Breaking the Spell: Rethinking queer community

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Toughy

Aj........... have not forgotten you...I will come back to you as I am still digesting..........

I think marriage as an issue is the epitome of assimilation. The revolutionary thought is marriage is a sacred spiritual bond and as such has no place in government recognition. All of the benefits of civil marriage are actually legal benefits that include right of survivorship and transfer of property. All of those things can be accomplished by way of legal contracts. Civil marriage does not guarantee the contract will be honored, so what is the frigging point? Legal contracts in the form of marriage and death benefits are contested on a daily basis everywhere in this country. Pre-nups are common to protect the interests of each party..........again legal contracts.

Toughy;

You do understand that this is nearly a word-for-word recapitulation of the conservative argument *against* marriage equality? I have heard innumerable conservatives argue that there is nothing that marriage grants that can't be recapitulated through contracts and so why push for marriage? Well, here's an example. One of the queer people at work and I were talking about how much more we pay to cover our spouses than our straight colleagues do. Much more. In the $400 a month more range. That's a lot of money. If we were in a state-recognized marriage, that would be illegal.

I want a radical shift in social organizing.

Okay. How do you plan to sell it to society? What if they don't *want* that? Toughy, there have been other plans to try to remake society wholesale based upon some grand vision of what a truly better society would be and as far as I can tell every single one of them either tore itself apart or created a nightmare. I'm inherently suspicious of grand schemes to reorganize society whether they come from the right or the left. That movie has yet to have a happy ending.

You have to start with the society we have and the species we have. We don't get to rerun the tape and get a species with a different evolutionary history. That means that if we are going to do grand redesign we should probably be VERY careful about it. That is why I'm a reformer and the civil rights movement was a reform movement. The civil rights movement was not a movement to completely remake society. It was a movement to make society apply the rules it claims to hold dear to black people. I believe that is an achievable goal for queer people. I have yet to hear an explanation for how we get to where you are talking about and I would really like to understand that. I think it's important.

Marriage is NOT the business of the State. Benefits of any individual should go where the person wants...period. The US has some fucked up ideas about Social Security and health care. Women are treated as second class citizens because of marriage. A woman stays at home and the husband works, and she only gets benefits because of her husband. She is not a whole human being and the value of her work in the home is void. Women who are married part of their life and hold no outside job get nothing because they did not pay into Social Security. They worked their entire lives and if hubby decides after 20 years of marriage he is done...........she gets nothing if she cannot afford a good lawyer.

Yes, that IS an injustice. I don't see how eliminating marriage eliminates the injustice. I think that there are ways to deal with those situations that *don't* require dissolving marriage.

If we are going to rethink queer, then we must rethink not queer. If we are ever to defeat the patriarchy then we must not use patriarchal value systems. A woman who stays at home and raises children deserves decent pay for her work for society and deserves more than cat food when she is to old to have and raise the children and grandchildren.

I'm with you on defeating the patriarchy but I'm not sure what you mean by patriarchal value systems? And by whose measure?

But on the rethinking not queer, how do you convince not queer people to go along with your grand vision? We may get there, Toughy, but if we do I'd be surprised if I were alive long enough to see it. I say that because human beings appear to be wired for knitting together in social structures and one of those social structures is a pair-bond. We are not an *entirely* monogamous species but, as a species, we lean toward monogamy. Nature gets a vote, Toughy and I don't see society going in the direction you are talking about, specifically regarding marriage, of its own volition. We've been forming pair-bonds for a very, very, very, long time. That is going to be a hard habit to break because our brains are wired-up in such a way that they really *like* bonding. I don't know how you convince the rest of the species to give up marriage. How do you do that, Toughy?

Just to give you something to chew on, consider that I am not religious. I am not a political conservative. I'm a secularist and a humanist. I'm a social democrat. And I am expressing profound reservations about your vision even though I see how I would benefit from it. So if I'm a hard sell, how do you sell it to people who are ideologically far from you?

Cheers
Aj