Fain would I wed
Some amusing arguments against gay marriage…
If you have a cognitively-challenged underclass, as every large nation has, you need some anchoring institutions for them to aspire to; and those institutions should have some continuity and stability. Heterosexual marriage is a key such institution. In a society in which nobody had an IQ below 120, homosexual marriage might be plausible. In the actual societies we have, other considerations kick in.
It is difficult to decide where to begin in pulling this apart.
To accept the basic oh-so-flawless premises here, though, wouldn’t it be simpler to explain the simple idea of marriage (1) to the “cognitively-challenged” (ah, the conservative exploits political correctness to avoid letting his audience know he means them!) - rather than the idea of sex-restricted marriage (2)? Count the words in my explanations of them:
- two people who love each other getting together in a legal union
- two people who love each other getting together in a legal union. If you love someone of the “opposite” gender to you then this applies. If you love someone of a similar gender to you then you’re excluded. If you’re transgendered, consider yourself ignored.
Surely the first one, where gender is irrelevant, is a lot simpler to explain to the “cognitively-challenged”?
The actual argument here appears to boil down to this, though:
- If everyone was smart, people could marry whoever they want.
- Not everyone is smart.
- People should only be able to marry one another if my friends and I want them to.
Don’t we elect smart people to ensure that democracy does not mean idiocracy? It is frightening to imagine this lack of logic passing for argument.
Moving on:
Human nature exists, and has fixed characteristics.
Source? Just gonna go ahead and give this sentence the “anti-diversity” seal of approval.
We are not infinitely malleable.
*cough* How did we evolve?
Human society and human institutions need to ”fit” human nature, or at least not go too brazenly against the grain of it.
If there is a human nature (some kind of average of the way that people do things across the board), then human institutions are an extension of it, an aspect of the cultural components to our evolution. That something is “natural” - say, rape, murder: presumably components of human nature as they pop up again and again - must mean that our institutions need to “fit” that something. This is precisely why no nation on earth has ever criminalised murder.
Homophobia seems to be a rooted condition in us.
Yes. Not innately, though. But because when we grow up we see heterosexuals prized over homosexuals - in the same way that we see colonists prized over indigenous peoples, Europeans prized over Africans, the rich prized over the poor, men prized over women, the abled prized over the disabled - we develop an instituationalised homophobia. Again, natural != moral, Thomas Aquinas.
It has been present always and everywhere, if only minimally (and unfairly — there has always been a double standard here) in disdain for “the man who plays the part of a woman.”
Okay, so it’s unfair. Thank you. Notice misogyny here, not to mention the ignorance of lesbianism. Oh, and the prizing of homosexuality in, say, settings in Ancient Greece, the pre-Colombian Americas, the Pacific Islands, Japan pre-Europeanisation …
There has never, anywhere, at any level of civilization, been a society that approved egalitarian (i.e. same age, same status) homosexual bonding.
WHERE HAS THERE BEEN A SOCIETY THAT APPROVED EGALITARIAN HETEROSEXUAL BONDING? Marriage in the Western tradition is a contractual thing, an extension of property rights. Nothing egalitarian about that.
This tells us something about human nature — something it might be wisest (and would certainly be conservative-est) to leave alone.
Great. Be a conservative. Ignore the facts and ignore the chance to improve your world. Why even get out of bed?
The man’s paternity is being violated
Armando Martinez, president of the College of Catholic Lawyers (Mexico), on a new law passed by the federal district government of Mexico City making abortion legal during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Abortion is generally illegal elsewhere in Mexico with exceptions if the mother’s life is in danger or if the pregnancy is a result of rape. Apparently the law’s “discriminatory” because the foetus’ father “has no say”.
No, Armando, he doesn’t have a say. But then he’s only contributed a few minutes of physical exertion to the foetus - not 9 months of a crazy body, a hell of a lot of physical and mental pain and upwards of 20 years of obligation to a child.
Women’s rights round-up; or, ad feminam
First - firsts, three:
- Dalia Grybauskaitė is elected as President of Lithuania. The Thatcher of the East. The Shipley of the North. The (Indira) Gandhi of the West. Anyway, now the Lithuanians get to say “women hold the most powerful economic/political positions in our country. Feminism is no longer needed.”
- Kuwait sees its parliamentiary elections usher in four (4 [iv]) women MPs. A first, a second, a third and a fourth for Kuwaiti women’s rights. Still, the PM’s the emir’s nephew and the parliament is essentially a religious institution. BUT…
The master’s tools will never tear down the master’s house.
¡Viva la revolución! - Ruth Padel is “elected” (read: drawn out in an Oxbridgian raffle, kind of how they decide on the next Pope) to the post of the Oxford Professor of Poetry, the first woman to have this done to her. She’s crazy looking which is kinda refreshing:
Mind you, she is English. As you probably guessed, my cynicism extends hither also; she probably only got the post because of the sexual harrassment charges levied against her competition. Whether true or not, they’re conceivable. That said, I wouldn’t mind Byron, cad that he was, having a post like this. Hmm. To Virginia then:
“Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
Ruth, don’t forget your mothers. You’ll never be told not to forget Shakespeare, Milton, Sophocles, Wordsworth, Shelley, Pope … But you may just need to be told not to forget Eliot, Sand, and Jane, Charlotte and Emily.
- Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Meanwhile, in Iowa, a prison inmate gives birth in her cell. Alone.
“Around 7 a.m., a guard came in and asked me if I wanted breakfast. I was crying and holding my stomach and said that I needed a nurse, but he only said, ‘Do you want breakfast or not?’
“And that’s when it hit me — I’m going to have this baby on my own.”
The beat goes on …
A man’s library is a sort of harem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Conduct of Life. 1860
IT IS A grave day when something in which you have trusted for your whole life is revealed for the sham it is. That day is hammer in the nail of the Enlightenment’s coffin, the triumph of postmodernism, W.H. Auden’s ‘Stop all the clocks’ - though trite - ringing true.
And today, for me, is that day. After dragging myself out of my hangover and bed, I managed to make it up the hill through the distressingly wet rain to the university library. With a syntax assignment due tomorrow, it’s not the first time I’ve been there looking for grammars of obscure languages over the last few days.
I spent all of Wednesday there, unable to find a single language for which there was a grammar accounting for ordering of elements inside the noun phrase. (Ignore the specifics and bear with me.) I then went to band practice which lacked a key member thanks to prolonged sickness so ginned up and won a game of Risk. Possibly for the first time in my life.
I returned to the library on Thursday, almost had all the information I needed (on Basque) but discovered the world offers no evidence of where numerals go with respect to adjectives (in Basque). Despairing, I headed off to work. That night I even tried to find information on the internet, the last bastion of hope for me finishing the assignment. No dice, somehow.
Friday I worked. Then danced.
Saturday I felt sick. Then danced. Then got stuck on facebook.
So today, being Sunday, I realised it’s my last chance not to fail the paper in question. I, as I mentioned, got up the wet hill with most of its moisture precipitating onto your humble narrator. About an hour before the library was scheduled to shut, I at last found what I needed. A grammar of Danish which was neither too Chomskyan and inutile nor too simplistic, geared towards those learning the language. I got all the data I needed about this arbitrarily-chosen language. Realising then that I had only fifteen minutes to go before the library shut, I frantically consulted Greenberg to find another SVO language with which to compare Danish. I found a contender in the library catalogue and, praise be, Bukiyip had the perfect book on its divine grammar.
I had just headed back to my desk to type up nonsense sentences to offer Liz Pearce as examples when a library official told me that the library was closing through the noise emanating from her iPod, headphones firmly lodged in her ears. I asked her if the Issues desk was still open and she looked as though I’d asked her for her number. She responded, “Uggggh I don’t know that kind of information”. At any rate, I packed up my things and hastened downstairs to find all the lights off at the main desk. Having the utmost respect for libraries prevented me from simply walking out with its grammars, so I asked if I could just leave my name and ID card with them and return in the morning to issue the books properly. I was screeched at by someone who was apparently being waited upon by a mysterious entity called “Taxis” which was repeatedly invoked as though it were a divine power. Angrily they insisted on putting the books behind the shelf for me to pick up within twenty-four hours. Downcast, I trudged outside, the rain curdling my hair product.
Some harem.
