Vicki, you asked me:
You say that you do not need marriage to raise children. Do you mean that any given individual can have and raise children without the benefit of marriage, or are you saying that you believe society as a whole does not benefit from the institution of marriage as a means of forming family units within which to raise the next generation?
Basically I think you are asking me what what my ideal society is. And I have avoided answering because the question is too big, and I don't have a pat answer. And RL has been killing me lately anyway.
So let me give you a few quick answers, anway.
About gay people: I can't see any reason whatsoever why they shouldn't be able to enter into civil unions, which, in the eyes of the law, should be perfectly comparable with a heterosexual civil union in all aspects except those that have to do with a heterosexual couple's natural ability to have biological children (in most instances anyway). I agree with those who think that churches should have the right to bless only those couples whose unions they approve of, and they should be perfectly entitled to reject those couples whose unions they disapprove of. In other words, a gay couple don't have the 'right' to be blessed in church, if the church disapproves of homosexual marriage.
If gay people are not allowed to live together, and if they are not allowed to have consensual sex with each other, then I definitely and quite strongly disapprove of such a law. If gay people are killed because they are gay, I get furious. But I'm usually furious when people are killed just because they are considered 'less valuable' than other people. In other words, I don't get more upset when gay people are killed for being gay than I do when girls are killed for being girls (in truth I get rather more upset when girls are killed for being girls).
As for marriage in itself, and what it does for society, that's a tough question. I think marriage has basically two functions: one that has to do with caring and providing, and one that has to do with ownership. By ownership I mean one person's right to control other people. The 'ownership' aspect of marriage manifests itself in many ways. In many cultures, young people belong to their parents or even to the head of their clan, and it is the father, uncle, older brother or the head of the clan who decides who will marry whom. Marriages are sometimes sealed when the bride is newborn and the groom is a few years old. In several countries today, girls no older than eight or nine are sold to men three, four or five times older than themselves and are required to fill all the functions of a wife, including the function of having sex with their husband, even though they themselves are small children.
In India, a wife has been regarded as so much her husband's property that she had had no right to live when her husband died, and she has been required to burn herself to death on her husband's funeral pyre.
In several cultures in Africa, fathers have not really been required to care for their children. The children, however, have been required to care for their father.
In countries and cultures where marriage is very much about ownership, polygamy is a natural consequence of this state of affairs.
Where marriage is about ownership, men and women don't have the same sort of duties to each other and not the same right to choose their spouses or to get a divorce.
When marriage is about ownership, the owner has the right to punish his property for being unfaithful to him, much like the slave owner had the right to punish his slave. I once saw a documentary about a Christian Coptic village in Egypt, where the men were perfectly entitled to batter their wives to death if the wives had dared to speak to a male stranger.
Historically, when marriage has been about ownership, fathers have sometimes had the right to decide whether or not a newborn baby, particularly a newborn girl, should be accepted into the family or not. If the baby was not accepted, the father had the right to send her away from the family's home and leave her alone to die.
All things considered, I don't much like the ownership aspect of marriage, particularly not when the law gives one spouse the right to punish or abuse the other spouse or their children.
I like the caring and providing aspect of marriage so much better. However, in the same way that ownership is not always expressed in terms of marriage - the slave owner was not married to his slaves, after all - so caring isn't always an aspect of marriage. That is very true in the case of rearing children. A friend of mine, who has spent a lot of time in parts of South America, says that it is very common there for people to eschew marriage and to have sexual relations with a lot of partners. That way the women often have children with several men. The mother is her children's chief provider, but the man who is currently her lover is expected to pitch in and help.
In many parts of the western world, not least in certain social strata in America, it is common for young women to raise their children with the help of their own mothers. In parts of Africa, paternity has not been really interesting, and the children's maternal uncle has been the important father figure in their lives.
I'm saying that family structure has varied wildly in different cultures and over time.
But I'm not trying to say that marriage is a bad thing or that it is unimportant. I, too, think that a happy heterosexual marriage, where the parents are committed to each others as more-or-less equal partners and where they really care for their children, is ideal. I think that society really benefits from such well-functioning and happy family units. I think that stability and commitment are very good things, and when heterosexual marriages work out well, they are indeed so good for the family members and for society.
One reason why heterosexual marriage is a good thing is that most people are straight, so a heterosexual relationship is natural for them. Another reason is that the small family unit that we have in the West hopefully has less to do with ownership and more about mutual commitment.
I just don't think that heterosexual marriages are right for everybody, and I don't see why responsible homosexual adults who want to live in stable legally recognized unions should not be able to do so. And I don't see why they should not be able to be good and caring parents to their children. I talked earlier about a gay Swedish couple, Jonas Gardell and Mark Levengood, who are good friends with a lesbian couple, and the four of them decided to have children together. Thanks to artificial insemination, both of the women have become mothers and both of the men have become fathers. If these four people are caring parents, and I don't see why they wouldn't be, then I don't see why their children should become disadvantaged from having 'four' parents instead of two.
Vicki, you said that a serious concern of yours is the freedom of churches, and your fear that the freedom of churches might be circumscribed has a lot to do with your opposition to the idea of legalizing gay marriage. I can see that there could be ways that churches might be adversely affected by legalizing gay marriage, but I think that the rights of people are more important than the rights of churches.
Ann
