GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

We haven’t heard from many women lately, nor many left-of-center opponents of same-sex marriage, so I thought I’d link to one of the first pieces staking out that territory. It’s from Salon, and it’s headlined “Same-sex marriage: I don’t care if it is legal, I still think it’s wrong — and I’m a lesbian.”

Author Dr. Laurie Essig is an assistant professor of sociology at Middlebury College in Vermont. She teaches a variety of undergraduate courses including “Sociology of Freakishness” and “Sociology of Heterosexuality.”

Some excerpts:

Although we like to pretend that marriage is natural and universal, it is an institution founded in historical, material and cultural conditions that ensured women’s oppression — and everyone’s disappointment. Monogamous, heterosexual marriages were an invention of the Industrial Revolution’s emerging middle class….

What annoys me is that no one, not even queers, can imagine anything other than marriage as a model for organizing our desires….

But why should those of us who have organized our lives in a way that looks a lot like heterosexual marriage be afforded special recognition by the government because of that?….

The legalization of gay marriage does not make me feel liberated as much as it makes me feel depressed. It’s sort of like getting excited about gays in the military — until I remember that I don’t really care about the military as an institution.