So I'm sitting here in one of those stay-at-home parent activities -- hanging with a bunch of other parents, all on our laptops, whiling away an hour and sometimes more in an activity center lobby while a child does a class in this or that.

I started thinking about various families I've known since college back in the 1980s and thinking about how much time we've all spent in various lobbies while our children master various skills. And, since in most of these circumstances the stay-at-home dad ratio is overwhelmed by the stay-at-home mom denominator.

And that left me thinking that it must be easier for married lesbians because basically once a child is weaned it doesn't really have to be their mom who brings them to all the classes while the other partner works.

And then I had the side realization that, duh, of course after a child is weaned there's really nothing a child needs from a mom that a dad can't provide as well.

But then I started thinking a little further and it sank in that an extraordinary number of women in family relationships do a really classic breadwinner / caregiver division of labor.

For that matter, very often even when the couple has multiple children it's almost always just one partner who has the babies, even though in terms of anatomy they could share pregnancy duties.

I definitely can't think of a couple where the biological mom returns to work after maternity leave while her partner stays home to take care of the children.

I don't want to make any pundit points on this. At all. The fact that I can't think of any couples where each partner has had children in the relationship doesn't mean there aren't plenty... even a majority. And while I've spent quite a lot of lobby time and parent volunteer time with lesbian stay-at-home moms I've spent plenty of time talking (and sometimes grousing, and sometimes bragging) about the nuts and bolts of housekeeping and caregiving, it occurs to me that I've no more discussed their initial decisions to arrange their families the way they do than I've discussed mine.

I don't actually know any gay-partner families so I don't know whether or how men divvy up caregiving and breadwinning.

So not only don't I know, I know I don't know.

Anyone know if this is commonly discussed in same-sex marriage circles?

I have this deeply embarrassed feeling I ought to know.

But I don't.

Yet.

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!

—-

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.”

So. When my partner and I first got together she was still recovering from the lingering effects of some sort of gastrointestinal amoeba she’d picked up while trekking through Nepal, Thailand, and Burma.

Ezra Klein explains both why arguments in favor of hetero-only marriage no longer hold up… and why that’s a good thing.

...Ross Douthat, as humane and thoughtful a supporter of traditional marriage as you’ll find, is not able to present one.

...

The closest Douthat comes to an answer is to quote Eve Tushnet saying that “marriage exists in large part to structure how you behave before you marry.” The obvious response to this is that marriage does not obviously transform the way the unmarried behave, and the state does not enforced a behavior code as a precondition for marriage. No matter, Tushnet says, “in order for men and women to have sex with one another, to avoid causing a lot of disruption and wrong action in society, they have to do a lot of difficult things. The fact that a lot of them don’t want to do those things now and don’t even see those things as related to marriage is part of the problem, not an excuse to further move away from the idea of marriage as the structure.”

In other words, America does not currently conceive of marriage in the way that Douthat and Tushnet would like it to conceive of marriage, and in the way it would need to conceive of marriage in order for there to be a good reason the institution can’t accommodate gays.

He said it here.

In other words the tradition that Eve Tushnet values would first unnaturally constrain men and women into unnatural social and economic relationship to each other in order to make them seek what Douthat seems to feel is merely a differently unnatural social and economic relationship in marriage.

And the point of that would be?

Here’s the funny part.

The part that just sort of generally invalidates Tushnet and Douthat’s peculiar foundation for marriage.

Same-sex people don’t seem to have needed that peculiar double bind to be perfectly willing, able to have durable, long-term, committed, loving relationships with their partners. They haven’t needed that pressure to stand by each other. They haven’t needed it to raise healthy families. They haven’t needed it to be productive and integrated members of their communities.

And so, by extension, neither have straight people.

This is not an argument against marriage, obviously. It is an argument against the traditional notion of marriage as a tool of social control. And it is an argument against the exclusion of participants based on the sex, gender, identity, orientation, or bodily configuration.

Image by Aaron G on the thoroughly enjoyable GraphJam.com.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, echoing something I was muttering to myself in the car this morning, nails why marriage equality is now a good idea even if, in the past, the whole idea might have seemed as incomprehensible as the idea that commoners and the aristocracy went to the same heaven. (Oh, wait!)

There are many parts of Judge Walker’s decision overturning Prop 8 that are delicious reading, but the most interesting part was how Walker repeatedly stressed that marriage had already changed—-that strict gender roles that justified restricted marriage in the past have already gone away.  We all know what he’s talking about: men don’t legally own their wives anymore, no-fault divorce degenders divorce legally, women are allowed to work and men to care for children, the legal restrictions on women’s rights in marriage have mostly fallen away.  Spouses aren’t legally distinct anymore, so there’s no reason to say they have to be different genders. 

She said it here.

Wives were once a man’s property in exactly the same way (in fact in exactly the same Biblical Commandment) as a man’s house or his servants or his cattle. And so when ‘wingers speak in outraged tones that once gay marriage was allowed the marriage between men and dogs might be next they don’t see it as that big a leap.

Since marriage is no longer a purchase, and brides no longer become the property of the groom “to have and to hold,” after the father “gives her away,” the tradition underlying “traditional marriage” is already dead. Instead marriage is now a partnership between equals rather than an acquisition of property or livestock. And being a partnership between equals the sex of those partners is no longer relevant.

Works for me!

(Graphjam image via David Kurtz and Breakup Girl.)