of state intervention—invariably ends. Which is precisely why gay marriage will prove to be just as unpopular in the gay male community as it is in the heart of the Bible belt, albeit for wildly different reasons.
Comments
This is an excellent article. It reminds me of what Elizabeth Taylor (who ought to know something about marriage!) is purported to have said about “gay marriage”: “Well, I can’t understand why they’d want it; marriage is a vastly over-rated institution.”
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Your post makes no sense as there are millions of gay male couples who are committed and loving and want to raise children whether by adoption or through some arrangement whereas they are the biological kids.
Gay couples are entitled to the over 1,800 rights/benefits that come along with civil marriage.
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“No man really wants to get married.” Um, really? There must be something wrong with the men I know, then… There are totally legitimate reasons to oppose gay marriage, but some outdated notion that straight couples only commit because women force the issue is more insulting to MEN than anyone else.
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Ha! Once more I am reminded why I have made antiwar.com and now Taki’s Magazine the top of my morning reading list.
I’ve been reading Mr. Raimondo’s articles for, good gracious, almost ten years now. While the reading isn’t always pleasant (he does write a goodly bit about war, you know), it is always time well spent.
Good post, sir!
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“Your post makes no sense because I can’t wrap my pea brain around it.”
Remarks like that remind me of why hatred was Murray Rothbard’s muse. Excellent article.
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Gay marriage is like kosher pork.
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You may have read this before; if so please forgive me. I understand that, in France, Israel, and perhaps other nations, marriage is a religious, spiritual, and romantic relationship established by a minister, priest, rabbi, mullah, or other person of the cloth. It is a relationship in the sight of God, and it has no legal effect. A civil union is a legal contract between consenting parties, solemnized at a city hall, court house, or maybe a justice of the peace’s parlor or study, which provides certain specified benefits and responsibilities the parties assume by forming the union. This is just the sort of separation of church and state the United State should have but doesn’t.
It’s nobody else’s business whether I wish to marry a male, female, or Francis the talking mule if the other party is of sound mind and is agreeable. If gays wish to form a contract relationship, that’s their business. If they can find a person of the cloth to give it a religious or spiritual dimension, fine. I really don’t believe that God hates fags or wishes to discriminate against them. What they wish to do is their business as long as I don’t have to watch.
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This essay is studded with wonderful insights, such as the explanation for why lesbians
are far more likely to get married, if they can, than male homosexuals. The description
of homosexual unions as a solemn parody of marriage is a truly memorable phrase.
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“This is where the propaganda of the right-wing anti-gay marriage movement goes completely off the rails: the alleged “threat” represented to marriage as an institution by the prospect of gay unions ranges from nil to nonexistent”
You later blast government intrusion into every “nook and cranny.” Don’t you see how same-sex marriage and anti-discrimination attitudes will further confuse and “queer” marriage? We already face the odd euphemism “partner” when we mean spouse. Children will be even more strongly educated to think all forms of cohabitation, married or not, are acceptable.
Further, heterosexual men, no matter how tolerant, tend to bow out of arenas embraced by gay men. “Straight flight” is not an unreasonable prediction. For every drama and sitcom where the married gay couple is stereotypically depicted as ideal and more virtuous than the straights, there will likely be a marginal impact on attraction to marriage unless the man decides to forgo the television entirely.
Also your depiction of males as lusty profligates is somewhat cliched and misleading. The average straight man is less promiscious than the average gay man.
Besides, ask a faithful husband who just discovered his wife’s infidelity whether men or women are randier. Many societies have viewed women as the sex more prone to destructive lust.
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Always interesting to read Mr. Raimondo’s take on the whole deal - however he probably knows his views are not considered the norm in the ‘gay rights community’.
You know Mr. Raimondo - I lived in San Fran for several years, and I was surprised at the amount of gay men who were otherwise conservative - sort of the opposite of the propaganda we’re taught.
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Yes, if you want to understand the nature of male and female sexuality, unaffected by the opposite sex, study and observe the behavior of homosexuals and lesbians.
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Kevin Jones must be a “masculist” or MRA. Yes, women are more salacious and predatory than men. They’re also more violent, of course, and “husband-battering” is a worse crime than wife-beating. And the reason that heterosexual men are less promiscuous than homosexuals has nothing to do with the distinct sexuality of women and its civilizing influence on men.
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So what really happened Justin?
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Lesbians: We do not know what horrors Heather’s two mommies will bring to the world. But it is certain that a child is entitles to a mother and a father.
Homosexuals have absolutely no interest in procreation. They are always on the prowl for new partners, the younger the better. Giving two homosexuals a small boy to care for is like giving two lions a lamb.
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Kevin Jones is absolutely correct.
Straight flight already happens as gays colonize more and more public space. Here in NY, I frequent a health club a few miles from my house beacuse the ones nearby are essentially crusing spots. It is altogether normal for straight men to have a viceral, pre-rational aversion to gay men, especially the hysterical queens across urbania.
The data coming out of Britain and Norway indicates marriage rates are down across the board, a trend that predates gay marriage but is obviously made all the worse by its acceptance. Marriage never has been and will never be a purely private matter.
One issue that is always ignored is what open acceptance of homosexuality does to male friendship, especially among teenagers. The perversion is assumed as normal, and any sign of affection between men is now a little joke of the “you know what that’s about” variety. Coupled with the emotional arrested development common among gay men, life increasingly resembles one big penis joke. Gay divorce court - how camp, how cute, how John Waters...how infantile.
For an interesting article on male friendship in light of the gay pride ethos, see below.
http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=18-07-021-f
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Sebastian wtote: “One issue that is always ignored is what open acceptance of homosexuality does to male friendship, especially among teenagers.”
Excellent article, Justin. The “gay lifestyle” is really not much different from the
heterosexual hedonist “Playboy Philosophy” or the “Cosmo Magazine/Sex in the City” lifestyles:
it is the devaluation of sex into a form of materialistic consumerism. The very idea makes
a mockery of human intimacy. Consequently, it has nothing to do with the ancient ideal
of “pure” love between males, which often as not non-sexual.
I would agree with Sebastian that a unmentioned victim of the cultural pre-occupation with
the “gay” ethos is adolescent and teenage boys. Any intimacy or close friendship, any
touching invites immediate accusations of being homosexual. Adolescent boys who develop
perfectly innocent--and often natural---attachments to older guys are told that this means
they were “born gay”, and are “sissies”...and worse. Often they are beat up and harrassed.
They enter the “gay lifestyle”, and spend the rest of their lives trying to reconcile their
sensitive natures with the superficiality and lack of intimacy in the hedonistic “gay
lifestyle”. The old idea of “it’s just a phase” is now reversed, and they are told their
close attachments in youth now makes them “born gay”.
Justin, one thing I wished you mentioned in your article was the legal “alternatives” to
marriage available to gays/lesbians---as well as everyone else---in contract law. Gay men
in the AIDs crisis developed and made legit legal contracts like Power of Attorney, Living
Wills, co-habitation agreements, and a host of other legal precedents that truely offered
a “libertarian"--ie marriage outside of the state---alternatives to marriage.
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Not original, this, but it all comes down to the truth
that all orifices are not created equal.
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After sleeping on and then rereading Justin’s passionate oration, all I can say is an old bit of doggerel:
Hoggamus higgamus
Men are polygamous,
Higgamus hoggamus
Women monogamous.
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Thoughtfull commentary, as usual. I disagree with La Paglia when she writes ‘I hate any time that gay causes get mixed up with seeming to profane other people’s sacred tradition. The gay activist leadership has been totally clumsy about that.’ To the contrary, I believe than the ‘movement’ is all about offending western institions than have excluded or persecuted homosexuals. In-your-face things like ‘pride’ parades that feature hairy, flabby men in various stages of undress, are meant to shock the status quo, not to endear them to us. In my city, the homosexual movement gets public funding to hold these events, complete with street closures of main roads, and taxpayer funded police protection to boot. Cumsy? Hamfisted? Well thought out, I would say.
@SK, a look at the FBI unified crime stats concerning domestic violence, and who precipitates it, might interst you.
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How disappointing: a Raimondo article about gay marriage, referencing Andrew Sullivan, without a mention of how muscular and titillating his gym-honed body is.
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What a cracker of an article this is! I shall share this one with my students. You have been one of the most consistently worth reading commentators on the Internet for several years in my view, Mr Raimondo,and long may you remain so!
“Gay men, on the other hand, are … men, and no man really wants to get married.”
That cracked me up! ROFL
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I don’t get the whole ideological fuss.
In homosexual relations there is a constellation of persons whose relation requires, if they wish so, an adequate legal form to properly address the inevitable implications of a domestic community and to allow for a fair solution under the law in case of conflict. It is a reality, and it has thus to be addressed. To leave that unregulated serves no one.
So just factor out everything involved with raising children and related privileges, call it civil union, a legal institute sui generis, and distinct from marriage, and begone with it.
That, of course doesn’t specifically address the situations of lesbian couples raising children. But I guess there, the existing rules about allocating the child to the biological mother would probably suffice.
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Very nice piece, Mr. Raimondo.
I would add that the picture is even more difficult when it comes to whether a (gay) marriage in one state is a contract that will be honored in all states.
No question that marriage is a legal institution which the 10th amendment clearly defines as a state matter. Many states are already regulating against gay marriage.
A mess, indeed!
JP Straley
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“Egalitarianism” understood as the idea that everyone should be exactly equal is of course nonsense, and surely lies behind lots of nonsense today, including “gay marriage” as instituted by the state. (But if some churches want to marry gay couples they should have the right to do so. Problems arise, because the theme is intertwined with the subject of inheritance (of material goods, fortunes) etc.)
Marx never believed in egalitarianism nor babbled about “new men” etc. That’s exactly why he described his vision of communism as a society where the differences between humans are accepted and does not create submission of one man under another. His problem is never to have understood that this can only be an ideal.
I think what you overlook is that there are limits to what amounts of economic inequality can exist in a society without resulting in the destruction of that society and it’s degeneration into barbarism. The old greeco-roman historian Polybios fx. discussed this. Lots of billionaires today live like they were fascist uebermenschen, their “freedom” is footed upon the suppresion of lots of human beings’ freedom of expression etc. I think we are fast approaching those limits to inequality today (where around forty people owns fortunes equal to the poorer half of the nation states on this globe), and that all the liberal babbling about “rights” is just a facade meant to cover for the enormous inequalities within the “democratic” “party” fx. between hyperbillionaires like mr. Soros deciding over billions of peoples’ lives like modern pharaos and little people living under the threat of being destroyed by pharaonic speculators like Soros.
Today it makes no meaning to speak of any society. The dominance of sheer psychopaths have again reached the levels we know from the barbarian times of Stalin, Hitler and their likes. With figures like Bush II or mr. desPutin etc. we are again approaching modern expressions of the phenomenon known from the antiquiety under names like Nero and Caligula. The old greeks sought to warn against these things in myths like the one about king Midas.
Humanity will probably never find any kind of stable situation, most facts point to the conclusion that humanity is incapable of solving it’s internal conflicts and will finally end up by destroying itself for sheer greed and by destroying it’s own natural environment and inner cohesion. That conclusion does of course not fit the political theorists, who are all so to speak by definition trying to collect political capital by creating illusions and simulacrums. But their creations are in general bad litterature proving the point that the art of lying is degenerating.
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The Kinsey Report, which was hailed by liberals at the time of its release – and damned by conservatives—showed that the great majority of homosexual activity takes place between men who identify as primarilyrimarily primarily heterosexual
Justin, you are a bad, bad boy for bringing this up. Anyway, multi-gender polygamy is th
e only answer. And if it was up to me, I would marry my dog (Shirley) and my cats in addition to my wife and my boyfriend. Frankly, I like being married. I’ll marry all comers, any weight, size or gender
der. Sure, there are responsibilities, but they don’t need to be crushing, besides, I split them among the various parties.
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Personal attacks, ethnic slurs, the riding of hobby horses and the beating of dead ones will be deleted as soon as they are detected by our small but alert staff.
Oh. That pretty much cuts me out. Sorry for intruding.
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This is one of the most ridiculous pieces of tripe I have ever read. Men are nothing but sex-seeking hedonists, women want nothing more than babies and security. Jesus. What tripe. Gay marriage won’t work because men can’t be monogamous? Then how can heterosexual marriage work if men can’t be monogamous? Haven’t you ever known men who actually WANTED to be fathers? Haven’t you ever known women who were mothers who really didn’t like being mothers? There is not one word of truth in this piece of garbage. It is nothing but a series of stereotypes and caricatures. He rails against “crude genetic reductionism” then he bathes in it with all his talk of male lust and female security. It’s all bullshit. I live in San Francisco; I’ve lived here for 30 years. This does not match the people and the relationships I’ve seen around me every day for 3 decades.
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Homosexuality can be seen as a kind of intrinsic-instinctive selfdefense by the human species agaist itself and it’s overwhelming of the globe, if we accept the biological fact that homosexuals can’t breed (but of course there now is another hysterical movement claiming that it’s a “human right” to have babies. Probably these consumerists (the only living ideology today is consumerism = childishness with hubris) also think that it’s a “human right” to escape the laws of nature. Fx. spanish truck drivers are on strike, seemingly thinking that their strike will boost the amount of oil left in the ground. It sure will not, as it will not stop the unstoppable series of catastrophic events coupled with global warming.
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Tom wood and his ilk either fail to understand or refuse to acknowledge the differences between groups and individuals, here in regard to males and females, and thus demonize anyone who does so.
It’s true that millions of men want to be fathers and millions of women don’t want to be mothers, but that doesn’t mean that men as a group are as maternal and nurturant as women. Moreover, no matter how many men want to be fathers in numbers and percentages, few want to be fathers in the same way as women want to be mothers. Some women are 6’4” and some men are 5’4”, but men on average are half a foot taller than women. Some women are stronger than some men, but men on average are almost twice as stong as women in the upper body. Individual women commit murders and robberies and aggravated assaults, but men on average are roughly ten times more likely to commit murder and robbery and aggravated assault.
Men and women are innately different in profound and significant ways. There are absolute sex differences -e.g.,men have penises and women vaginas and only women get pregnant- and generic differences, physically and psychologically. And exceptions don’t negate the reality and importance of generic differences.
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Mr. Raimondo, this is a wonderful article. It elegantly expresses the reasons why, as a transgender woman, I cannot support the fight for gay marriage and why I have more and more trouble in identifying myself as a feminist, a label I once wore proudly.
What that means is that any sort of activism has all but ended for me. You see, one of the unwritten rules of LGBT activism is that you unquestioningly support gay marriage. That fight will be the Titanic of the LGBT movement, and I don’t want to be on a ship that I know is going down.
And, one of the unwritten rules of being a feminist seems to be acceptance of the idea that women want the same things men want. Having been on both sides, so to speak, I know that it’s not the state of affairs.
Of course I don’t think gays should go back in the closet or that women should be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. But if you don’t subscribe to the shibboleths du jour of the LGBT and feminist movements, those are beliefs people impute to you.
In my opinion, governments should not be involved in any way in personal relationships. Legislative bodies have no right to decide who is a couple and to what they’re entitled, any more than they should be doling out those entitlements. Of course, the state of the state (smaller) I wish will not come about unless we actually have a country in which the church is seperated from the state and in which we don’t have a corporate welfare/warfare state.
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The main thing right-wing Christians are getting wrong here is that homosexual marriage won’t destroy marriage. It will simply be finished off, after decades of soaring divorce rates, a phenomenon that has had nothing to do with the increase in gay visibility. Heterosexuals need no help whatsoever from gay rights activists in destroying an institution that the state now has a keen interest in tearing apart. How many divorce lawyers, divorce judges, and child protection services get their livelihoods from the destruction of the family? Mr. Raimondo rightly points out that the state is the real culprit in the end of this, the greatest institution in Western Culture.
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It wasn’t until after my own experience in the so called ‘family courts’ that I realized that state sanctioned marriage is a three way contract with the state as the third party. The state makes money at the beginning and at the end.
Those who most vociferously lament the fate of marriage in our society are looking at the wrong culprit when they should be looking in the mirror. The state needs to be removed from the marriage and divorce business. Those who pine away for state sanctioned exclusivity in such matters need to be silenced.
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First, Justin, thanks for the great essay! You seldom let me down! There are very few out there today who address gay marriage from this POV--or at least have the nerve to--and I’m so glad you have. I hold both the “progressive” and Biblical American blather gay marriage with equal contempt.
Geoographer opined:
“...homosexuals can’t breed (but of course there now is another hysterical movement claiming that it’s a “human right” to have babies. Probably these consumerists (the only living ideology today is consumerism = childishness with hubris) also think that it’s a “human right” to escape the laws of nature.”
You are correct, but I’ll fill in the blanks a little.
American culture promotes baybee consumerism, especially amongst women, but men are not immune from the siren call. Advertising,the media, churches, employers, peer pressure all teach that without a baybee you are incomplete. There is something intrinsically wrong with you. God is punishing you. Why does He let that 15 year old neighborhood slut have a baybee when I can’t. Or as Rosie O’Donnell has told adopted kids, “God put you in the wrong tummy and now I have to fix God’s mistake.” (can I make this up?) Maury’s “Who’s The Daddy” shows must drive them over the brink.
The adoption and hightech repro industries play on this constructed “need” and in the process reap millions if not billions of dollars from the pocketbooks of wannabe parents.
The discourse on the human “right” to have babies originated with desperate baybee-hungry infertiles who argue that they have a “right” (nay a Constitutional right, sometimes!) to have children. These children can be someone else’s through adoption or their “own” (more or less) through all manner of machocistic expensive hightech repro procedures--anything from turkey baster therapy to sperm spinning to embryo implantation with little thought to the consequences their entitlement has on the children they acquire or the ethics involved.
Marriage and children is a heterosexual model and queerness is not. I’ve never known a queer who wants to be married or to be a parent. But I know plenty of fit-in GLBT people who do. The difference is political, sociological, and aesthetic. Marriage and children in the US are the keystone of “normality.” Those of us, straight or queer who are husbandless/wifeless and/or childfree by choice are considered transgressive and selfish. How refusing to acquire something you don’t want is selfish has never been explained.
The current obsession with gays and lesbians with adoption and artificial reproduction is an outgrowth of the well-in-place hetero model of entitlement. I don’t know how to stop this silliness outside of “teaching by example.” People need to know, from an early age that there is nothing wrong with not having children; that you can have a great life without them. No doubt some of our devout contributors here will disagree.
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I was brought up in the Catholic Church where marriage is one of their sacraments. If we separate church and state, it would seem that the state should have NO involvement in marriage.
But all sexual proclivities or sexual orientation aside, all people should be able to have contractual relationships such as are afforded married couples.
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I’ve tapped men, women and watched lots of television. Libertarians, it seems, would rather own homes and pay a flat tax than screw anyone. And Justin, you’re kinda cute. Might have to sick my brother on you (and he’s a priest!)
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Other than a few predatory lawyers, the rest of us don’t care about the legal problems of the homosexual union pass through rights to the partner. Myself as most, are on the side of the dearly departed’s legal wishes.
As Raimondo says, the libertarian view is not about to make judgement on the arrangements.
Hick libertarians like me have a very strong adverse reaction to the taxes levied for the benefit of the so called “domestic partners”.
The right and egalitarian thing to do is to pay benefits for the public primary employee only.
Of course the best way is to behead the parasite class. Few will go along with that, so you will post interminably on the next usurpation of the parasite class.
Keep up the posts, but do a special when ground beef goes over ten dollars a pound.
Goy sidetracked?
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What a mess on the above.
Private arrangements must be respected by the courts that really want to strip all passed on assets for themselves.
The last bastion of the dead notion of a “living wage” seems to be in the public sector employees.
What is so hard about drawing up laws for passing along assets? What is so hard about simplifying the rights of a conjugal partner?
None of this is difficult unless the lawyer class and the gombit maggots can drag it out and tack on all sorts of other “rights” that are detrimental to the conventionals that rarely invoke gombit, or even have any contact with the thieves.
All of this is another ploy to undermine common law and religious custom to strenghthen the central state.
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I read an article a good number of years ago suggesting giving homosexuals the right to marry and let them enjoy the full joy of all the problems that come with it, mainly divorce. The author next suggested making the reversal of the law just as difficult as having it approved, as in “be careful what you wish for...”
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HaHaHa, turd burgulars with delusions of gender too.
Symptoms are what they really are.
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Even Palglia notes the link between procreation and marriage.
“Raising Children”? Either through some Frankenstein like experiment or by obtaining one on the market? That is not procreation. And neither is whatever legal fiction coupling two people of the same sex.
What I do object to with “domestic partner” laws is that they only apply to Homosexuals. There are a number of poor people I know, some at my church, some friends who do not have health insurance and I am single. I don’t have any brother or sister, but that would be another example. But I can’t add someone who might need it on to my health insurance unless they are my spouse or domestic partner. I would not object if whatever benefit could be to anyone I name.
Ah, but now that gay marriage is available in CA, they can repeal all the Domsetic Partnership laws!
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Just a quick point, before easy divorce, women were dependant on men. Today most divorces are initiated by women. Most are seeking either richer men or a new sex partner. The other point is that men were content with marriage before the no-fault divorce. Married men had stature and power in the old days. No employer wanted too many single guys. They were considered immature and undependable. Now married men have neither. Of course, society was so much better before easy divorce, especially given the problems that fatherless children has given us in the black community. The real problem may not be gay marriage, it is easy divorce and women’s independence. They want both to be single and free but have children too, and mostly at taxpayer expense now. Better for society to find a solution for the collapse of the heterosexual family than fight the issue of homosexual marriage, which they will soon learn has a high cost. Homosexual alimony, can’t wait for that one. Will serve them right.
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My husband and I will be celebrating our 7th anniversary in just a few days. Justin speaks the truth with regard to leftist gays disliking the notion of gay marriage. I would say they hate it almost more than the right. A couple of gay friends even refused to go to our ceremony. These few gay dissenters were all older people. We have found there to be a huge generational divide on this issue amongst our gay friends.
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If the highs and lows of marriage are good enough for heterosexuals to experience then who has the right to deny the experience, with all that it entails. Two minor points: the term “gay lifestyle” means as little as “straight lifestyle” (nothing) and unless meant as a pun “malestrom” should be maelstrom. This is an interesting topic as it brings to the surface the many generalisations and stereotypes that persist in relation to males and females, gays and straights and the political left and right. They ignore the realities and attempt to conform and suppress individuality.
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I agree with Tony’s comments above. Also, there are some clearly bigoted and hateful
comments posted here that I am surprised and disappointed to see on this usually high
brow site. As a “straight” libertarian who normally agrees with Justin, I take issue
with his post here. In addition to blatant stereotyping and generalizations, he is
imposing his own lifestyle preferences on others. If he doesnt want to marry, thats
great. Many heterosexuals (and yes, even some women) dont marry. But the deny the
right to even have marriage as an option (with full equal economic and legal rights,
which yes may involve legal proceedings at some point) to gays is nothing more than
discrimination and bigotry. The fact that he is gay doesnt immunize Raimondo from
criticism. He does not speak for a majority, and certainly not for all, gay people.
His essay was uncharacteristically poorly written, full of antagonistic, personal prejudices (against
gay males who choose a different lifestyle than he has chosen), spiteful and without
logic. Libertarians should stand for equal justice and civil rights. Taking the state
out of marriage and making it a private contractual matter for ALL people is a different
matter entirely, and while I agree that this is the true, ulimate libertarian position, i
it does not justify state sponsored discrimination against an entire class of Americans
to humor a bunch of homophobes, gay bashers and right wing religious nuts.
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