On marriage and “marriage”
CommentsOne of my favorite same-sex marriage advocates (and an occasional commenter at GaysDefendMarriage.com) is Fannie, of the fine blog Fannie’s Room. A little over a week ago, she complained on her blog about the excessive use of quotation marks by marriage defenders (her term, not mine - thanks Fannie). Fannie describes the practice as:
excessive unnecessary quotations marks to cast suspicion on the legitimacy of same-sex relationships. Like stubborn segregationists blocking access to white schools, they fail to concede a loss when they have, in fact, lost. Scare quotes, or more accurately “sneer quotes,” are non-direct quotations used to indicate scorn, sarcasm, and/or disagreement with another person’s usage of a word.
As someone who uses such quotes around gay marriage some but not all of the time, I thought it might be useful for me to delineate three reasons why I do so, and give same-sex marriage advocates a chance to respond. We may not change each other’s minds, but at least we’ll understand each other better.
1. Liberals do it too. I have frequently seen quotation marks around terms conservatives use that liberals don’t like. For example, many pro-choice people will say someone is anti-choice, but sometimes they’ll call that person “pro-life.” In other words, he calls himself pro-life, but in actuality his policies are anything but. He favors the death penalty, and he cares about the fetuses of poor women only until they’re born, but then he cuts every program that might help the child have a successful life. Another example is referring to right-wing religious people as “Christian.” They’ll say the president of the California Values Alliance is a “Christian” who forgets the call of Jesus to help people in need. I wonder if Fannie and others like her object to the examples I gave above when used by liberals?
2. I have to do it. I know and understand and respect that Fannie thinks that Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin are married. I also know that the state of California considers them married. But in my opinion, they are not now and never can be married, for marriage is a union of a man and a woman. In fact, that’s precisely what we’re arguing about. Why should I give in when the debate has only begun? An analogy: Most opponents of the reparative therapy movement, including myself, refer to people who credit their therapy for a transition from gay to straight as “ex-gay.” That’s because I don’t believe, and most LGBT people don’t believe, that therapy can make a gay person straight. If I stopped using the quotation marks, I’d be surrendering on the debate before it even began. For the same reason, I refer to Messianic “Judaism” because no serious Jew of any movement considers it to be Judaism.
3. I think it’s more respectful. Yeah, respectful. If I stopped referring to same-sex “marriage,” which I’m open to doing if people on the other side tell me it’s important to them, I’m not going to start using the term marriage to refer to things I do not believe are marriages. Instead, I’m going to look for creative ways to refer to same-sex marriages, husbands and wives. So: “Del and Phil had a same-sex legal ceremony of commitment at City Hall” and “Ellen DeGeneres and the woman in her life had a California lesbian union in front of several hundred friends.” (Not Ellen and her wife got married.) I find it more respectful to use the word my opponents want to be used, but to put it in quotes to indicate I do not agree with it, but that’s the term they prefer. Do you think a Muslim would rather I said that Islam is a “religion of peace” - or that Islam is a hate-filled faith of genocidal murderers? I think the former.
If anyone has a suggestion for how I can be more respectful of the other side of this debate without violating my conscience, I’m interested in hearing it.
Whatever you call Massachusetts and California same-sex “marriages,” the one thing they are absolutely not is marriage equality. Because they do not include all of the rights of marriage, including the 1138 federal rights, they are the same as state civil unions or state domestic partnerships. Barak Obama has pledged to support Federal Civil Unions which would give us all of the federal rights of marriage. That would be true marriage equality.
The fight for marriage, per se, rather than the rights of marriage have hurt our community tremendously! 8 days before the California Supreme Court’s ruling the Michigan Supreme Court ruled their state’s SSM ban strips public employees of their domestic partner benefits. Pensions, health care, family leave GONE! Michigan’s ban on SSM and DP was the backlash to 2004 Massachusetts “marriages.”
Now, Arizona, the only state to ever defeat an anti-same-sex marriage constitutional amendment (November 2006, 51% to 49%) has put another SSM ban constitutional amendment on the November ballot. The previous one would have also banned domestic partnerships, this one does not. Previous attempts to place another anti-same-sex marriage amendment on the 2008 November ballot had failed and the issue had been thought dead. However, on the last day of the legislative session and citing the California Supreme Court’s action the Republicans succeeded. This was only 6 weeks after the California ruling—the backlash time is getting shorter.
Federal Civil Unions=Marriage Equality, state SSM does not.
Having raised the quotes issue earlier, I thought I’d give a quick comment.
David, you simply are not the arbiter of what consitutes a marriage–the state gets that honor in our society. Your belief that Del and Phyllis are not married is factually inaccurate. I get it that your intent in referring to their marriage as a “marriage” is a way to demonstrate your belief that, despite what the state says, you don’t view them as married.
If you were really interested in legitimate debate you’d find a better and less demeaning way to make your point and avoid parroting the behavior of right-wing idealogues.
PS If you’re attempted to rebut with “well, left-wing idealogues do it too”, see my comment on your “double standard” post.
Dan D.-
In my view, the state is not the arbiter of what constitutes a marriage any more than it is the arbiter of what constitutes Shabbat or bar mitzvah or rabbi. In France, the state licenses rabbis, but here I have the religious freedom to choose to recognize some rabbis and to refuse to recognize others. If the government declared a six-day week, Shabbat would be all over the map, even though the government would call a particular day “Saturday.” I wouldn’t care. I don’t decide when Shabbat is based on the government. I think your belief that Del and Phyllis are married is factually inaccurate. We’re not going to solve this. I mean, if Del and Phil travel to Texas, where they are legally not married, are you willing to acknowledge that they are factually bachelorettes?
A am interested in legitimate debate - that’s part of the reason why I brought it up. I can’t think of a good way to solve this problem, but I am open to suggestions.
Finally, about left-wing use of quotations marks, I have been using them with “ex-gays” for years. Do you recommend I start referring to ex-gays, without the quotation marks?
For what it’s worth, I don’t complain about your use of scare-quotes. We have serious disagreements. There’s only so much they can be camouflaged in the name of civility and beyond a certain point it’s silly to try.
David,
Thanks for your response.
I would just like to clarify that I don’t object to scare quotes. Rather, I was making an observation. Scare quotes are a way to cast suspicion on the legitimacy of someone else’s use of a word, or to indicate disagreement with the usage.
While I don’t object to scare quotes, I find them to be inaccurate when used to reference same-sex marriage when such marriages are legal. I would tend to agree with Dan that the state, actually, is the final arbiter of what constitutes marriage as the state is the institution doling out marriage licenses. At the same time, I can see how you feel otherwise if you do not believe the state is the final arbiter of what constitutes marriage.
In the case of the LifeSite article I was quoting from, the only surprising use of scare quotes was on the word “pioneer” here :
“Participants could hardly hold back the tears for Lyon and Martin, whom Newsom lauded as ‘pioneers’”
Does LifeSite disagree that the first women legally married in CA are pioneers? LOL!
Fannie-
I would say the LifeSite quote is retarded, but I don’t want to insult retarded people, who are generally far more sensible than that. The fact is, Newsom very well could be referring to their entire lives, during which they have been pioneers as an out lesbian couple at a time such a thing was virtually unheard of (remember, I’m an expert at gay and lesbian history). You can tell the LifeSite people I said the Lyon-Martin couple has been pioneering long before anyone every heard of LifeSite. (By the way, when one of them, I don’t remember which one, disagreed with my retelling of an early-1960s San Francisco gay and lesbian event for which I relied on published secondary sources that didn’t comport with their memories, they called my editor and chewed his ear off.)
For the record, if ex-gay people want to be called ex-gay and believe that they are ex-gay, then yes, I object to you using quotes. It’s still demeaning.
Dan-
I admire your consistency.
Let me take it a step further. If an actor named Tim Cruz was declared the Messiah of some fake religion, and he really believed he was the Messiah and wanted to be referred to as the Messiah, would it be wrong to call him the “Messiah” of Scientography? Are we obligated under your system to call him the Messiah?
Or take Robert Mugabe, whose election as “President” of Zimbabwe was a complete farce. Now, Mugabe wants to be called President and believes he is President. Am I wrong to call him the “President” of Zimbabwe?
What an interesting way of thinking:
One can have a marriage that is recognized by the state and by one’s church and yet it should be “marriage” rather than marriage.
While at the same time, one can write articles that are NOT carried in the Dallas Voice or any other gay newspaper and can be a columnist for the Dallas Voice and several other LGBT newspapers.
But in a world in which honesty and integrity are immaterial I guess this standard would make sense. After all, Benkof is consistent. He always recognizes what he wants to recognize regardless of the inconvenience of facts or truth.
Sigh. There you go again. Timothy Kincaid thinks because he has quoted a low-level editor at the Dallas Voice that he’s proven my column will no longer run in that paper. Meanwhile, I have been negotiating with the publisher of the Dallas Voice, Robert Moore, who is the person who actually gets to make the final decision about what happens with the four installments I wrote specifically for them and which have already been approved to run in their paper. Today I got an E-mail from Robert at 12:46 p.m. with a specific monetary offer, along with permission to sell the columns I wrote for them in any publication I like. In our industry, that’s typically called a “kill fee.” Until I got that letter, I didn’t know for sure if one, two, three, four, or no future installments of my column would run in the Dallas Voice. Now that I know (as soon as I got home from lunch and opened my E-mail), I removed that reference from my Web site. There’s no conspiracy. Everything I wrote was true at the time I wrote it.
The stupidity of Timothy Kincaid and his cohort is stunning. Now that I have Robert’s permission, I can sell those four columns in any newspaper I want. In case you haven’t noticed, I have a pretty good track record of placing opinion pieces in major mainstream publications - the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and so on. If only one of the four installments in question is in a major publication like that, it will do far more damage to the “marriage equality” movement than if every gay newspaper in the world had run it.
This behavior is of course typical of the LGBT community, which is obsessively focused on symbolism (we can’t have a gay-press columnist who opposes gay marriage! we need the exact same rights in California to be called marriage, not domestic partnership!) and not so interested in getting results (letting Benkof waste his time on an audience he can barely reach instead of encouraging him to make a bigger splash with an audience he can, helping LGBT people who are actually suffering from real issues, not symbolic ones). It shouldn’t be surprising for such a selfish, morally confused community, but somehow whenever they behave with such cluelessness, it catches me offguard.
And still the “About Us” page contains the following language:
“Gays Defend Marriage is a website founded by David Benkof (formerly David Bianco), a columnist for the Dallas Voice and several other LGBT newspapers … “
And now this site no longer makes claims about David being a columnist (that I know of). Good.
The marriage amendment is not anti-marriage and it is not a ban on SSM. It affirms the both-sexed nature of the social institution that is recognized, not owned, by the government.
Timothy, for the sake of honesty and integrity, and to backup your claim about what is and is not marriage, please state the essentials of SSM in California and list the definitive legal requirements.
It is necessary to distinguish marriage from non-marriage.
What is its core — by which marriage can be identified, protected, and preferred by society? Just the facts, please.
–> “Like stubborn segregationists blocking access to white schools”
The advocates of SSM promote a sex-segregative arrangement and seek to push that under the auspices of the social institution that has always integrated the sexes.
Like the segregationists which promoted white supremacy, the SSMers promote their own brand of identity politics and would press an unjust nonmarriage purpose onto a foundational social institution. They’d have the government own civil society.
The SSMers, not the defenders of sex integration, are the are the descendants of the racist segregationists whose anti-miscegenation system selectively segregated the sexes, based on a racist identity filter, and undermined responsible procreation, by obstructing the legitimization of children. Segregating fatherhood from motherhood is another thing the two would have in common.
Given the way that SSMers declare disagreement about this issue amidst their ranks to be an act of heresey and the dissenter to be a self-hating traitor, well, they have that in common with the white supremacists, as well. Hiding behind an unprincipled imitation of states rights, the SSMers pretend that there is not one single definition of marriage for the country but they have as their goal, as per SSM argumentation, the imposition of thier definition on the entire nation. That, too, they have in common with the bigotry of the hawkers of white supremacy of old.