The Trouble with Normal (1 Viewer)

[TulsaSaint]

Hey, all, I went to a lecture on Monday by Michael Warner, a professor of English at Yale and one of the founders of queer theory (a school of critical theory that focuses on the destabilization of categories like male/female, gay/straight, etc.) in the early 1990s and has also been a fairly prominent activist in the gay movement. But he's unique in the gay rights movement, because he is pretty strongly against gay marriage.

He argues that the gay rights movement only turned toward this obsession with gays in the military and gay marriage in the early- to mid-1990s and that before that, the movement had focused more on typical liberal causes like universal access to medical care. That is, the answer to gay partners not being covered by their partners' insurance plan was to make health care available for everyone, not for companies to start treating gay people as though they were married, or for government to allow us to marry. For Warner, the interest in gay marriage is a bid by insecure gays and lesbians who just want the rest of society to consider them "normal" like everyone else. If we can have nice, traditional, monogamous, picket fence marriages just like everyone else, then people will see that we're not a threat and that we're just like they are.

But what is "normal," really? Warner argues that the very existence of a category called "normal" only dates from the nineteenth century, when early psychologists started classifying human behaviors according to bell curves in which only the center of the curve was normal, and everything else was an aberration, and that our desire to be "normal" is not something that most people throughout history would have understood. Even today, we don't all want to be normal in everything. How many of us just want to be of normal intelligence or of normal attractiveness? So it can be argued that the desire to be normal is a bit misplaced and should not be the gay movement's real priority.

Warner's answer to the issue of gay marriage, and an answer I've heard from people on here, is that we need to destabilize the institution of government-sponsored marriage altogether. In other words, we don't need to redefine marriage - we need to eliminate it, at least on the civil level. People can get married in church all they want to, which is what marriage always was until a couple of hundred years ago, when government started getting involved in the process. And all the legal benefits associated with marriage - tax breaks, immigration sponsorship, Social Security survival benefits - could be given to people through other mechanisms. For example, Australia does its immigration sponsorship not on the basis of marriage but allows Australians to sponsor any one person who is personally important to them.

But I thought it was a really interesting critique of gay marriage from within the gay rights movement, and it really made me think about the gay rights movement's single-minded pursuit of gay marriage over the last 10-15 years. It seems to be a strategy that has not worked - most states now have gay marriage bans, the federal government has a law banning gay marriage, and it's not likely to happen any time soon. At the same time, there are also the ideological (for lack of a better word) issues surrounding the gay movement accepting gay marriage, because instead of trying to challenge and broaden people's ideas of what normal or acceptable relationships should look like, we end up trying to gain acceptance by acting like some sort of copy of everyone else.

Please, none of the usual replies about how homosexuality is an abomination before God. I'm more interested in a discussion about how we decide what "normal" is, and whether the most appropriate way to deal with the issue of same-sex couples is for them to be pursuing civil marriage in order to be just like everyone else.

 

[TPS]

>>People can get married in church all they want to, which is what marriage always was until a couple of hundred years ago, when government started getting involved in the process.

Except during Caligula (sp?). Malcolm McDowell delivered the seal of Rome to both bride and groom compliments of that giant ring.

TPS

 

[superchuck500]

That's interesting.

But I haven't heard anyone really use term "normal" in this debate. It seems that those opposed believe that marriage is between a man and a woman- not because it is "normal" but because the male/female union is deeply connected to what it means to be human. It has deep religious and physiological/procreative meaning.

Whereas, those in support of gay marriage seem to argue that their homosexuality is as natural and god given as any other person's heterosexuality, and thus it is both discriminatory in legal effect and contrary to the idea that we all should be able to pursue true happiness. Something along those lines.

I think you're right that "what is normal" is an interesting debate. I've just never observed "normality" to be central to the gay marriage discussion. It probably wouldn't get you very far to argue that it is or isn't "normal" as a foundation for your position - precisely because what is normal is so subjective from person to person and from time to time.

 

[TulsaSaint]

I think his argument wasn't so much whether gay marriage or relationships are or aren't actually normal. His argument, rather, was that gay people are misguided in their quest or desire to be accepted as normal. He thinks that gay people are so set on the idea of gay marriage, in part, because they see it as a way to be acknowledged as more "normal" than they were before, as a way to prove that we can be monogamous and have functional, "normal" relationships just like everyone else.

 

[buzd]

Warner's answer to the issue of gay marriage, and an answer I've heard from people on here, is that we need to destabilize the institution of government-sponsored marriage altogether. In other words, we don't need to redefine marriage - we need to eliminate it, at least on the civil level. People can get married in church all they want to, which is what marriage always was until a couple of hundred years ago, when government started getting involved in the process. And all the legal benefits associated with marriage - tax breaks, immigration sponsorship, Social Security survival benefits - could be given to people through other mechanisms. For example, Australia does its immigration sponsorship not on the basis of marriage but allows Australians to sponsor any one person who is personally important to them.

Quoting the above, because this is pretty close to my feelings on the subject. After some critical thought on the issue (probably not enough), it seems to me that "state-sponsored" marriage is a contradiction of the separation of church and state. Marriage is a sacrament of the church and it seems that in a legal sense, the state adopted it in the interest of convenience (and history and tradition, I'm aware I'm over-simplifying).

Now that the concept of "marriage" is tied to insurance and financial issues, issues of succession, et cetera, the parochial argument of the sanctity of marriage as man+woman is skew to the civil argument of two responsible citizens united for the purposes of sharing their lives (and in terms of the financial and social impact, this should be seen as a benefit to the state regardless of sex). Maybe (and probably) it shouldn't be called marriage (civil union works for me), but IMO it's to everyone's benefit to allow it.

EDIT: Probably a little off topic, but I have no idea what normal is.

 

[gaminerie]

I think his argument wasn't so much whether gay marriage or relationships are or aren't actually normal. His argument, rather, was that gay people are misguided in their quest or desire to be accepted as normal. He thinks that gay people are so set on the idea of gay marriage, in part, because they see it as a way to be acknowledged as more "normal" than they were before, as a way to prove that we can be monogamous and have functional, "normal" relationships just like everyone else.

i think i understand what you're saying here. i'm as heterosexual as heterosexual gets, but i still don't buy into the whole monogamy promise of the traditional state-dictated marriage construct.

i am more than capable of being monogamous, without someone waving a wand or a scepter over me on some random Saturday. not believing marriage creates monogamy magic doesn't affect my "normal"cy.

 

[Shawn]

What you've described is pretty much as close to an articulation of my feelings on the matter as I've ever read.

It's only in the last couple of years that I've come to believe this, but marriage should be recognized by the church, and not a state/government distinction.

 

[HouDat]

Divorce attorneys will have none of that.

 

[MLU]

The law needs to be involved somwhere in the relationship simply because when marriages end and people split, the legal rights of both parties need to be represented to ensure fairness in the splitting of assets. Since this is a necessary evil, the law also needs to be involved in the creation of the relationship which is nothing more than a contract whose terms are decided by the government in advance instead of the parties involved.

I guess you could get around this by creating a law that requires both parties to create an individual and unique contract like a pre-nuptial agreement that defines these terms.

 

[SaintsFan11]

Divorce attorneys will have none of that.

Somehow I doubt that doing away with civil marriage will reduce litigation. If anything, it would likely increase (unless you do away with co-habitation).

 

[TulsaSaint]

Exactly. The only right that comes with marriage this is really hard to give to people without civil marriage is the right to get divorced. And it's hard to figure out how to divide things up when two people don't want to be together anymore - divorce provides a helpful mechanism for doing that.

 

[johnnyd]

Exactly. The only right that comes with marriage this is really hard to give to people without civil marriage is the right to get divorced. And it's hard to figure out how to divide things up when two people don't want to be together anymore - divorce provides a helpful mechanism for doing that.

Perhaps the government should just be in the job of civil unions or maybe like incorporated union.

This does bring up an important point. In the end all incorporations are about stuff. Possession (ergo property) is 9/10th of the law.

 

[TulsaSaint]

Yeah, that would seem to me to be why government got involved in marriage in the first place. So that there could be a legal mechanism for joining, dividing, and disposing of property. Marriage, even in the religious sense, is often about property anyway. In the early United States, colonial Latin America, feudal Europe, or early modern Europe, marriage was much more about cementing a family's economic position through alliances with another family, passing an inheritance along to a daughter through a dowry, improving a family's reputation in the community through marrying into a respectable family. This idea of a marriage between two individuals for love without the larger family's economic and social position being a major issue is an incredibly new phenomenon going back no more than 150 years, and less than that in most places.

That's why I'm prone to laugh when people talk about the sanctity of traditional marriage being threatened by this relationship or that. Really, marriage means so many things to so many people in so many cultures that it probably won't perish if we tweak it yet again. Or if we get rid of it as a civil institution and leave it to individuals and churches to figure out.

 

[superchuck500]

I think his argument wasn't so much whether gay marriage or relationships are or aren't actually normal. His argument, rather, was that gay people are misguided in their quest or desire to be accepted as normal. He thinks that gay people are so set on the idea of gay marriage, in part, because they see it as a way to be acknowledged as more "normal" than they were before, as a way to prove that we can be monogamous and have functional, "normal" relationships just like everyone else.

But my response remains the same: I don't think the "quest" of those in support of gay marriage is one of being "normal."

I again believe that it has 2 components- one is the fact that there are advantages in our society that go with being married (taxes, insurance, decision making authority, etc.) and two, that marriage is deeply meaningful to humans: it marks a deep committment between two people that share love for each other and want to commit themselvs to one another for their lifetime. So it isn't that they necessarily want to get married just so they can be "normal like everyone else" but that, for human beings in our society, marriage has appreciable meaning, in and of itself - not just because its the normal thing to do.

This isn't about being "normal" IMO. I think that's a rather shallow way to look at it.

Now, I also recognize that the argument could me made that the committment and the love and all of that is something that exists regardless of whether there's an actual marriage. But I think that the meaningfulness of the marriage, as a concept, is something that is important to those who seek gay marriage. At least those who seek it for genuine reasons, and not just to rock the boat.