Virginia
bloggers who are fighting to amend our Bill of
Rights to make marriage the exclusive path to
creating legal rights within families have
recently generated some excellent discussion of
the beliefs underlying their position.
Because
much of the harm to gay families is done through
denying children the security that would come from
a legally recognized relationship, both with their
parents and between their parents, these
discussions are often turning to the existence of
same sex-couple families, and to the definition of
family itself. The meme “every child deserves a
mother and a father,” or some variant
thereof, has emerged as the coordinated message of
the campaign to claim that our families are
undeserving of protection.
In
one of these exchanges with James Atticus Bowden,
one of the more active anti-gay bloggers, I
pointed out what I thought was the obvious: Just
because two people are a mother and a father
doesn’t mean that they automatically will have a
particular set of attributes. I assumed that we
could agree on the premise that individual men and
women are not interchangeable, like two types of
widget, but individuals with a variety of traits.
Apparently,
I was wrong about that. I explained that the model
he was presenting of men and women doesn’t fit
the data very well, and that people in real life
aren’t generally exemplars of gender
stereotypes, but tend to be more complex. I
described his unbending insistence that any given
man and woman automatically bring specific,
complementary traits to marriage or parenting,
simply by virtue of their gender, as an
“abstract model of gender bipolarity.”
James
has profoundly misunderstood this point, and is
doing what people sometimes do when they don’t
understand something, which is to make fun of
it.
"Homosexual
activist bloggers,” he says, “call the idea of
men as fathers and women mothers exclusively as,
get this, ‘an abstract model of gender
bipolarity.’”
As
you can see, there is a significant leap of logic
from the idea that any given man-woman pair do not
necessarily create between them a specific
complementarity of traits, and the unsupportable
idea that fathers are not necessarily men and
mothers are not necessarily women. How did James
manage to get there?
What’s
this “abstract model” business about?
For
those who maintain that “family” exclusively
means a biological father, a biological mother,
and the children they conceive and raise together,
the standard arc of logic goes like this:
Male
and female are required biologically to create a
child;
Therefore,
a father and a mother each bring something unique
and irreplaceable to the creation of a child;
By
definition, a father is biologically male and a
mother is biologically female;
Therefore,
a man and a woman must each bring something unique
and irreplaceable to parenting;
Therefore,
in order to have complete and proper
(“complementary”) parenting, children must
have a mother and a father.
The
problem here is the logical leap from the
definitive biological roles that fathers and
mothers play in becoming parents to the assumption
that fathers and mothers must therefore play
equally definitive roles in parenting. In real
life, they do not, and the claim that all mothers
have a certain set of traits and all fathers have
a different and complementary set of traits is
precisely to put forth an abstract model of gender
bipolarity. If anyone can offer a better term for
this fallacy, I would love to hear it.
James
conflates the reproductive roles of male and
female with sets of attributes to which we have
assigned the labels “masculine” and
“feminine.” In making this error, he has
reduced real men and real women to the
two-dimensional symbols one finds on the doors of
public restrooms. This is not what real parenting
is like, and I don’t think that most people in
contemporary American society see their own
marriages in these terms, either.
This
brings us to one of the strangest memes currently
floating about in this debate, and that is the
notion of “the two complementary parts of the
human organism.” This curious phrase suggests a
belief that individual human beings are
incomplete, by themselves. I have asked repeatedly
for an explanation of this idea, only to be
ignored. I have to think that it’s one of those
things that sounds sort of mysterious and romantic
and lovely as long as you don’t examine it too
closely - and having to explain what it means
would tend to have that effect.
Not
even Freud was this reactionary
As
it turns out, this idea does have a history.
Prior
to the industrial revolution, the smallest unit of
production was a household. Marriage was an
economic relationship, not a romantic one, and in
fact it was considered somewhat suspect if a
couple seemed too affectionate. The idea of sexual
fidelity didn’t even exist, at least, not for
men. Marriage was a business relationship that
produced both goods and offspring, and in the
upper classes, political alliances.
This
all changed with the shift to wage labor. The
basis of marriage as a unit of production was no
more, and there was a precipitous drop in the rate
of marriage among young people who, to make
matters worse, had a bunch of crazy Enlightenment
ideas about “equality” and “rights.”
Marriage
had to be reinvented -- one might say
“redefined” -- as the ultimate source of
happiness and human fulfillment. The new basis for
marriage became the idea that men and women are
incomplete without each other.
This
Victorian model of gender was disseminated as the
idea of “separate spheres,” in which man is
made for the public world of politics and
breadwinning and the intellect, while woman is
made to be the “angel of the home.” Neither
sphere can exist without the other. In this way,
marriage was reinvented as a requirement, not for
economic adulthood, but for becoming fully human.
There
is a weirdly Victorian flavor to much of the
discourse being produced in support of the
Marshall-Newman amendment, right down to the idea
repeated by James that butch lesbians who are
mothers are “pretending to be fathers,” and
feminine gay men who are fathers are “pretending
to be mothers.” This is an idea that leaves gay
parents shaking our heads in wonder, but it has
its origin in the popular Victorian notion that
gay and lesbian people are “inverts” who wish
to be the other sex.
The
most laughable ideas from that era have gone away,
such as medical wisdom that said women aren’t
meant to use their intellects, or that if a woman
engages in athletic competition, her uterus will
fall out. Yet, when amendment advocates are
pressed to explain why their exclusionary
definition of family should be enshrined in our
Bill of Rights, they repeat similarly archaic
notions.
It
should be positively chilling to straight and gay
people alike that a model of marriage, family and
gender relations that is essentially lifted whole
from the Victorian ethos is being seriously put
forward as the basis for amending our
Constitution.
Aren’t
men and women different?
Sure
they are, and some of those differences are
biological - mediated by prenatal brain
differentiation and hormones. But that’s not the
same as the abstract idea that “a man” has one
set of traits and “a woman” has a different
and mutually exclusive set of traits.
Like
all cultures, ours has a way of categorizing
people by gender, and we have labeled certain
traits “masculine” and “feminine” as a
sort of cultural shorthand; but that’s all it
is. Some attributes that we identify as
“masculine” have the opposite connotation in
another culture, and vice versa. Further, the
distribution of these traits across the population
reveals that there is actually greater variability
within each gender than there is between genders.
In
the real - not abstract -- world, all people are
individuals who possess a mixture of traits that
are labeled “masculine” and “feminine.” To
very briefly sum up the social science research,
people who describe themselves as having a mixture
of “masculine” and “feminine” traits, as
opposed to having mostly one or the other, are
more resilient and adaptive.
There
are an infinite number of ways in which two people
can be complementary that do not involve their
specific roles in reproductive biology. Real
marriages are each a unique example of
complementarity, not merely reproductions from a
one-size-fits-all template.
For
all the talk of “redefining marriage,” the
redefinition that really matters -- and, I would
argue, the one that is really threatening to
so-called “social conservatives” -- has
already taken place. Most people in contemporary
western society see marriage as a freely chosen
partnership between two equal adults who have
agreed to build a life together, a life that may
or may not include children. To the extent that
some people still see marriage as something that
“completes” them, this notion is likely to
result in marital problems. Marriages that thrive
and last are partnerships between two healthy and
whole adults, not between people with the
unrealistic expectation that marriage will somehow
make them whole if they are not whole already.
“You complete me” is a romantic declaration to
one’s beloved, not a literal diagnostic
statement.
Paradoxically,
because of the cultural redefinition of marriage
that located it as the ultimate source of human
fulfillment, people now have the expectation that
marriage is a personal choice that should bring
them happiness, and that they should be able to
marry the person with whom they are in love.
It’s
unlikely that this cultural shift can be undone,
nor should we try.
--
July 24, 2006
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