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While referencing Utah’s dismally low same-sex marriage acceptance, Em & Lo quipped

Apparently polygamous marriages are okay, but only 22% of the state agrees with gay marriage.

They said it here.

This is actually a pretty not-unreasonable snark based on a non-illogical syllogism: broader society tends to brand both homosexual and group marriages as deviant, and defenders of the “between a man and a woman” standard see permitting gay marriage as a slippery slope gateway to polygamy, (overwhelmingly so!) therefore would-be practitioners of one should be supportive of the other.

I’m going to do a little U-Turn on that position and say that while it’s a perfectly reasonable line of thought it’s also almost completely mistaken: same-sex marriage and Utah-style polygamy couldn’t possibly, possibly be more different. In fact public disapproval is the only thing they have in common!

First of all let’s clear up one other minor misunderstanding. Long-term popular public opinion, as collated, for instance, in the egregiously cis-centric Purity Tests that emerged during the dawn of the networked-computer era, assume that either homosexual or multiple-partner experiences are fetishistic, “kinky,” perverted, or otherwise a departure from “vanilla” normalcy. The first obvious problem being that the vast majority of LGBT community members are as vanilla as cafeteria pudding*. And contrary to any possible myths or fantasies, religious polygamists are just as likely as religious monogamists to have a “for reproduction only” approach to sex. Point being that popular culture’s fantasies of deviancy or licentiousness notwithstanding, actual average gay or polygamist individuals don’t consider themselves “kinky” at all.

But to get to my main point, I think the biggest reason gay marriage is least tolerated in areas that would most tolerate historically polygamous marriage isn’t so much homophobia (though there’s obviously that) but a complete and diametric understanding of the purpose of marriage and the functional roles spouses inside of marriage.

The essence of gay marriage is the love in the subtitle of Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Whereas the essence of historic polygamy, especially religious polygamy in the American inter-mountain west, was (and, where still practiced, is) the acquisition, consolidation, or transfer of property, wealth, or obligations between (pretty much exclusively male) heads of families.

For traditionalists, the way two men would exchange property or obligation would be to do a standard business deal or, if they’re a little more old-fashioned, to arrange a marriage between subordinate family members. And for traditionalists, who historically believed women have no autonomous legal, personal, or property rights, letting two marry is as pointless as letting a man’s cattle marry his house.

Meanwhile I think you’d have to look long and hard to find many same-sex couples who want to marry for reasons larger than to legally and socially cement their personal relationships with each other.

This is not to say that polygamists don’t value love for each other, nor that same-sex couples don’t value tax breaks, powers of attorney, and succession of estates. But it is to say those aren’t the essences of the respective forms of marriage.

So. I think the real question isn’t so much why Utah, with its tradition of polygamy, is so antagonistic to same-sex marriage: the purposes are so diametrically opposed it should be no surprise at all. The real question might instead be whether same-sex couples would be similarly antagonistic to efforts to legalize Utah-style patriarchal, property-based polygamy.

My guess would be yes, same-sex couples would probably be particularly antagonistic. All the more reason, then, not to be surprised that same-sex marriage is least popular in Utah.

Just sayin’

* Quentin Crisp’s flamboyant visibility notwithstanding, for instance, there are far more gay men like the quiet “marines, scaffolders, and rugby players“ he partnered with.

Echidne of the Snakes, riffing on anti-feminist angst over women’s armpits, says something deep and true about what the “shaving” wars say about the effort required to construct gender from the mostly-undifferentiated material of corporeal humanity.

I would love to stop discussing the “to shave or not” topic in feminist circles and to start focusing more on what the ridiculing opposition is really saying. Just think about it for a few seconds. Their message is that it is not nature that defines what a woman is, but they, the namers and deciders. And they have decided that a woman in this culture should be without body hair but with very large and perky breasts and basically no hips. It is not some historical or theological concept of womanliness but a purely cultural one, and it is based on the accentuation of gender differences, with a few cultural quirks thrown in.

I see an analogous case in the discussion about cognitive differences between men and women. The anti-feminist point is always to try to make women and men into two quite different species, two “opposite sexes” as the saying goes, whereas the evidence I’ve studied and my life experiences all suggest that men and women are like two overlapping Venn diagrams in almost everything. Partly different and partly the same. This messiness, like armpit hairs on women, is unacceptable to the patriarchal mind.

She said it here.

Once again it’s not that there are no differences between men and women. It’s that the real differences are enough. Oh yeah! And hooray for all of our respective orientations and our shouldn’t-be-surprising discernment of those we’re drawn to. By which I mean there are enough differences that it’s foolish, willful, conceited, and fundamentally insecure about or orientations and of those around us to require more than nature gives us.

And once again it’s not that there’s no need nor interest in decoration of ourselves, others, or our environs. Quite the opposite — decoration appears to be a fundamental quality of humanity!

But while referencing the expectation that we participate in gender construction, Echidne puts the problem in context (even more emphasis mine)

...we all know how a real man will not wear pink (in this culture and time period) or lace (in this culture and time period) or skirts (in this culture and time period).

Sticking with hair for the moment, the classic example being that in some cultures in the world today men can be punished for having a beard on the one hand (in most of the U.S. military, for instance) yet be punished for not having a beard in others (in most of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and Pakistan, for instance.) Another being that for women to have no body hair is considered sexy in some parts of the world (white America for instance) because of its association with high-status femininity while in other parts of the world (white/European South America for instance) women’s body hair is associated with high-status femininity because “native” South American women are believed to have relatively sparse body hair.

In each case, in each culture, in each time, in each location, gender might be constructed, yeah. But if it’s constructed differently in different places…

Sigh.

You know what’s most peculiar of all? For roughly 99.999% of the .001% of cases where for whatever reason someone else’ biological sex really matters, but where for some reason you’re not able to tell, you can usually ask.

AlwaysArousedGirl has a nice catch related to the real interest ‘wingers have in keeping marriage heterosexual. This time it’s Sam Schulman writing in the Christian Science Monitor, even though he’s more often found in rabidly conservative and neocon rags like The Weekly Standard, the Wall St. Journal, Commentary, and Orthodoxy Today.

Marriage is not about couples or lovers – it’s about the physical and moral integrity of women. When a woman’s sexuality is involved, human communities must deal with a malign force that an individual woman and her family cannot control or protect.

...

Marriage is a necessary defense of a woman’s sexuality and her human liberty from determined assault by men who would turn her into a slave, a concubine – something less than fully human. Human communities need to give women some additional degree of protection – through law, custom, religious decree, or sacrament…

...

Modern marriage is only the least worst version of marriage that has emerged from all this – but it is still necessary for women. What protects women, ultimately, is that marriage laws and customs confer upon her independence something extra – dignity, protection, sacredness – that others must respect.

Read the quote in context here.

This guy Schulman is a real piece of work when it comes to understanding the dominant paradigm’s insistence on the bogus Two Rules of Desire and the whole general ideology of women as the “no-sex” class.

Writing more confidently in Orthodoxy Today, for a readership he knows to be more conservative than the relatively liberal Christian Science Monitor he wrote

...marriage benefits women, again not just in law but essentially. A woman can control who is the father of her children only insofar as there is a civil and private order that protects her from rape; marriage is the bulwark of that order. The 1960’s feminists had the right idea: the essential thing for a woman is to control her own body. But they were wrong that this is what abortion is for; it is, rather, what marriage is for. It is humanity’s way of enabling a woman to control her own body and to know (if she cares to) who is the father of her children.

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 child­ren.

...

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.

He said it here.

It gets worse, by the way. You know how everyone goes around saying it’s radical feminists who think all heterosexual sex is rape? Check out Schulman (who incorrectly identifies the very conservative feminist Catharine Mackinnon as a radical feminist.)

Radical feminists were right, to an extent, in insisting that men’s and women’s sexuality is so different as to be inimical. Catharine MacKinnon has proclaimed that in a “patriarchal” society, all sexual intercourse is rape. Repellent as her view is, it is formed around a kernel of truth. There is something inherently violative about sexual intercourse—and there is something dangerous about being a woman in a sexual relationship with a man to whom she is not yet married. Among the now-aging feminists of my generation, no less than among their mothers, such a woman is commonly thought to be a victim.

Marriage is a sign that the ever-so-slight violation that is involved in a heterosexual relationship has been sanctioned by some recognized authority.

Call me a radical here but I’m… pretty sure marriage is not MacKinnon’s preferred solution to the problem of heterosexuality-as-rape (to the limited extent even she sees it that way.) I’m even more sure her solution does not include further extending “fiercely protecting” women’s virginity and “hardly permit[ting] them to ‘date.’”

In fact, call me a real radical here but I’m… pretty certain that no matter how conservative, and no matter how genuinely leery of sex she might be, and even no matter how superficially similar the outlines of her strategies might be to Schulman’s and those of his ilk, MacKinnon’s solution is precisely antithetical to his: the way to give women agency, sexual and otherwise, is to give them agency, not to immure them in deep and often outright murderous traditions that are merely less worse than enslavement… not to construct them into traps that are at best “ever-so-slight violations” of their autonomy, their integrity, and their right to be independent human beings who’s decisions are to be respected.

And finally, what exactly do Schulman and his kind think of men that they imagine this enslavement of women to be better, safer, more dignified, more sacred at the hands of tradition than at the “mercy” of the monsters they imagine men to be? Sweet Mother of Pearl! And these are the folks who imagine that feminists hate men!

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The remaining points against Schulman have been better expressed by others but they bear repeating

• The most dangerous place for a woman is in her home.
• Women are most likely to be assaulted, battered, or murdered in their homes.

• Women are most likely to be assaulted, battered, or murdered by a husband, domestic partner, or male family member.

and finally

• If the goal of traditional marriage really was the protection of women from men rather than the protection of their property value* as exchanged between men then, as AAG so nicely puts it, women would be far better off marrying 80-pound Rotweiler/pit-bull-mix attack dogs. Or as one of her commenters put it, they could marry their cans of pepper spray. Or as Holly Pervocracy would probably say, a handgun. (Although as Holly also points out, one rarely has one’s handgun, well, handy when you tend to need them most: when around male friends, dates, and partners. Just sayin’)

But of course the traditional institutions of marriage were never meant for the protection of women. And the extent it ever was necessary, the advent of classical-liberal conservative institutions as manifested in the notions of, say, rule of law founded on principles of individual rights held self-evident in our and other constitutions has made it less so.

Sheesh! Where do they get these guys? Who’d want to marry one of them?

Oh, right. And at the end of the day, of course, Schulman says (after claiming, naturally, that some of his best friends are gay) marriage must remain forbidden to same-sex couples because if you let just anybody get married then the special role marriage carves out for women might be lost.

He says it as if that were a bad thing.

* As in “thou shall not covet thy neighbors wife, nor his house, nor his cattle, nor his man servant nor maid servant, nor anything else that is thy neighbor’s.”

Linda McClain of Feminist Law Professors continues a theme that’s been developing in light of the recent Prop 8 findings about marriage

I would like to invite the attention of feminist scholars and anyone else interested in the marriage debate to Judge Walker’s extensive findings of fact as well as his conclusions of law about the irrelevance of gender to marriage and parenthood.

...

To that end, Linda Greenhouse, an experienced analyst of the U.S. Supreme Court, posted (last week) an insightful commentary “Hiding in Plain Sight,” in which she praises Judge Walker for “his unveiling of a central hiding-in-plain-sight fact: the change in society’s expectations about what partnership in a marriage entails.”

...

Without making any predictions, she nonetheless takes the position that if Judge Walker’s opinion survives on appeal, it will be on the basis of his conclusion that to extend marriage to gay men and lesbians will not “redefine marriage,” since marriage has already undergone profound change “as the result of forces completely independent of federal judges.”

She said it here.

Continuing a theme she developed in a previous post (key point: whereas California once had myriad laws specifically related to the different sexes of married individuals it had repealed every one except the underlying requirement that there be two sexes in a marriage), McLain examines Judge Walker’s findings that outcomes for children of same-sex couples are no different than they are for opposite-sex couples.

The bottom line, though, is that Judge Walker’s ruling has basically validated Stephanie Coontz’s thesis in Marriage, a History, which was originally subtitled “From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage.” I’m pretty sure Coontz would say Walker’s ruling was the final blow against marriage as a key vehicle of the original Patriarchal patriarchy. Under capital-P Patriarchy, you may remember, marriage is not considered “a union between a man and a woman.” Instead it’s a union between families, generally arranged by the eldest living members of the respective families for the purpose of cementing economic, social, or political interests.

What makes McClain’s point about family law is that the Walker decision also suggests that the capital-P Patriarchal intention for children in real “traditional” heterosexual marriage — sealing the union with blood-relations — has been superseded by what modern opponents of same-sex marriage only imagine was the real intent: creating a safe, nurturing environment in which children can grow to adulthood.

All-round good stuff in that ruling. Although (update!) let’s hope they’re upheld on appeal!