In a similar fashion, I find myself after Friday's class discussion wondering where I stand on many issues. Before coming to Rhodes, I was certainly conservative and quit frankly, conservative in a negative, stereotypical way. I grew up in a small community where farming was the way of life. Growing up in a Baptist church also shaped my "logic." I believed that women should hold a certain role in society, namely as loving, nurturing mother, that government should hold a limited place in regulating commerce, and that homosexual marriage was not an issue to even consider. Those were all things I did not question. After my first few life classes, things began to change and over the past three years I have developed many different positions on political matters. Homosexual marriage is the human right I wanted to talk about after Friday's class because it is one extreme example of how my views have changed since high school. I just wanted to relate some of the other materials I'm working with on sexual ethics for other courses and projects with to our class as a precursor to the issue of homosexual marriage.
One of the core problems in social justice, in my opinion, is the fascination and fetish for men to dominate women, a feat made possible in "traditional" relationships. This system allows for sexual injustices in the areas of homophobia, hate crimes, sexism, violence against women and children, and, as I would stretch to argue via Mark Jordan after recently reading his book Blessing Same Sex Unions, the refusal to allow marriage to homosexual couples. It is the romanticizing of marriage, I believe, that is part of the widespread abuse of homosexual couples that should have the right, in a just society where individuals have equal rights (as long as one's will does not infringe upon another's will), to share their lives with another of the same sex and have a blessing from both church and state. Thinking of Adam, Eve, and their subsequent family as the first model of family and considering an authoritarian husband and subservient wife and children model is harmful for everyone.
In his book called Erotic Justice, another work I am currently reading, Marvin Ellison notes that many face “a growing disparity between their personal power to shape the future and the power of institutions. Increasing numbers of people lack adequate economic power to support their families.... but why does this fear become attached to sexuality? Why do economic and other forms of insecurity translate into sexual rigidity” (Ellison, 17)? Also, the thought of two women together is altogether strange to society; how do they make money without man? This is wholly out of tradition and questions the norm of society where men are powerful provider. Here, Ellison hits close to my traditional upbringing: sex, according to him, is good if it “is heterosexual, institutionalized, and regulated within marriage, monogamous, reproductive, and noncommercial” (22). Anything away from this center is seen as dangerous and should be distrusted. “A patriarchal church and culture have identified male-dominant heterosexual marriage as the safe place. Marriage has been designated as the proper site for containing and regulating sexual desire by controlling women’s lives and specifically women’s bodies. Legal codes have regulated marriage as an economic institution as well as a sexual arrangement, protecting men’s property rights over women, children, and slaves.... In fact, Christian sexual ethics have traditionally been an ethics of marriage, not an ethics of sexuality. The focus has been on encouraging marriage and phrasing, or at least restricting, all non-marital and usually all non-procreative sexual activity” (26).
The Church is often seen as granting certain permission for sex and creating rules about what is and what is not permissible. They decided, long ago, where sex outside marriage is OK and whether gay sex was sinful. It has been in a set of patriarchal rules that teh Church has created exception-less rules with a face of morality. People want definitive answers and, where possible, from the Bible. At least that has been my experience in church and with those who ask what my interests in religious studies are. It is this patriarchal Christianity that promotes ethics of control grounded in taboos used to scare clergy and laity to respond in fear-based, reactive ways.
I believe that gay couples should have teh right to participate and receive government and religious support from individuals so that they can have an encouraging, formalized sexual partnership, the same right afforded to "traditional," heterosexual couples. When the state and church allow for unions to be properly consummated, that will be a justice in society because a human right is being restored that has been violated (Clapham, 143). Sex alone does not determine whether a marriage is legitimate or not and it should not be able to. I believe it is time that society must offer a blessing acceptable to gay couples that allows them to meet certain criteria so that they and society legally recognize their union.
This is currently where I stand, a product of realizing that humans are equal and society should make provisions for those who are in need of basic necessities and human rights. If we are to encourage equality among all humans and promote strong unions between gay couples, we must grant them the right to legal and, when sought, church rights to union or blessing, if they should so choose the latter.
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It seems important to inquire out of what origin and for what purpose marriage exists as a social institution that is recognized by the state. To my way of thinking, the existence of marriage is bound up in the differences between the sexes; since there is an inherent sexual inequality between men and women (the latter become pregnant while the former do not), marriage has existed since the earliest societies to regulate sexual relations to ensure stability and prevent exploitation. It is in the interest of women that their male partners stick around to support children, and it is in the male interest to know that it is his offspring that he is supporting; leaving aside religious or moral considerations, this is the basis of the monogamous heterosexual norm. Since then, however, Western society has taken something that was merely a component grafted onto the institution (feelings of romantic love or companionship) and substituted it for the whole. But when marraige is viewed in its proper social context one sees that it has nothing to do, either positively or negatively, with homosexuality, nor can it.
ReplyDeleteClearly, in modern context, that which I set my argument, marriage is not a social tool to keep men from running away from their children. Men who are like this just leave and the state often ends up supporting these children and mothers. Marriage is, indeed, a moral issue and a human right if we are to offer it to one group of people and not another. It is unjust to exclude groups based on sexual preference, most especially because married couples are granted special privileges in the state as a result of this union.
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