Conservative Queer Theorists Against Gay Marriage: Bad Acronym, Good Idea
In the seventies, when the activist Left was calling marriage a form of soft slavery and rallying behind no-fault divorce, conservatives very cannily played feminism against itself, making the argument that weakening marriage would be bad for women. (It was.) As gay marriage becomes more and more of a live option, conservatives can, I think, get analogous mileage out of using queer theory in the argument against gay marriage.
Queer theorists have spent decades’ worth of time and ink defending the idea that homosexuality is its own kind of love with its own mythology, rules, virtues and pitfalls, rather than a defective form of heterosexual love, a variation on the natural and normal. In the fight for the language of difference over the language of defect, any attempt to apply the deeply gendered terms of marriage to homosexuality would be a step backwards.
When erotic metaphors pop up in the Western canon, they aren’t always gendered—I’m thinking in particular of the Greek idea of pedagogy, Romantic analogies between erotic desire and artistic appreciation, and even Freudian Eros and Thanatos. On the other hand, marriage metaphors, from Israel-as-adulterous-bride in the Old Testament to the Christian motif of Christ-as-bridegroom, have always depended on one party being the husband and one being the wife. (This doesn’t mean that the tradition of marriage couldn’t become ungendered, only that it would be radically revolutionary to do so; there are separate arguments for why such a development would be a bad idea, including but not limited to the fact that making romantic love’s definitive institution “unisex” would make an exclusive preference for men seem about as meaningful an exclusive preference for blondes.)
Committed homosexual relationships will always exist—if there’s one thing conservatives can learn from people like John Boswell and George Chauncey, it’s that the gay community will never disappear; if there’s another, it’s that even those of us who hold to orthodox Christian views on the matter of homosexuality shouldn’t necessarily want it to—but trying to shoehorn these relationships into one of the most heteronormative institutions ever invented would only be a setback for anyone who prefers to think of homosexuality as a perfect version of itself rather than an imperfect version of something else.
Comments
“Romantic analogies between erotic
desire and artistic appreciation”
I can’t think of anything more
destructive to the homosexual
lifestyle than marriage.
All that remains to be seen is
what the queer eye will be
wearing in divorce court.
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John Boswell’s research on the “brother-making” ceremony is bogus. What exactly are
we supposed to learn from shoddy, agenda-ridden research?
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Healthy cultures through history have had homosexuals, but this does not mean that they had a “gay community,” which implies an organized subculture. I look forward to making sodomy illegal again and smashing the “gay” culture of death.
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Mr Schmidt has it right. Miss Rittelmeyer, I see your point, but I think you are being far too generous. Surely the sodomites contradict themselves in this current revolutionary effort, as you aptly point out. But do we really need to adopt some of their arguments and present our intent as an effort ‘to protect their tradition,’ as it were, of free-love to defeat them ? It seems a bit disingenuous.
Either we support marriage because it is right and because the traditional family is the basis for all government and the social order, or we support categorised institutions for the sake of tradition itself. But love for tradition must be married to the soil in which a given tradition grew and blossomed; otherwise, it becomes a meaningless attachment to the status quo. Defending the traditional institutions, therefore, is praiseworthy precisely because they developed from Christian civilisation and the attendant prejudices. The defense of Christian civilisation is good enough cause to oppose this attempt of the sexually perverse to bury another aspect of our beautiful ancient customs and institutions that outgrew from the Truth itself.
Revolutionaries, whether they be philosophical, political, or sexual (moral), are enemies to the established order and sovereignty always and everywhere. That is what makes them revolutionaries; what makes their ideas poisonous and worthy of contempt; and what makes them trash.
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“Revolutionaries, whether they be philosophical, political, or sexual (moral), are enemies to the established order and sovereignty always and everywhere. That is what makes them revolutionaries; what makes their ideas poisonous and worthy of contempt; and what makes them trash.”
Charles, would you defend the established order against any alternative vision of society no matter what either vision looked like? It seems to me that there is no point in defending a society so vehemently if there is any aspect that we can still perfect about it. As such, revolutionaries have their place in alerting us to possible defects of our given society. And that goes for sexual revolutionaries as much as any other kind.
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