Another repost from ’04. Once again, because we’re nearing an election, and once again certain Topics will and have become part and parcel of the political debate, I thought it time to put this back up.

Did you know that the last week of October is national Protection From Pornography Week? Yes, indeed, signed into law by our illustrious president, Mr. Bush back in 2003. I for one had no idea I needed to be protected from it. How reassuring to know that we are being defended from dangers both real and imagined by the ever watchful gaze of our very own homegrown clerics.

We’ve spent tax dollars on this. Here is the link to the official White House proclamation.

Seems innocuous enough, even homey. All that stuff about the destructive effects of porn on children, who can argue?

Has it occurred to anyone throughout the last two decades (beginning, in my opinion, with Ed Meese—anyone remember him?) of the war on pornography that—like alcohol and tobacco–pornography is simply not for children? It seems a ludicrously simple idea to me—it was never intended for them. We manage to have reasonable laws about things not intended for children. We don’t let them drive cars (except at amusement parks, in specially constructed rides), we don’t let them drink booze, we don’t allow the sale of tobacco to minors. They can’t vote, either, because we presume to decide on their level of intelligence and ability to make political statements. That one may be arguable, but…

We don’t allow children to sign contracts. We don’t let them in to see “R” rated movies without a parent or guardian. Technically, children aren’t allowed to have credit cards, but sometimes that one slips through the cracks.

Point being, we manage these other prohibitions quite handily. Occasionally something goes wrong, but we have a system for dealing with it that doesn’t require a national week signed into effect by the president. I mean, we don’t have a National Protection From Contracts Week detailing how contracts have debilitating effects on families and children (especially children, oh, those poor innocents who cannot defend themselves from the deprivations of over-zealous loan officers and contract litigators!).

The other side of this is, however, perhaps a little more contentious. We don’t allow children to participate in all this stuff, but we make an assumption that adults may, can, and that there is, for the most part, nothing wrong with it!

So why do we need this Protection From Porn Week?

Well, it’s not aimed at children. With all that child sexual exploitation is an evil thing and no sensible adult would allow that it’s not, the target here is not to protect children. It’s not even to protect. The target is Sex.

Since the Sixties there has been a war going on in this country about the public function of Sex in our society. I won’t here detail that war—we sell products with it, but we can’t actually sell the thing itself (except in certain places under strict licensing etc.); we all like to be sexy, even when we don’t admit it, but we don’t necessarily want to follow through on the implications, i.e. have sex commensurate with the degree of sexiness we like to pretend to; sex is one of the most wanted things we have, yet there is a perverse urge to deny it to others when we deem it inappropriate (or even when it is appropriate, just public). The war has taken on all the canny subterfuge and annoying intangibility of the worst aspects of the Cold War, which I think is an ironic if apt comparison. After all, the Cold War was as much about ideas as about actions.

Attorney General John Ashcroft spent $80,000 on a curtain to hide the tits of Justice so television viewers wouldn’t be offended.

Who really was? We’ve been looking at public nudity like that for two centuries. Except for a few extreme crackpots, I don’t know of anyone who ever seriously complained—because we have all made the distinction between nudity and sexuality in these instances. I mean, no one seriously gets turned on by the nakedness of Justice. Do they?

Now, with another far right, religio-obsessed appointment to a position which requires a far more Libertarian attitude than one comparable to Sir Charles Lamb or Carrie Nation, we get closer and closer to the core program of the faction this administration represents.

Just what is it about these people that they cannot stand other human beings having orgasms which do not lead automatically to child-birth?

As a statement of principle, let me be up front. I think sex between mutually consenting individuals is a wonderful thing. Under any circumstances. Sex itself is one of the best things we can offer each other. Sex is beautiful, sex is great, sex is a thing to be sought and had and indulged. I have always thought restrictions on it between mutually consenting people were silly if not obscene.

Having said that, look at what I said. “Mutually consenting individuals”. There’s a lot of substance floating beneath the iceberg tip of that phrase. What it implies is profound.

No one should thoughtlessly indulge sex.

No one should have sex under inequitable circumstances.

No one should violate another’s individuality in order to have sex.

In order to mutually consent to something, we presume a kind of level playing field. You have to know why you’re there, know yourself, know what you’re getting into, and know what you think you’re getting out of it. You have to UNDERSTAND what’s happening.

Which is what makes all forms of sexual coercion ugly and condemnable. Which is why “No means No” has to be adhered to utterly. Which is why, for all you frat boys, jocks, and hapless wannabe Don Juans (of either gender), getting someone drunk or stoned in order to screw them is a crime.

It’s also an act of cowardice.

Equitable conditions is a little less concrete, but in the instance of children it’s absolutely clear, and you can use that as a starting point. There is no way a child is the equal of an adult in any practical sense. Adults having sex with children can never be anything but abuse because of the fundamental disconnect in status and knowledge and experience. There is no possibility of “mutual consent” in this case, because the basis on which such consent is given is absent.

That shouldn’t be too hard to understand. Other bases of inequity are slipperier but no less real. Financial inequity is a biggie. When the boss threatens job loss if sex is not forthcoming, this is an inequitable circumstance. Of course, this is a power game, and sex should be devoid of power games in order for it to be right. (Unless power is part of the Game, in which both participants are agreed in advance, but that’s not coercion.) Unfortunately, in this society, it goes beyond such simple—and prosecutable—examples as that. Despite our ardent political illusions to the contrary, we do have a class structure, and that alone tilts the scales into inequitable exchanges. Money always shifts the balance. Who you have sex with and why all too often has less to do with sex itself than with other factors. We make jokes, always have, about “marrying money” and “trophy wives”, but the basis of those jokes is not a laughing matter. Coercion goes both ways, depending on circumstances.

So you see, when I say Mutually Consenting Individuals, that is not a carte blanche. It never was, even though we treat it that way more often than not. Two people are over 21, they can vote, they should be able to do what they want with and to each other.

Is it ever that simple?

But aside from these considerations, if conditions of mutuality and consent are met, where does anyone get off suggesting it’s wrong to have sex?

And just to be clearer, I don’t mean sanctified sex-for-procreation. Nature has pulled a nasty trick on us, in my opinion, by linking sexual pleasure with procreation so strongly. It makes perfect sense in terms of Darwinian necessity, but the contents of our minds is not from that part of nature and is a separate thing from the urges of basic DNA.

It’s a cliche, of course, but still powerful, that in this society we have no problem with people going to the theater to watch a film in which people kill each other in many and varied and devious and painful ways, but if two people are naked and mutually indulging each other carnally, we try to get it banned. At least limit the audience. Heaven forbid we give our children the idea that sex is good and all right and that maybe violence is bad.

Which is a curious thing. We raise children to gradually (in theory) learn how to manage the controls of their lives in just about everything—we teach them (supposedly) about cars and traffic laws, about politics, about finances, all gradually over time, so that when they reach adulthood they have some grasp of what all this stuff is about. Except when it comes to sex. We try our best to pretend in front of them that it doesn’t exist, that it’s something they should not know anything about, and then expect them at 21 to all at once comprehend the complex and rich world of sexuality. That’s how it seems anyway.  (And if any proof of this proposition is required, just ask yourselves why this ludicrous Abstinence Only sex ed policy has not been torn to shreds by outraged parents who actually want their kids educated?  I think more parents than not are quite content to assume their children aren’t learning anything that would embarrass the parents to acknowledge.)
Now we have politicians getting in an uproar over gay marriage. They’ve been in an uproar over abortion since Roe V. Wade, and I do not believe that for most of them it has as much to do with fetuses as it has to do with sex. Notice, almost uniformly all prolife groups refuse to consider a broader, more comprehensive birth control education and availability program. Randal Terry, the former head of Operation Rescue, has stated that all forms of birth control, to his way of thinking, are abortion, murder, and immoral. No, it’s not the morality of abortion, it’s sex. Abortions represent women having sex without consequence (which is a fatuously wrongheaded way to look at it, so self-servingly puerile in its refusal to see any other possible explanation than their own). I would be less inclined to despise the Prolife Movement if they were out there encouraging people to use condoms, the Pill, or sterilization. That they condemn these things almost on par demonstrates that the issue is, really, sex.

And now we have a White House appointee with exactly these attitudes. (I don’t care if he’s a gynecologist––if I were a woman and his patient, I’d change doctors now––that obviously doesn’t make him sane on the issue.)

Let’s not kid ourselves. True, there are economic considerations to all these things, but the bottom line here is a public aversion, even hatred, of sex. It’s effective because even people who disagree with the programmatic side of this campaign find it too difficult to stand up and argue the opposite. They get squeamish. After all, it’s personal, it’s private. Of course it is, so why is the government involved at any level other than the FDA approving new contraception?

It’s a control issue. I’m being a bit Kafkaesque, now, a bit Orwellian, so fair warning that some of what follows is just me thinking out loud and very broadly.

Something to consider. Traditionally, those in power who work to oppress sex—who enact sodomy laws, or things like the Mann Act, or marital status laws, or laws regulating pornography, or who condemn people who indulge themselves in sex without guilt—the leaders who condemn immorality, who tell us that society will collapse to anarchy if we don’t control our sexual urges, who try to lock us in prisons of fear or guilt, who turn sex into property and then legislate it as such, those people have always indulged themselves, from popes to presidents. Those who are most aggressively anti-sex in public have usually lived private lives drenched in it.  (One need look at the Republican/social conservative roster of hypocrisy to see this.  Not that Democrats don’t cheat on their wives, the it’s more often a hapless thing, not tied to a vociferous Family Values political record.  Dole divorced his wife to marry his mistress.  Gingrich served his cancer-stricken wife divorce papers in the hospital so he could marry his mistress.  McCain divorced his wife to marry his mistress.  Foley campaigned against pornography and worked to stop Gay marriage and has been caught propositioning male pages.  It goes on and on.)
And they could, because they have the power to condemn those who they coerced. The ultimate inequity. The ultimate abuse.

Not all of them, mind you. I have no doubt that our current president is faithful to his wife. In our present media-invasive climate, if he weren’t we would all know soon enough. But those who benefit from his position, those who support him, those who sycophantically proclaim their loyalty, those who donate money and give favors. There is always a cadre, a circle, around such leaders who do get to have what they want.

What is distressing is that this is a button so easily pushed. We seem as a collective incapable of arguing back when our leaders tell us we need to oppress sex. Maybe if we stopped acting like sex is something we “get away with” every time we have it, stop acting like the children we claim to be trying to protect—in short, collectively pull our heads out of our posteriors and deny the politicians any right to tell us what is or is not appropriate private behavior, then we could begin to rationalize the discourse and subsequently the panic-driven legal paroxysms we seem to be going through.

Many—possibly most—people behave quite reasonably about sex. But their voices are not the ones dominating the public discourse. Instead, the discourse is driven by those who wish us to be ashamed of arousal, of touching, of orgasm, as if civilization will perish if we collectively admit to enjoying it.

Of course, if we did take this approach, then maybe we could also start addressing the real problems we have with it—the inequities in our relationships, the abuse that happens every day, the real disconnects we have between law and practice.

In order to protect children from it, we should first grow up ourselves, instead of acting like children who’ve been caught with our hands in the cookie jar.

Until then, we have present-day puritans dictating morality. And we let them, even when we know that what they’re doing is wrongheaded, because we don’t want to admit…

What? That we like sex? Or that maybe we don’t really know how to deal with it?

Start with what I suggest: Mutual Consent means a great deal more than just two people saying yes.

Protection starts with self-knowledge.

Or maybe we should just wait for the presidential “Protection From Arousal” week.

This is another repost from 2004. As the election nears, this may be something we hear more about (again!), especially since McCain has selected a pit bull for morality as a running mate—which is really a clever move, reminiscent of Nixon’s selection of Spiro Agnew to be his attack dog. Utah of course will vote red based on this kind of stuff, as will other states. It bears a re-airing, and so…

You may have heard. Missouri has become the first state in the union to establish a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. More will follow, of course, but it’s something to be the first.

I live here. This is my state.

Shame on us.

This was not, however, unexpected. Did anyone actually believe Americans, especially in the middle of the country, are ready, en masse, to embrace such a substantial change in attitude toward an institution that extends back to the murkiness of prehistory?

Prehistory. Genesis notwithstanding, I make that claim based on the fact that we have no documentary evidence that at a given moment Marriage was invented. It’s something homo sapiens brought with it into the historical period, which is really only that part of time in which we have had writing. Writing that survived, to be more specific. For all we know there may be a cache of stone tablets or whatever yet undiscovered extending that time backward reliably by a century or millennia or more. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the historical era has lasted (reliably) for ten thousand years. We can quibble over certain dates, but we’ve got evidence suggesting that humans have lived in organized social groups for at least that long, which suggests that we’ve been doing so for a lot longer. Marriage has been with us just as has been agriculture and the domesticated dog. It came with the package.

By marriage I mean a formalized union establishing what we call a Family Unit. For purposes of this discussion, I’m only interested in the Formal part of that. It’s quite self-evident that humans come together in unions of various types quite spontaneously and without the need of an overriding authority to give us permission. All the surface (and most of the deep core) attributes of marriage are manifest in self-selected associations all the time. We have never needed marriage for sex, the Fifties notwithstanding, and since the Seventies we have evolved a line on the Census to cover people with not-formalized arrangements—POSSLQ: Persons of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters.
The fact that we have had the concept of “common-law marriage” for a long, long time proves that such arrangements have also been around for long, long time. Communities recognizing this fact decide at some point that, whether the participants like it or not, the condition constitutes a marriage. This was eminently practical in the days of expanding frontiers, when more often than not the formalizing apparatus was nowhere to be found (because just as often it was intentionally left behind, a lesson most people didn’t quite pick up on).

(I recall a hysterically funny argument in high school—my first ever encounter with a hardcore fundamentalist—over the status of Adam and Eve. Who married them? No priests and it was not stated in Genesis that they were husband and wife, but rather companions. Not only weren’t they married, but obviously they practiced some form of birth control since the kiddies didn’t show up until after they were banished from Eden. Maybe that was the definition of paradise then—lot’s of sex, free food, and no kids. The reply was that God had married them and while in a state of grace, they did not have sex. The older I get, the more I think this is fractured thinking, especially when one recognizes how often fundamentalist groups, regardless of what other purpose they may have, subjugate the women and turn them into sex toys.)

Okay, so we have this Institution called Marriage. Long history. After so much time it has become something other than a solution to a problem. We’ve hardwired it, seemingly, into our culture. Every culture has it. It’s so basic that for the most part no one questions it as a cultural phenomenon, only it’s imposition as a requirement on the individual. I may reject the idea for myself, but I don’t really question it across social landscapes. Marriage is emotionally and financially useful—so much so that all attempts to rid ourselves of it don’t even get off the ground in any meaningful way. I mean, even people like me—who do not live in a formalized union with our significant other—come in time to consider ourselves “married”. (And pleasantly so. It is not, when it works, a Bad Thing. If it were, it would not be so tenaciously part of our cultural identity.)

So we defend it. We protest over the specifics—its implementation, its uses in hiding inequities between men and women, its cultural drawbacks across social lines when questions of economic and educational status arise—but we don’t question the basic idea. We realize, at some times more than others, that we conduct it wrong, that we abuse it, that it doesn’t work the way it should, but we’ve never really questioned it as a desirable practice.

Given which, it should come as no surprise to anyone that groups who are barred from it would wish to eliminate those barriers.

This is not, historically, a Gay issue. But you can see the same arguments cycled over and over again in every instance that a social norm was challenged.

Everyone should know what Miscegenation is. If you don’t, open a dictionary. Then start checking social histories.

Basically, miscegenation is a term applied to the practice of sexual intercourse with an out group. In America, it was against the law for white people to have sex with (not to mention marry) black people. (Yes, I know, a lot of mixed blood Africans found their way to the auction block in the Old South, fetching higher prices for their lighter skins. Racial laws were in place to prevent their existence, but there you have it—and why let a little illegal screwing stop us from making some money?) Go see the movie Showboat for a dramatic example. Not only was the fictional couple unable to travel south because he was white and she a mulatto and because they were married, both could end up in jail—not only that, but the movie studio wouldn’t even allow a black woman to play the part, substituting Ava Gardner for Lena Horne. In fact, laws forbidding interracial marriage were not overturned in the United States until 1967—just in case you thought these things existed only in the Dark Ages of our history.

The LAW was brought to bear to prevent marriage between two groups society had decided shouldn’t come together that way. For a more violent, but no less savage example, look at the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany. Same idea, carried to horrific extremes.

Examples of less formalized restrictions abound—look at Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Class is more often than not the basis of such restrictions. Often religion. Aristocrats have always been barred from various associations on both those bases. The whole awkward debacle of Prince Charles and Princess Di was born out of the religious problem—the woman Charles actually wanted was (gasp) Catholic! Can’t have that. (Diana was not only the right religion, but, ostensibly, a virgin—another holdover from a less enlightened time.)

In every instance over time we have grown out of it and rejected such proscriptions. After three or four generations in this country, what difference does it make if an Italian marries a Russian, or a Protestant marries a Jew? At least, where the law is concerned. What difference does it make if a white marries a black or an Asian? The law no longer concerns itself with enforcing such restrictions because we as a society have gotten to the point of recognizing the stupidity of such laws.

But here’s a new one. People of the same sex wish to marry.
What?

I imagine that for a lot of people who don’t initially react with the distorted horror of some religious objection, the first response is:

Why?

In one of the most superficial readings, this is a legitimate question. The basic assumption we grow up with (whether we maintain it into adulthood or not) is that marriage is for the formation of a Family. And “family” means mommy, daddy, and children. It’s a Standard Model image that is very difficult to disregard when questions of social propriety or morality or just plain tradition arise. Basic biology—you need a male and a female to make more of either.

So, the question follows, what would be the point of two men or two women getting married to each other?

I said superficial. For this question to have any real meaning, one has to accept the most basic concept of the purpose of marriage.

But once you put it that way—The Purpose of Marriage–you open the box and let out the genie, because up to that point most people don’t actually regard marriage as having A Purpose. It’s one of those things that simply Is. We marry because we’ve always married. Because in its way, it is Natural. What need to discuss Purpose when considering something Natural? What is the purpose of a flower?

And at that point, if one has a scintilla of intellectual honesty, one realizes that marriage is not natural. Sexual partnering is. Living in a community is. Friendship is. But the formal condition of Marriage is an invention. Like rituals. Like all communal institutions. It’s an artifice imposed upon us, which we impose or embrace ourselves, but it is not Natural. It has Purpose. We do it for certain reasons. We don’t do it to find love—love, it is presumed, is already there before the proposal is made. (We certainly don’t do it to maintain love—it doesn’t work, obviously.)

All the emotional components of a bonded relationship happen between two people whether there is a formal arrangement or not. So what do we do marriage for? Stripped of its romanticized components–which happen outside, in spite of, but certainly independent of marriage—we find a social form that fulfills certain requirements of community.

Rousseau had it pretty right—it’s a contract.

No, really. You might be surprised how many people don’t—or won’t—see it that way, but under all the pretty clothes, big cakes, photographs, champagne, and hoopla, society in fact does see it that way. Fill out these forms, meet these criteria, and you too can enter into a contractual obligation that makes you into a fiscal unit obligated for each others’ debts, with all the rights, responsibilities, and privileges thereto appertaining. The interface between family and society has always rested on one basic question: Who’s going to pay for what?

This may sound cold, but when it works, this has proven to be a very efficient boon to the human condition. Just consider the one aspect of this debate that has everyone so concerned—children. Until the last century, reliable contraception has been, well, not. Hit or miss. Often people with money got better product or could afford to “take care of” the problem by other means. Children are the inevitable by-product of humans indulging in sex without benefit of contraception. (This is a no-brainer, and may be too obvious to even state, but I don’t make assumptions like that anymore: people are dense when it comes to certain topics.) Children require.

Children require Everything. They are, to put it as bluntly as possible, expensive.

So who will pay for them?

My theory is that the institution of marriage evolved over time to by law and custom divide the responsibilities for children in such a way that the community would not be adversely affected by their production. In other words, once you’re married, whatever you produce is your responsibility. You pay for it.

Now, of course, the community will help. The way it’s come down to us today, the community will help a lot. Schools, doctors, daycare, etc etc, in various forms and to different degrees, the community provides support for families. Always has. The inadequacies of that support are legitimate political questions, but underlying it is the assumption that there is a division of labor. You, the parents, will do XYZ, we the community will do ABC, and somewhere between those extremes we will have a working social structure.

But marriage is the legal framework.

Illegitimacy, although not the stigma it once was, still has drawbacks unless the parent that keeps the kids is very careful, very resourceful, and very There. The relationship between community and single parent is somewhat different. We’re working on it.
But because we’re working on it, because it’s becoming less stigmatizing, it is clear that marriage is no more than one possible arrangement of the social contract. It’s not the only thing that will work for us.

However, it’s so old, so well practiced, so ingrained, that it is in many ways the easiest way to handle all these matters. All the benefits accrue to the married couple without their even being aware of it.

It’s that lack of awareness that pushes issues like Gay marriage into the realm of morality as opposed to a logistical problem. Because people who don’t think about it believe marriage is somehow natural, who don’t understand that it is a contractual arrangement that simply helps keep the proverbial boat unrocked, they see this issue as something Unnatural and therefore a religious issue rather than a social issue. (Of course, we have conflated religious and social issues in such a way that it is often difficult to tease them apart.)

By now—after all the debating, the media coverage, the outraged speeches from both sides, and the judicial reactions across the country—it might occur to some people to ask: what rights? I mean, part of the problem of debating this issue is that we in fact live in such an open society, with so few restrictions on personal behavior (yes, I said so few, all you who think we live in an oppressive state take note) that the difference between a married couple and a couple simply cohabiting is hardly noticeable. Those differences only emerge in extreme circumstances.

Representative Henry Hyde (R-Ill), while chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary in 1996, requested that the General Accounting Office make up a list identifying “federal laws in which benefits, rights and privileges are contingent on marital status.” The GAO response ran to 75 pages. You can go look at it online, at www.gao.gov/archive/1997/og97016.pdf

It turns out there are over a 1000 federal benefits. Add to those roughly 400 state benefits, and you can see that this is not a question of just a few “niceties” married people enjoy that make little difference. It makes a huge difference.

The laws break down into 14 groups:

Social security and related programs
Housing, food stamps
veterans benefits
taxation
federal civilian and military service benefits
employment benefits
immigration, naturalization, aliens
Indians
trade, commerce, intellectual property
financial disclosure and conflict of interest
crimes and family violence
loans, guarantees, payments in agriculture
federal natural resources and related laws
miscellaneous
Among those, let’s list a few of the biggies:

judicial protections and evidentiary immunity
crime victims’ recovery benefits
joint filing of customs claims when traveling
veterans’ discounts on medical care, education, homes loans
joint filing of tax returns
inheritance of jointly-owned real and personal property through the right of survivorship
joint insurance policies for auto, home, and health
next of kin status in cases of illness or accident
joint parenting, joint adoption
wrongful death benefits
inheritance automatically in the absence of a will

Many of these benefits can be arranged by legal instrument, if one takes the time and trouble and spends the money on the paperwork. But many cannot be had, regardless. For instance, outside of marriage there’s no guarantee of joint responsibility to the partner and to third parties (children) in such areas as child support, debts to creditors, taxes, and so on.

A lot of this has to do with money. Please note.

Money money money. Money makes de vorld go round, de vorld go round, de vorld go round…at least in the bromide made famous by Joel Gray. Ahem.

We have a lot of myths about marriage these days. Ask anybody and they will tell you that the divorce rate is at fifty percent. It’s not. The peak was reached in 1980-81 and it was 22.6 divorces per 1000 married women over the age 15. As of 2000 it had declined to 18.9 (Personally, I don’t think divorce as such is a terrible thing. We make mistakes. The idea of living unto death with a mistake just isn’t, well, good. We complicate the issue with children, though, and that is a whole other issue—and again it mainly concerns money. It does. Really. Child support, alimony, custody battles. I suppose in that last other issues enter in, like philosophy, religion, mutual animosity. But the legal structure we’ve built around the question of child custody in divorce overwhelming addresses the money issue.)

Average age of first marriage today is around 27, which is the oldest in the history of the United States.

Cohabitation is way up. That’s why unmarried couples now get a line in the census. There are close to five million unmarried couples now. There was a time you could be arrested and sentenced to prison for that. State laws, mostly, a lot of which are still on the books, but the sheer numbers militate against any kind of law enforcement crack down on what today nearly 70 % of young people take as a right and consider a good idea, at least as a prelude to marriage.

Pregnancy rates have declined, and are still declining, even though as a percentage of population unmarried pregnancy has risen.

That last is important because it directly relates to one of the chief reasons in the past to get married. There are two things to be said about it. The first, and most obvious, is that marriage to start a family is now an elective. People choose to marry, to start families…or not. Because they can. Not only because effective contraception is available, but because the economic opportunities for women have exploded since 1960. Then, a woman would have to be rich or nuts or profoundly unlucky to be stuck raising a child on her own. The job market was closed tight, as a legacy of the post WWII employment adjustment (which kicked a competent, powerful female work force out of jobs for returning veterans to take, and then made every effort possible to instate a single-breadwinner family model according to a stereotype that HAD NEVER EXISTED BEFORE in large enough numbers to merit the attempt) and women simply could not find work that paid sufficiently to raise a family on their own.

The daughters of Rosie the Riveter changed this by the mid-70s. Or at least started to. We’re still fighting over it, and pay equity is still one of the biggest thorns in the social briar patch. But it is changing.

We’re not talking about a small amount of money here. If you are an employer with a payroll of a hundred workers, and you can, by whatever means, pay a significant portion of them less–say by a third–depending on the gender make-up of your staff (which should be roughly two-fifths female, I think), you’re looking at enormous savings. If the bases for that pay disparity disappears, your bottomline just got smaller. Multiply that across the fiscal landscape of society and we’re talking about a chunk of change.

We still, financially at least, prefer that model we erected in the 50s. Male breadwinner, stay-at-home mom. When women charged through the doors into the work force, the economy made adjustments. The buying power of a dollar decreased, the wages of that single breadwinner did not keep pace, requiring two incomes to maintain or do slightly better. The price of women entering the professions, of taking their place as part of the labor force, was the devaluing of the paycheck. Hey, remove the gender question, and just ask what happens when you dump a third to one half more workers into a labor pool and expect the economy to absorb them. You get inflation, you get a value squeeze, and you get a changed social contract.

Where it becomes obvious that there is a bias can be seen in the credit industry. Single women have more difficulty getting loans. When a divorce occurs, despite the contribution she may have made to the marriage—she may have paid the lion’s share of the bills, in fact—the credit benefit goes to the man, not her. She has to rebuild from scratch. Now, what actual monetary benefit comes of this lopsided mind set I’m not sure—but I am sure there is one. All these things conspire, subversively, to drive women to seek a new marriage. It just becomes easier. When you add the fact that if she has majority custody of children (and often even when she doesn’t) and the added burden of expense on that, plus the fact that she is likely earning less at her job (most of the child support will be going into daycare and school expenses, possibly medical expenses, and doubtless there is a shortfall) AND that she has a harder time getting the same kind of credit established as her male counterpart, well, it must seem simply practical to jump once more into the marriage pool—which, if that one goes bad as well, leaves her with exactly the same credit problems she had after the last one.

Why am I harping on all this in an editorial about gay marriage? Well, I’m glad you asked that.

Because if marriage becomes a civil institution legally shorn of all gender qualifications, then none of the aforementioned equity problems can long stand. If the credit industry is suddenly forced to choose between two divorcing males over who “inherits” the credit and who gets penalized; if they are suddenly forced to contend with how to determine who is the dominant breadwinner in a two-female relationship; if employers find that family leave, parental rights, and loss-time due to caretaker duties has no gender basis; if lending institutions find that they can no longer make assumptions about future marital arrangements when considering a loan to a single/divorced/alternately married individual, then the financial (read, book-cooking) bases for inequality disintegrate.

Why? Because by legalizing gay marriage (and, yes, all you terrified neocons who think the end of the world is nigh because of such things, all the other alternative arrangements, like polygamy, line marriages, communes, etc etc) you legally make marriage an institution between two individuals, with all rights accruing thereto, AND THAT’S IT. No other assumptions can be made.

Of course things will change. But things have already changed. And will continue to change.

A word to those who view this as a strictly moral issue. A great deal has been said about how homosexuality is undermining of “traditional values” and that legitimizing it will bring moral ruin. There are two ways to address this.

The first is to point out that the so-called “moral ruin” attaching to homosexuality is a matter of ostracization. The illegality of it in the past set up a circumstance in which gays found themselves entering clandestine lifestyles in order to find fulfillment—which, of course, since the practices involved could not be conducted in the open like “normal” (read “legal”) relationships, fulfillment became virtually unattainable. Certainly, since openness was impossible, guilt accrued to the act, not so much because the impulse was wrong, but because one had to break the law to do it. Most people, quite outside their sexual orientation, desire to be good citizens, and when forced by circumstance to violate the law or custom, a erosion of one’s sense of citizenship is likely. Look at Prohibition. We turned hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of previously law-abiding citizens into criminals by a change in the law, and one result was the solid establishment of a criminal subculture with which we live to this day. Since it has stopped being the actionable issue of days past, and gays live openly, the moral wrack and ruin has failed to transpire—unless you are one so rooted in apocalyptic neuroses that the very fact that gays live openly constitutes that wrack and ruin.

The second, of course, is to draw the venom of Scripture on which much of this moral condemnation is based. The key passage is Leviticus 18:22. When you read the rest of that chapter, you find it is a whole screed about proper sexual conduct. Taboos about incest can be found here as well. Expand your reading throughout Leviticus and you find all kinds of stuff which no one today, with the exception of a few fringe cults, would tolerate for a minute. Just for a sample, check out Leviticus chapter 12—this concerns the rituals of childbirth, with references to “uncleanness”. You will note that giving birth to a male child is less unclean than giving birth to a female. Leviticus 15 deals with “sexual impurities” and, of course, the woman gets the worst end of the rules. The first half concerns men with, essentially, the Clap. But the second half deals with a woman’s menstrual cycle.

But there are others. Leviticus 20 is the penalty chapter. Verse 9 through 17 lists a number of offenses all of which carry the death penalty. Cursing ones parents brings a death sentence. There is somewhere in all this a prescribed “price” for deflowering a man’s daughter. Fine, uplifting family values stuff.

Anyway, the passage I wish to deal with in this context concerns the applicability of Leviticus to our situation. We go back to Leviticus 18, verses 24 and 25, to wit: “Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these practices, for it was by such things that the nations that I have expelled to make way for you made themselves unclean. The land became unclean; I exacted the penalty for its fault and the land had to vomit out its inhabitants.”

Now, this pertains, of course, to the Chosen People moving into Canaan, from which, presumably, the previous residents were expelled. Of course, Joshua had to do battle with some holdouts, but that’s a trifle.

Did the land “vomit out” its inhabitants? Apparently not. The entire region, however, was vacated by the Hittite during a massive catastrophe, the details about which we are still rather fuzzy, but seem to have had something to do with the Trojan War. See, it was around the same time. Troy fell and in the aftermath Something Big happened, remarked in many places around the Mediterranean. I would guess a massive economic collapse. The Trojan War, if Homer is to be believed even a little bit, lasted ten years and involved huge resources. Troy was a crossroads in a vast trading network. Its demise no doubt caused more than a little difficulty.

What does this have to do with Moses and the Tribes? The area into which they moved had been part of the Hittite sphere. A hinterland, really. In the political, economic, and military vacuum following the collapse of the Hittite Empire, the Hebrews moved in against demoralized, unsupported provincials, and kicked them out. Yahweh didn’t do it. Global politics did. Once the Hittite recovered, becoming the Babylonian Empire, they easily swept down, reconquered what had become Israel, and the second Hebrew Exile began.

Between these two events we have the stories of Joshua, Saul, David, and Solomon. And to a large extent, these people lived in a Hellenized world. Greek culture dominated everywhere except Egypt, which took a while to become Hellenized under the Ptolemies. This is important in relation to the story of David and Jonathan. It makes perfect sense in Greek terms, and it was perfectly homoerotic.

And David was the favored of Yahweh.

He also had a man killed so he could take his wife. He remained God’s favorite. He had several hundred wives. Still a favorite. Solomon, his son, had more wives, and lots of concubines, and was one of the principle characters in one of the more erotic love stories in history.

The inconsistency of Yahweh in these matters makes sense when you realize that all these laws, rather than coming down from Sinai, were manmade. No, I don’t expect fundamentalists to be swayed, but I do expect a little perspective from people less radicalized in their religious outlook. If homosexuality makes you uncomfortable, it’s YOUR problem—you may not refer to Scripture to legitimize your prejudice. Live with it. There is not one single passage in the Bible that says anything at all about gay marriage. There are three beautiful love stories that are clearly homosexual. Ruth and Naomi (the word “clave” is used to describe their relationship, which is exactly the same word used in describing husband-wife relationships); David and Jonathan; and Daniel and Ashpenaz (the Hebrew describing their relationship is chesed v’rachimin–chesed translates as “mercy” but v’rachimin, which is used in a plural form suggesting more than one of its usual meanings, which includes “physical love”).

But go ahead, peruse Leviticus, read all the rules and restrictions and requirements. The point I wish you to understand is—we don’t do that stuff anymore. Not for a long time have we considered these rules, most of them, useful, nor have we taken to heart the penalties for noncompliance. We live—and have lived for a long while now—in a post-Levitical world.

And civilization has not come to a halt. In fact, there has been considerable improvement.

So why pick and choose among laws we no longer pay any attention to when we find one that agrees with our prejudices and claim that we’re in violation of God’s law when we ignore it? (The answer is too obvious to state. I hope so, anyway.)

When we hear conservative opposition to same-sex marriage, there is always the claim that marriage is between a man and woman for the purpose of having children. While this is certainly the way a majority of marriages play out, it is ridiculous to assume that this is the only reason to be married. But it does in fact support the contention that marriage is, ultimately, an institution with strong, if not primarily, monetary concerns. The production of children has traditionally been a measure of potential wealth for the community. We have entered a period in which this is no longer the case, but it takes time for custom to catch up to reality. It is nevertheless an imposition of prejudice, seeking to dictate not only to gay couples but to straight couples what they OUGHT to be doing. Perhaps when gay marriage is recognized and legitimate, we heterosexuals might find other, more relevant reasons for marriage across the board.

The bigot will not be swayed. The bigot must be defeated. The bigot hates and then finds justification for hatred. The first thing to do in the fight against bigotry is to learn. If this exegesis has in any way aided that particular quest, well, good. But let me make this final observation: bigotry like this stands only in ignorance, and not simply book ignorance. I have found in my life that it becomes impossible to hate people different from me once I know them (barring, of course, the obvious—ax murderers, rapists, environmental despoilers…but even these people I don’t exactly hate, so much as fail to understand). It’s easy to buy into stereotypes until you have to deal with someone who is supposed to fit that stereotype, and discover that what you thought you knew just isn’t true.

But for now I live in Missouri, which has decided to enact its ignorance into law. I return once more to my theme, that a whole lot of money is being spent on this issue, by those who are more afraid of having to correct the inequities still extant in so-called “normal” relationships than any kind of apocalyptic fall-out from allowing same-sex marriage. They play upon the uninformed fears of those who still believe marriage is—at least as far as society is concerned—a matter of romance and “traditional” family values. Of course, marriage is that. But that doesn’t need defending. I doubt you could hurt it where it truly exists between two people who love and respect each other, enough to make a lifelong commitment.

No, the only thing you could damage is the legal standing to deny humanity to people you don’t care for. Whether they’re gay or straight.