“… Assuming they are fair, the world must respect the results of the elections. …”

Why? As an anarchist, I don’t respect the results of any government elections.

Here’s my contribution: Geekery Today 2006-01-22: Roe v. Wade Day #33.

Jason:

This reply surprised me, as I had understood you to favor a full privatization of marriage. If you do favor this option, then it seems you are forced to concede my point, and to admit that government acts at best to protect, never to create, a marriage.

Well, my position is that the concept of a marriage analytically includes recognition within a community; a purely private marriage is no marriage at all. But “private” and “community” can mean different things in different contexts, and “marriage” has at least two, and probably three distinct (though related) meanings: (1) a legal construct counting the spouses as under a single household in the eyes of the government, (2) a religious sacrament sanctifying a romantic and sexual union, and probably (3) some kind of more generalized form of union, recognized within civil society, that underlies (1) and (2). I think that marriage-1 ought to be abolished, marriage-2 is purely a matter for the churches (and has no meaning at all outside of the kinds of sanctifying rituals that churches are or aren’t doctrinally open to), and I don’t have very strong opinions about marriage-3, for a variety of reasons.

I would find this strategy [of striking “marriage” ought of the law books and punting the issue to case-by-case decisions in family court] both impractical and disingenuous. I want a set of rights and obligations that are basically identical to those of married heterosexual couples; as such, I feel I should be up-front and honest about this desire. I also mistrust a patchwork or piecemeal solution for two reasons: 1) Many of the most important rights — including immigration protection — will almost certainly never be obtained short of full civil marriage, and 2) A patchwork of rights and protections is both substantially less convenient for those seeking to obtain them — and substantially easier to revoke than an actual marriage. Notice how in Massachusetts, even those seeking to repeal same-sex marriage are not proposing to nullify the marriages that have already been contracted.

(1) Careful with the language here: if you think that gay marriage already exists even without government recognition, then you already do have a set of rights and obligations basically identical to those of married heterosexual couples; the government just fails to recognize the rights and obligations that you really do have. So what you want is for the government to respect your rights and recognize your obligations, not for you to get those rights and obligations.

(2) I don’t understand why you think that the strategy of punting the issue to case-by-case family law is disingenuous. I’m not proposing that gay marriage advocates conceal what they are about; what I am suggesting is appealing to people’s better natures, and their likelihood to understand the issue better when it’s a matter of understanding particular situations in real people’s lives than when it’s a matter of a cultural-religious turf war to be debated and legislated on. If folks tend to get it better at the level of particulars than at the level of universals, then dialectic should start with the particulars; but that’s a matter of seeking better understanding, not a matter of sidestepping understanding.

(3) I think that “many of the most important rights” discussed in these debates actually ought to have nothing to do with marriage at all in the first place. Exemptions from immigration restrictions are a chief example: the solution is an open border policy, not fiddling with marriage law. You might say that gay marriage has a better shot than open borders at political success in the near future. Fine, but so what? The best direction for political conversation isn’t always determined by the easiest option.

(4) I don’t know whether “a patchwork of rights and protections” is an apt phrase to describe what I’m advocating. What I’m advocating is a common law approach to the issue instead of the ex ante statutory approach that the entire contemporary debate over gay marriage presupposes. Part of the reason that I advocate that approach is practical: I think it will work better, will make it easier to make marginal gains rather than praying for the one decisive blow, and it will minimize the damage in cases where it fails. But part of it is also that I think that the current notion of “marriage,” as recognized in law, is itself a patchwork of a number of things that do not essentially belong together, and including a number of things that shouldn’t exist at all. It’s not that I’m advocating a patchwork; it’s that I think we already have an ugly, motley thing and I’m suggesting we unravel it.

Jason:

Indeed I am. If government did not exist, marriage still would exist. Marriage would still exist at least so long as two people promised one another (and their God(s) and communities) that they would care for one another no matter what, that they would help one another through good times and bad, and that they would forsake all others.

Fair enough; that’s not how I use the word “marriage,” but if that’s how you intend to use the term, and use it consistently that way, then you’ve probably got a linguistic right to it. However, it does seem that this complicates the argumentative ground between you and, for example, Rauch. I haven’t read Rauch’s book, but I have read previous articles, and from those and from the passage on political strategy that you cite, it seems pretty clear that he’s claiming that gay marriage is something that doesn’t yet exist in most of the United States, that ought to be brought into existence by means of democratic political processes. If that’s his conclusion, then he and you might just be using the word “marriage” in two different ways.

Just as a side note, do you take a vow to forsake all others to be essential to a marital relationship? If so, aren’t you defining (open) polygamy out of existence?

To the extent that certain third parties decline to recognize my marriage, they are thwarting my pursuit of happiness, and they are frustrating the very purpose for which I appointed them, and for which I pay their salaries.

I think this is a very romanticized picture of what government officials do and how they are selected and paid. I’m not sure you ought to hinge your case for the requirement on it. In any case, though, the point again is that this seems to complicate the question of where the debate between you and Rauch lies. It’s not that you disagree that third parties ought to be required to recognize the union, apparently; it’s that you disagree over which third parties ought to be required (or, better, in which roles third parties ought to be required) to recognize it.

In these senses, I think Nancy gets things just about right, particularly in the last paragraph. It would be a just and equitable solution for the government to offer civil union contracts to all, but it would not be a practical one. Shame that it isn’t, though, as the word marriage so often has such strongly religious overtones that it leads us into trouble.

My suspicion is that many people tend to react much more positively to legal recognition of family rights within queer relationships much better in particular cases than they do to the abstract question of “gay marriage;” for example, that even many overt bigots who spit fire at the notion of “gay marriage” would object to a court invalidating your will and giving all your effects to your sibling or third cousin or whatever rather than giving them to your spouse. (Similarly denying your spouse the right to act on your behalf in medical decisions.) So why not skip straight over civil unions, even, and simply eliminate “marriage” as a legally recognized category altogether, i.e., to simply devolve the legitimate issues you cite to family law, to be decided case-by-case. This has the advantage of shifting the fight to the terrain on which you’re strongest; it also has the advantage of offering a nice rhetorical strategy for both pro-SSM camp (“eliminate heterosexist privilege! put all families on an equal footing!”) and the anti-SSM camp (“take marriage out of the hands of the judicial activists! let the churches define marriage for themselves!”)

Jason:

We could very easily say that these gay people did own property, …

Right; because property has a well-defined meaning outside of the context of government recognition of property rights. (It’d have to, for libertarian claims such as “taxation is theft” to even be comprehensible.) Are you suggesting that, analogically, gay people are already getting married (thus that gay marriage already exists), and that the only political question remaining is whether government will recognize those already-existing marriages?

Jason:

This is the situation with marriage: It is an individual institution, made by, for, and about indviduals. And it should enjoy the protection of the government for exactly that reason, since government exists to protect the individual and to permit him the pursuit of happiness, free from the interference of others.

So your complaint is that certain third parties (viz. government officials) aren’t required to recognize gay marriages?

alexander: Oddly enough, Ayn Rand denounced libertarians as right wing hippies who want to throw bombs, use drugs and disband the FBI.

Well, she objected to the name “libertarian,” and to some individual people who described themselves as such. But Tuccille is right about libertarianism; it usually did begin with Ayn Rand, and her reception among, and influence over, the growing libertarian movement of the time was certainly very different from her reception among, and influence over, the growing conservative movement of the time. (And many of the members of “conservative” groups who were influenced by her ended up leaving — e.g. in the departure of the libertarians from YAF.) Incidentally, I don’t think there’s any correct sense of “conservatism,” no matter how broad, that includes free markets as a matter of moral principle, let alone militant atheism or hostility to cultural traditionalism. But this is well off the topic by now; in any case, Rand’s (astonishingly reactionary) attitudes towards sexuality and women’s proper relationship to men are fodder enough for the point you wanted to raise, quite apart from any questions about “conservatism” proper.

alexander: Well, that is like saying that people who object to communism owing to their experiences in the USSR lack any genuine knowledge of Marxist ideology. (Or people who had a bad experience with the Inquisition lacking any knowledge of christian doctrine.)

I hope that you understand that comparing whatever bad experiences a man in the United States may have had with feminism, or with something that he thought or imagined to have something to do with feminism, to the reign of terror in the Soviet Union, or in Europe under the Inquisition, is insulting. Not just to feminists, but also to the victims of Communism and the Inquisition.

We have to deal with the reality, not the theoretical.

That’s fine, but someone who has not taken the time to so much as, say, read a sustained discussion by a feminist of feminist thought and action, or a serious book-length memoir or history of the feminist movement — and, to be clear, this encompasses every anti-feminist I’ve ever met who based his or her position on bad run-ins with something he or she took to be related to feminism — has not done the basic homework necessary to understand the reality. Basic facts about the positions advocated by major feminist thinkers or the actions and historical trajectories of important feminist groups are an important part of what the reality of feminism is.

Vacula: Rad Geek, I’m not saying it’s justified for MRAs who’ve had bad experiences with one or more feminists to hate all feminists or reject all feminist theory. I was appreciating Hugo’s awareness of the danger in looking to personal (bad) experiences as the most effective motivation for feminists. That’s an approach that fails to really trust that the ideals of the movement are worth pursuing on their own merits. If a feminist can say “all MRAs are personally biased against feminism because they don’t understand it and have had bad personal experiences with unworthy feminists,” what prevents an MRA from discounting feminism (if primarily motivated by bad personal experinces) as a movement of “angry women who resent men because they’ve been taught to feel victimized”?

Well, fair enough; unreflective appeals to personal experience or testimony can be dangerous. But I think there are some important differences between the appeals that some feminists make to first-hand experiences of victimization by men and the appeals that MRAs (for example) make to first-hand experiences of what they take to be bad treatment at the hands of what they take to be feminism. One difference being that women can be pretty sure when their victimizers are men whereas MRAs often seem to have a very confused idea of when they are encountering feminism at all (e.g. the frequent identification of bad experiences in family court with oppression at the hands of some kind of congealed feminist power-structure; it’s not just unrepresentative feminists, but also people who have very little relation to feminism at all that MRAs take to be victimizing them in the name of the mythical feminist hegemony). Women’s first-hand experiences of victimization by men generally also include a number of things that are indisputably wrongs (e.g. rape, battery, street harassment, overt prejudice against women, etc.) whereas MRAs first-hand experience is at best a mixed bag (whether or not you were treated unfairly in family court is a much more complicated question than whether your husband was wrong to beat you; other common objections, such as the purported anti-male bias in education, are simply delusory). There are a lot of other distinctions that can be drawn. Broadly speaking, I don’t think that “starting from personal experience” means “treating everyone’s say-so as equally decisive in political questions,” which is important, since treating everyone’s say-so as equally decisive is obviously a dead-end strategy. (I also don’t think that starting from personal experience means not trusting the ideals of the movement to be worthwhile on their own merits; I do think, though, that trusting women’s first-hand experiences is — as the Redstockings, for example, argued — both an important ideal of the movement and an important way of discovering what the further ideals of the movement should be. (To be clear, I don’t think that Hugo was arguing against either of these things, or that you were; I’m just trying to clear up where I’m standing.)

All that said, I think that you make an excellent point above when you point out (among other things) that the sort of first-hand experiences that feminism should be interested in are broader than women’s first-hand experiences of victimization by men, and that among other things women’s first-hand positive experiences of (e.g.) sisterhood ought to be given attention as well.

Patrick,

Yes, I’d consider the Black Panther Party and SNCC during its Black Power phase to be members of the radical Left. Besides their explicit development of Marxian revolutionary thought (which they both embraced and substantially altered in order to adapt it to the situation as they saw it), it’s also worth noting that a number of other paradigmatic New Left groups at the time (SDS, Weather, the Young Lords, American Indian Movement, etc.), and other groups with roots in the radical Left (New York Radical Women, etc.) considered SNCC in its Black Power phase, and the Black Panther Party, to be leading members of the American Left.

None of this, of course, is the same thing as saying that they were correct; I take “Left” to be a term of ideological analysis, not necessarily a term of praise. As for myself, I think that there are valid criticisms to be made of the Black Power tendency, but they are mostly criticisms that applied to the New Left as a whole at the time (e.g. the pseudo-revolutionary embrace of violent, patriarchal masculinity); as for the debate between integrationist approaches and Black nationalism, I think there are important and valid criticisms on both sides, but I don’t have any strong opinion as to who’s right, all things considered (and since I’m not a member of the Black community I don’t think that any strong opinions that I had about the best way for Black people to organize themselves, or the best things for them to fight for, would be worth much anyway).

And even if I don’t have my family’s support — which, frankly, I do not — I’m still married. … Marriage may be a bond between two individuals, affirmed and supported by those the couple elicits for help, but it can’t possibly be — and should not be — with everyone.

If marriage is a chosen bond between individuals that doesn’t require the support or recognition of other people, then what’s keeping same-sex couples from getting married now? Nobody, as far as I know, is forcibly preventing gay couples from committing to each other ‘till death do they part, and holding a ceremony to formalize it where they say “I thee wed,” and describing themselves as “married,” “spouses,” etc. thereafter. So then what’s all the fuss about? Same-sex couples can already get married today, if that’s all that there is to it.

Ayn Rand, for good or for ill, is pretty decisively not a founding figure in modern conservatism, but rather in modern libertarianism. Many conservatives did read her books at some point or another, but she was and is reviled by movement conservatives, from National Review’s slashing review of Atlas Shrugged, in which Whit Chambers declared “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber — go!’,” to their surprisingly nasty obit on the event of her death in 1982. The hostility was over a number of issues, but especially her militant atheism, her hostility to cultural traditionalism, and (according to Rand at least) her willingness to insist on free market policies as a matter of moral principle when conservatives were willing to compromise for the sake of religion or the purchase of political pull.

Vacula: “It’s a very narrow view of oppression that leaves very little room for the negative(/sexist) influence of female anti-feminists on women and ‘bad’ feminists on men, much less the positive impact of male or female pro-feminists on women.”

You raise some important points, but I don’t understand what you are trying to highlight when you mention the “negative influence of … ‘bad’ feminists on men.” Speaking quite frankly, I have never met a man who talked up some kind of hostility or political opposition to feminism on the “bad experiences” he’d had with feminists, who had any genuine knowledge or understanding about feminism as a movement or as a body of theory. Men who make this complaints very typically have had some limited unhappy experience with feminists in their area, or an impressionistic idea of who feminists are and what they do as gleaned from the mass media; have made little or no effort to make themselves less than ignorant about the history or theory or practice of feminism, as explained by the women involved in it (say reading a book, or even keeping up with a feminist periodical over any period of time); and are extremely petulant about remaining in their state of ignorance while also expecting feminists to cater to their delicate sensibilities. Thus when they start talking up bad experiences with “bad” feminists, what follows is a mishmash of anecdotes, caricatures, ignorance, half-truths, dishonesty, and nonsense. Having tried talking with men like this before, I can’t say I’m very much interested anymore in trying to deal with them or take the trouble of educating them; at root, the problem isn’t the fault of feminism, and probably isn’t the fault of the feminists that they’ve encountered either; the problem is that they are not making a good-faith effort at learning or understanding.

Maybe there are men who fit the description you offered but aren’t like this; I’ve yet to meet them, though. Or have I simply misunderstood your point?

Even so, sometimes a difference of degree can be perceived as one of character instead if that degree is relatively large. There is such a perception with regard to the Bush administration in particular, and it’s widely held.

Sure, but I think there are clear reasons for regarding that perception as clearly mistaken. As dangerous as the Bush regime is to us, and as deadly as it has been to others, I don’t think there’s any reasonable standard of comparison by which it would compare unfavorably, in terms of degree, to the absolute depotism and overt reign of terror that reigned against American Blacks from 1788-ca. 1968. Bush is bad, but as a matter of degree he is not worse than even Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt, let alone the slave power and Judge Lynch. At the most he represents a lurch back towards the worst elements of Cold War militarist statism.

I understand the dialectical impulse, but part of my worry is that appealing to wistfulness for the Old Republic is likely to purchase whatever insight it offers to the interlocutor only at the expense of blinding them to very important facts about American history, and thus leaving dangerous prejudices about the past untouched (in fact I think that something like this is precisely what happened with the transition from the anti-statist elements of the old liberals and the Old Right, which combined genuine libertarian insights with mythistorical Old Republic nostalgia, to the brazen Caesarism of the New Right).