For All My Friends Again

[catsittingstill]

And now a screed on a similar subject from Ross Doubthat at the New York Times.

Ross is, as one might expect from a conservative who has wormed his way into the New York Times, more circumspect about his condemnation of gay marriage. As a matter of fact, from the first two thirds of his essay, one might almost suspect that however he feels about women, he doesn't actually have anything against gays.

Then we get to the real heart of his argument.

The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.

Suppose for a moment that this was true. So what? It applies to people who were both virgins when they married, and have a happy and healthy relationship anyway, and have children. It would be great if that handful of couples, among the 300 million or so people in the United States, have something really special and ideal, of course, but why hold the rest of us hostage to this ... um, unusual ... relationship pattern? It's not like the vast majority of us, no longer being virgins, are ever going to achieve it.

And frankly, lifelong heterosexual monogamy when it's *not* at its best, can be a hellhole.

Lately, it has come to co-exist with a less idealistic, more accommodating approach, defined by no-fault divorce, frequent out-of-wedlock births, and serial monogamy.

....

If this newer order completely vanquishes the older marital ideal, then gay marriage will become not only acceptable but morally necessary. The lifelong commitment of a gay couple is more impressive than the serial monogamy of straights. And a culture in which weddings are optional celebrations of romantic love, only tangentially connected to procreation, has no business discriminating against the love of homosexuals.

Well yes. Duh.

But if we just accept this shift, we’re giving up on one of the great ideas of Western civilization: the celebration of lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a unique and indispensable estate. That ideal is still worth honoring, and still worth striving to preserve.

Excuse me for interjecting reality into your philosophical flights of fancy, but this "ideal" in the past has mostly been enforced on people who didn't want it, for the purpose, or at least with the effect, of oppressing women--making large numbers of men miserable in the process, I grant.  There's not much there to honor, is there?

Let's face it; expecting people to be virgins when they marry leads to teenagers marrying so they can have sex, or so they can cover up the results of having had sex while not knowing about birth control.  Teenagers making big life choices like choosing a permanent mate tends to work out poorly because teenagers, lacking experience and maturity, sometimes make mistakes.  Trapping people in marriages that turn out to be mistakes guarantees misery. 

Let's not increase human misery in the attempt to push the dozen or so virgin-when-married-but-happy-and-with-children marriages in the US to two dozen.  They may be special, but they're just not worth that much. 

Let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good..

Comments

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

Agreed. And I like the last line very much. Is it your own?

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Alas no, I can't claim it. I first recall hearing it from cflute, but I think it may be one of those sayings that makes the rounds.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Ah! found it. Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. -- François-Marie Arouet. Ou, en anglais, The perfect is the enemy of the good. -- Voltaire

[occams_pyramid]

He thinks "lifelong heterosexual monogamy" is a good idea, therefore he wants to force it on people? Prohibition of divorce has caused untold misery, but there's no backing for it whatever except a religious idea that because the religions have taken over the marriage ceremony then marriage is 'holy' and must never be ended no matter how disastrous.

And does he really think marriages are in general utterly monogamous? The number of children not related to their mother's partner is something like 10% or 20% (I've heard various figures). Jack Cohen reckons this is effectively constant. Between classes, between countries, between types of society. Even in other 'monogamous' species, the percentage is much the same.

Any other decision in life can be changed if it goes wrong or if circumstances change. But this one extremely important decision, normally made at an early inexperienced age must be *utterly* *inviolable* - for no other reason than 'Because it is. And god said so.'

Yes, there must be continued care of any children. But forcing them to stay in a home with a broken relationship, with no other option allowed, is not the best way to deal with it.

So the whole argument is broken. To then apply it to other relationships, to twist everything into this theoretical ideal that never existed, would be farcical if it wasn't so evil.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't think he's quite that extreme.

He doesn't want to outlaw divorce, he just wants to shake his head and tut-tut and shame people who get divorced, especially women.

He doesn't want to forbid out-of-wedlock birth (I don't know how you could do that, anyway, without resorting to abortion which he despises, but never mind; practicality is not generally a conservative strength) he just wants to tut-tut and shame women who go through it.

He doesn't want to outlaw remarriage, he just wants to tut-tut and shame people who do it. Without ever being called on it in public where angry brides and grooms could rip him a new one--he wants to act like a jerk without paying the social price of being considered a jerk, hence all this deniable language.

What he *does* want to do, is kind of dance around and hint that we should outlaw all these things to preserve wonderful, wonderful lifelong heterosexual monogamy, and in the process *actually* outlaw gay marriage, ostensibly for the same reason, so that's all fair, innit?

[kittyguitar.livejournal.com]

While I agree with the main substance of your argument here, I have to take exception to your quoting an almost certainly inflated figure for the number of children not the genetic offspring of their mothers' partner-of-record. What you're looking at there is the percentage of paternity tests that come up negative. Paternity tests are generally conducted on children whose paternity there is already some reason to suspect. When you look at the results of studies on the populace in general, the figure ranges anywhere from 1% to 4%--which while still significant pains a rather different picture. There's a thread on the subject over at the snopes board--which naturally, I can't find right now.

[occams_pyramid]

I've no personal idea what the figure is, I'm going by various comments I've heard, and particularly from Jack Cohen who I would expect to know a lot more about it than I do.

[kittyguitar.livejournal.com]

Found the thread, for what it's worth:

http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=61567&highlight=paternity+tests

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

I find it safest to assume that Douhat is usually wrong about whatever he's writing about.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

This. He tries to sound like a well-meaning, soft-spoken rationalist. He is, in fact, a vacuous boob.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

True.

Living evidence that the phrase "liberal media" is an oxymoron.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

He is certainly usually wrong about women. I hadn't noticed the whole wrong about gays thing.

Why the hell does the NYT pay him? He belongs on Fox with the other ...um, people who are routinely out of touch with reality for ideological reasons.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

Lifelong heterosexual monogamy actually works for a few people, and it's nice when those people are happy, but trying to make it the standard that everyone has to live up to hurts the majority of people who just don't work that way. The more strictly the standard is imposed, the more people are hurt. Far from being an ideal that an englightened society should embrace, traditional marriage is something that we should be trying to put behind us with the sort of cultural shame that we now apply to traditional practices like trial by combat and the divine right of kings.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

And the thing is, it's not like we're trying to eliminate lifelong heterosexual monogamy.

We're just trying to make it a choice among choices so that people suited to it can engage in it and people suited to other systems can engage in them.

[kittyguitar.livejournal.com]

A woman very dear to me was very successful at lifelong heterosexual monogamy--for about 40 years, until her partner got sick and died. She's since decided she'd prefer not to have another husband get sick and die on her because that part was rather unpleasant. She has a couple of casual boyfriends right now and that's what suits her at this stage of her life.

I suppose she could have put on her widow's weeds and resigned herself to never having sex again, but personally I think that after nursing her beloved partner through his final illness and burying him she's earned something better.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Absolutely.