Genderless marriage, or, What’s in a Frame?

Yesterday (and today) have been interesting days. I noticed earlier last morning (like, 2AM early), that around 7 of my friends had changed their profile pictures to a pink-on-red variation of the Human Rights Campaign’s equal sign logo. It seems that as with sports and holidays (“March Madness” does not seem real to me…and I had to google just to confirm that it is pretty much happening right now. I completely missed St. Patrick’s Day whenever that was), I am also living under a rock when it comes to politics — I know the Supreme Court would be hearing cases on California’s Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act, but I didn’t know when.

Well, the profile pictures clued me in.

The main reason today has been interesting is because so many people I know have shown their support for marriage equality/gay marriage/same-sex marriage.

Like, I am aware that my friend group is assuredly not a random sampling (let’s put it this way: I have the greatest number of friends in common with John Dehlin, followed closely by Joanna Brooks. After a gap comes my own brother in third place.)

Nevertheless, the 7 early birds ballooned out to a much larger number…I haven’t counted them all, but here’s one thing I’ll say: I’ve seen several Facebook discussions where every commenter has a red equal sign.

Is it so strange that support for gay marriage/same-sex marriage/marriage equality has spread so quickly?

Sorry for the unwieldy terms here…but that gets me closer to what I wanted to talk about today. What do we even call this?

Perhaps I’m just not critical enough in my use of language, but the term I naturally move to using is “gay marriage.” Many of the articles I see describe it as “same-sex marriage,” but that leaves a similar taste (at least in my mouth) as “same-sex attraction” — yet I doubt that the origins of both phrases are anywhere near the same, so maybe the connotations aren’t either?

I see a lot of activist and supporter types using “marriage equality”, and while I find this somewhat unwieldy, I like the gist of the framing here. (As supporters and proponents will often point out, gay marriage is just marriage, so why not treat marriages equally?)

I don’t know the data on who is most likely to use which term — I think it would be cool if it maps out regionally like the soda-pop-coke difference does…but if I had to guess, I would say that these three names (including same-sex marriage) are neutral to supportive terms to frame the concept.

So, then, what is the opposition fighting?

Cue the title.

I have seen this a few times, but the term boggles my mind: genderless marriage. The most recent time is in this Meridian Magazine post: “The Inequalities of “Equal” Marriage”. (Note…this is a Meridian magazine article…if you don’t know what that entails and are at risk of having high blood pressure, you might want to pass on it…and probably skip this article, since I’ll have quotes below.)

I guess the basic issue for me is that the term “genderless marriage” just doesn’t make sense. It reminds me of when people say that gay people are just experiencing “gender confusion.” While I could maybe understand if that were a confusion of gay issues with trans issues (considering in the QUILTBAG or LGBTQIA [so many letters!] umbrella, trans- and gay/lesbian/bisexual are usually included together), but to the contrary, it’s usually not even nuanced enough for that to apply.

…but let me just put this out there. No matter how problematic gender or sex terms might be, with sexual orientations, sex and gender do matter. Being gay isn’t being “confused” about one’s gender. It’s a guy knowing he’s a guy who likes other guys, or a girl knowing she’s a girl who likes other girls.

…of course, the reason why it comes out as gender confusion or as genderless marriage is because of paradigm mismatch. I understand that what they really intend to talk about is a mismatch, redefinition, or renegotiation of gender and gender roles.

The problem is that our gender role expectations haven’t been a perfect match for plenty of people for ever. (It’s just that more and more, these people are speaking out about it instead of hiding for their safety.) [Note, one can feel the gender role expectations mismatch without being transgender. But put this in the box of “the difficulty in even establishing gender in the first place.”]

We have also been redefining and renegotiating gender roles for…ever.

This, by the way, is why the concept of traditional marriage doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It just seems to me that people who use the term 100% unironically are not aware enough of the shifting goals both in the past, in the present, and in the future.

Fortunately for our purposes, the Meridian Magazine article gives a great example:

Besides children, women who carry the burden of pregnancy are obviously at greater risk than men in the childbearing process. Historically, gendered marriage has tied men to their children and to the mothers who sacrifice to create them. This arrangement not only overcomes but also compliments the biological differences of men and women.

Finally, gendered marriage addresses the rights of fathers. Fatherhood is the most fragile biological relationship in the father-mother-child triangle. The bond between mother and child is obvious. The father less so. Marriage closes this gap by legally binding a father to a mother and child, giving him both rights and responsibilities in a relationship that, by the way, dramatically affects the successful socialization of children.

I interviewed a lawyer once and asked her to imagine a world without legal marriage. She abruptly responded: “It would be chaos. Women and children would be chattel. They could be abandoned without the slightest thought. They would have no legal recourse.”

By traditional definition, marriage is the protective sanctuary that allows children to have a relationship with both father and mother. That relationship provides them with the stable and long-term care and nurturance they deserve. “Without this public purpose,” Dr. Morse explains, “marriage would cease to exist as a distinct social institution.”

From the start, I recognized the general thrust of this argument…probably because Seth R has posted the basic idea in several venues across the internet (including with a defense of the origins of patriarchy as giving men a reason to become involved in society [comment 10 {also, to be fair, he’s trying to separate his own personal views from his reporting of sociology/history/psychology}]. I know there’s at least one person who calls Seth a rape apologist, but if she saw that comment…)

…And if you check out the main post to which Seth was responding (see link above), Nathaniel also hashes out (in far more eloquent language) the Meridian article’s basic contention that the bond between father and child is asymmetric and tenuous contrasted with the  bond between mother and child.

But then you have an anonymous lawyer who throws around the word chattel.

…Well, see, the funny thing about the word “chattel” is that it has a history. If you google for “chattel” and “women,” you’re not going to find results about an “imagined” world “without legal marriage.” To the contrary, you will find instead that women as chattel is a tradition embedded in the legal understanding of marriage.

So, by traditional definition, marriage isn’t quite the “protective” sanctuary that allows children to have a relationship with both father and mother. It’s protective in that the man has his best interests in making sure his property and livestock are well-taken care of — considering that part of it will be his food, part of it will be making his food, and part of it will inherit  and continue his legacy. And maybe that’s what matters to traditionalists (because the presumably capitalist traditionalist might not see any other reason for a man to stick around if there aren’t legally defined and socially-enforced economics around it.)

Here’s the thing…most folks simply don’t want to go that traditional (although, there are still people who nevertheless want exactly that and understand that to achieve that, you have to roll back quite a few other things that the rest of us would consider necessities of modern living, rather than degradations of society against tradition.)

Like, we simply moved aware from the gender role expectation of women not seeking education, or not seeking to work wherever they please with that education.

I’ll re-emphasize: we moved. It’s done. It already happened. For people who want to roll it back, everyone sees it as a roll-back. And most don’t see it as a rollback worth making.

When you have women who can seek education and who can seek to work, then you have women who have economic power — and these women, suddenly, have a degree of independence. They do not need a husband to give a “protective sanctuary”. Believe it or not…they are not at risk of becoming chattel, because they are not owned in the first place. (Think about what the lawyer quoted in the Meridian article is saying: without legal marriage, [women] would have no legal recourse. But why is legal recourse for women dependent on her being tied to a husband?)

This is just one change of many — and note that this change in particular does not overtly seem to have anything to do with LGBT people or even marriage in particular. Nevertheless, it was a change that renegotiated the expectations of the tradition. Again, past tense. The tradition has already been renegotiated. When someone talks about “traditional” marriage they have to square that.

And I’m not saying that because changes happened in the past, we must change everything that comes along as it comes. Instead, what I’m saying is that the changes that have led us to the point where my Facebook is inundated with red equal signs have already arrived. We are already here. Going back is just that: rolling back.

…But of course, these things aren’t inevitabilities. And even if we could make this a line, this isn’t the end of the line.