So many people have emailed me the blogpost by "Queer Kids of Queer Parents Against Gay Marriage!" that I feel a need to point it out to any of my readers who have yet to see it. The variety of comments following the post suggest the authors have touched quite a nerve. It merited a link in Melissa Harris-Lacewell's post on The Nation website. (I LOVE her on Rachel Maddow!)
Harris-Lacewell succeeds in walking a very fine line. She supports marriage equality for same-sex couples but offers a critique of marriage itself. "Our work," she writes, "must be not just about marriage equality, it should also be about equal marriages, and about equal rights and security for those who opt out of marriage altogether." Identifying herself as a black, feminist, marriage equailty advocate, she writes that movement work "must be staunchly supportive of same-sex marriage, while rejecting the marriage-normative framework that silences the contributions of queer life." It is precisely such contributions that the "queer kids..." blog (above) seek to illuminate.
I also loved learning from Harris-Lacewell's post about a new history of slave marriages that concludes that such marriages were real, even though they were not recognized by law.
Harris-Lacewell's final call echoes the imperative of the Beyond Marriage statement written more than three years ago, as well as the guiding principle of my book.
We must do more than simply integrate new groups into an old system. Let's use this moment to re-imagine marriage and marriage-free options for building families, rearing children, crafting communities, and distributing public goods.
This is precisely the work that the mainstream marriage-equality movement refrains from doing. As Harris-Lacewell points out, the pragmatic political strategy is insisting that allowing same-sex couples to marry will not change marriage. But it's a strategy that comes with too high a price tag, and the voices within and without the gay rights movement seeking to make marriage matter less need to speak out more.
Showing posts with label history of marriage and the law. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history of marriage and the law. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
MARRIAGE FOR 17-YR-OLD BRISTOL PALIN -- HOW 1950's!
Sarah Palin's 17 year old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant. So why no uproar from conservative Christians (as Sarah Palin describes herself), or from those abstinence-only sex-education Republicans?? Because she's marrying her boyfriend, Levi Johnston, that's why!
How 1950's! That's the decade that saw a peak number of teenage pregnancies (the national teen birth rate reached a peak in 1957, at 96 births per 1,000 women ages 15-19.) Half the pregnancies resulted in "shotgun weddings" to preserve the young woman's honor. Those marriages didn't fare too well, but Bristol's is sure to last through the November election, which is all that really matters, right? (Of those young women who did not marry, over 25,000 a year were sent to more than 200 unwed-mother homes where they gave birth secretly and almost always relinquished their children for adoption. Women who gave birth and kept their children, including the black women who were excluded from most of the unwed-mother homes, faced harsh state policies, including eviction from public housing and denial of public assistance. More on this in Chapter 2 of my book.)
Of all the legal and social changes of the late 1960's and 1970's, none is more significant than the end of "illegitimacy" as a legal category and the reduction in social stigma associated with nonmarital birth. Women now have the choice to bear children without a husband, with the knowledge that the law won't discriminate against those children. They also can choose an abortion...although I doubt Bristol Palin really had that choice, in spite of the fact that the Alaska legislature this year kept a bill requiring parental consent from passing. (You might want to donate to Planned Parenthood Alaska to help keep it that way.)
Still, it's no surprise that the daughter of a prominent abstinence-only conservative is pregnant. Abstinence-only sex education doesn't work. Meanwhile, we haven't heard a date for the wedding, so I'm thinking this marriage plan is, well, somewhat last minute. You see, if Bristol wanted to raise this baby on her own --like the teenage girls in Gloucester, MA -- this story would be playing completely differently.
How 1950's! That's the decade that saw a peak number of teenage pregnancies (the national teen birth rate reached a peak in 1957, at 96 births per 1,000 women ages 15-19.) Half the pregnancies resulted in "shotgun weddings" to preserve the young woman's honor. Those marriages didn't fare too well, but Bristol's is sure to last through the November election, which is all that really matters, right? (Of those young women who did not marry, over 25,000 a year were sent to more than 200 unwed-mother homes where they gave birth secretly and almost always relinquished their children for adoption. Women who gave birth and kept their children, including the black women who were excluded from most of the unwed-mother homes, faced harsh state policies, including eviction from public housing and denial of public assistance. More on this in Chapter 2 of my book.)
Of all the legal and social changes of the late 1960's and 1970's, none is more significant than the end of "illegitimacy" as a legal category and the reduction in social stigma associated with nonmarital birth. Women now have the choice to bear children without a husband, with the knowledge that the law won't discriminate against those children. They also can choose an abortion...although I doubt Bristol Palin really had that choice, in spite of the fact that the Alaska legislature this year kept a bill requiring parental consent from passing. (You might want to donate to Planned Parenthood Alaska to help keep it that way.)
Still, it's no surprise that the daughter of a prominent abstinence-only conservative is pregnant. Abstinence-only sex education doesn't work. Meanwhile, we haven't heard a date for the wedding, so I'm thinking this marriage plan is, well, somewhat last minute. You see, if Bristol wanted to raise this baby on her own --like the teenage girls in Gloucester, MA -- this story would be playing completely differently.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
DID YOU KNOW THIS ABOUT MARRIAGE AND THE LAW?
The law used to make marriage the dividing line between first class children (born to married parents) and second class -- or worse -- children (born to unmarried parents). The Los Angeles Times published my op-ed about the Supreme Court ruling 40 years ago that marked the beginning of the end of this distinction. When I argue today that marriage shouldn't be the dividing line between relationships the law counts and those it doesn't, I am advocating a continuation of a set of changes that altered the meaning of marriage forever, including ending wives subjugation to their husbands and allowing no-fault divorce. This change -- giving constitutional rights to children born outside marriage and their parents -- is the least recognized change that took place in the era of 1968 and the early 1970s....but it might be the most important!
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