Celebrating Thanksgiving this year (and Black Friday), people have expressed thanks for lots of things: real authentic connections to so many people, damn fine loin fruit, blog readers, a great family and support system, lots of stuff, giving without prejudice, being out of the church, being a gay man and not straight, second life, winning NaNoWriMo early!, and no random Mormons at the family Thanksgiving table. Some people had some uncomfortable family situations others better ones. On that family note, here are some touching illustrations of what I’ve always said about marriage: it’s about love (and romance is more than just sex).
(On a related note: look at this historical note on Thanksgiving! I already knew it was a Puritan replacement for Christmas, but I didn’t know the Puritans had also outlawed wedding ceremonies and wedding rings — I wonder what they did instead?)
Marriage is one of the actual problems with Mormonism (and if you want to call straw-man on that one, just read this post). Interestingly, though, the British Columbian Supreme Court says gay marriage is not the slippery slope to polygamy.
Other actual problems include sucking the strength out of so many women. Not that other religions are so fab for the ladies — I thought the mandatory-bra rule was just a BYU thing! But there seems to be a problem with Mormonism and gender roles and sexuality in general. Not to mention race and cultural questions — even if Mormonism is an ethnicity. On the plus side, there’s a ton of interesting doctrine to speculate about! Also the stories are great! (Apparently Death of a Disco Dancer is doing well, and the faithful Mormon crowd is planning a Lit blitz.)
This holiday of celebrating plenty is also a good opportunity to think about the 99%. And how to pepper spray them (h/t).
If you celebrate this holiday I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving! Otherwise I hope you had a lovely Sunday at one of these indoctrination meetings! 😉
p.s. Here’s one more thing to add to your Thanksgiving celebration. I don’t think I can describe it — just have a look…
Also, Chino — those are some great sidebar links!
KSL: “Mormons Exposed” calendars and “I’m a Mormon” campaign share similar goals — So true! The difference is that one of them passed correlation, and the other has a shot at being effective. Speaking of correlation — that Peterson interview is surprisingly funny!
Why does the Mormon baptism interview include a question asking ONLY about past gay relationships (ignoring presumably equally-sinful past heterosexual ones)? — a very good question! It’s related to Andrew S.’s piece I linked above (among numerous other related discussions). On the other hand, in your What’s happening at BYU? link, did you catch this passage?!:
Is that true? That’s the most positive thing I’ve read about BYU in a long time. Good for you, BYU!
Hey, I hadn’t caught that passage, but it just confirms my first impression that the Standard of Liberty crew unintentionally created a very useful summary of all the good stuff that’s been going on. 😉
And, on my side, I’m gonna be watching to see if my initial reaction gets proven wrong:
Of course, the other way I could be proven wrong is if the folks at SoL actually carried out their threat to defund BYU. I triple dog dare them to do more than bluster.
It’s also the case that the Church will exploit “enemy resources” to protect its core, and often “good people” on the border will do this work. An egregious not-on-the-border example would be Dean Byrd quoting Lisa Diamond’s work on sexual fluidity to show that “gays can change.” But a less egregious on-the-border example would be inviting a gay man to BYU to help students accept their gayness so that they can have more self-awareness to not “act” on it.
It’s really odd when you get down into the nitty-gritty. I remember reading Ty Mansfield in In Quiet Desperation tell his readers that there’s no such thing as “the gay lifestyle,” that “practicing” gays are *gasp* individuals. But yet, the whole book is geared toward how to be happy, gay, celibate-for-now, and heterosexually-married-tomorrow.
DISCLAIMER: Some people are going to take this comment to mean that I oppose same sex marriage. That it not my intent. My own personal belief is that the debate over same sex marriage is a vast conspiracy (by those for and against it) to spend obscene amounts of money on something that will have a neglible impact on anyone. Just legalize it and move on. And give that money to the poor. (or, if they don’t want it, I’ll take it…)
As far as the ruling in the BC supreme court case is concerned, the justice made nary a mention to same sex marriage, except to say that multi-partner same sex marriage is outlawed in Canada (and, in another place, inserted a quick reference to same sex couples by way of parantheses as though it were an afterthought.) Especially since he heard so much evidence on the benefits of monogamy historically to Western civilization, any mention of same sex marriage was going to open a can of worms. One could have argued that the historical evidence to support monogamy was meaningless because the Canadian government had legalized another form of non-traditional marriage despite a long tradition of heterosexual monogamy and its attendant benefits. And no BC judge would want that kind of message in their opinion.
Alan — You may well have an interesting point, however, before we revisit themes you brought up on this thread, can you please go back through your comments carefully and see if you can tell the difference between stuff I’ve actually said and the straw-man you projected onto me? I really, really don’t want to have a fight with you — I want to have a civil dialog. But a civil dialog doesn’t include attributing to other people stuff that they didn’t say, and, in fact, don’t agree with.
dpc — Regarding the B.C. ruling: Are you saying that the judge is just trying to keep the two issues separate?
I’m not sure I totally agree with the logic of the BC ruling (of course I’m not a judge or legal scholar or even Canadian):
OK, but that necessarily mean that the polygamy is the problem or that keeping it illegal is the best way to help vulnerable people in this situation. Of course maybe that part is explained somewhere else in the ruling…?
Alan-
Yes, it is. Throw Ty into the mix, and it’s odd x 10.
dpc-
My own personal sentiment is that people who have no skin in this contest — but who feel somehow compelled to armchair quarterback the process — ought to maybe get over themselves unless they’ve got something constructive to add. Do you? Because if the only advice you’ve got happens to be about avoiding unnecessary outlays, you don’t. Nobody who donated to No on 8 did so because they were itching for a fight. That’s all on the Mormons and their friends in the USCCB and their fairweather evangelical buddies.
chanson@6:
*sigh* I’m not sure that this will go well, but I don’t see how I implicated you into a straw man. Maybe what might help is if I summarize how I see the flow of the conversation, and then you can maybe tell me where you see me pinning words onto you that aren’t yours.
@5, you asked:
This set of questions seemed provocative. I don’t really see how the question was born from my rant @4, plus the “either/or” here is odd, since personally I wouldn’t be a straight-privilege folk. So it sounded as if you were asking whether I think only gay people are allowed to advise a gay person not to marry a straight person, and straight people aren’t.
My answer @8 was that it doesn’t really matter who does the advising (gay or straight), since “people have tried to involve themselves in other peoples engagements, and it doesnt really have much of an effect.”
At @11, you asked:
And I said @12 that I was just disappointed in something that I thought she had written (which it turns out she hadn’t…just that her name was attached to it).
At @13, you asked
And I answered @17
@22, you said:
You further said,
I responded @25
I also noted that, in terms of resolving the situation, “I think about the situation prior to marrying age.”
@27, you summarized your POV:
Okay, that was certainly provocative, since I don’t quite see why how I’ve given that impression. It’s also strikes me as contradictory, since it would require me to both privilege and not privilege a straight man’s words over those of his lesbian wife. So then I summarize my POV:
Later @39, you state
@41, I clarify about CLP:
Hence, I’m responding belatedly to your @22 in terms of why, IMO, CLP does not support gay/lesbian relationships (in a necessary way, as far as Mormon discourse is concerned) while she simultaneously advises authorities to stop counseling MoMs — in others words, why I find CLP to be presently heterosexist.
Then, @47, I apologize for taking up space and making the space too much my space.
And then you ask me @48 to apologize for painting you into a straw man argument, and also note that your @22 was sarcasm-laden.
Sorry, I just don’t see the straw man. If anything, I see you creating a set of straw men for me to try to unravel from the very beginning with your questions @5.
Alan — I really appreciate your willingness to review and discuss this in a civil and constructive manner. Let’s start from the top. Here’s the first comment where I take issue with they way you present my POV:
Can you figure out my specific objections to what you attribute to me?
The three items that I attribute to you in that passage, as I perceive them, are as follows:
I got this stance of yours from here, where you say: “Im not interested in making sure that every responsible party gets justly blamed. Im interested in preventing painful errors in the first place, as much as possible.”
I get this from the fact that you asked me @5 what I would advise a particular gay man thinking about marrying a woman.
I get this from the fact that you asked me @5 how I would advise a gay man who knows he’s gay and wants to marry a woman. To be clear, the way your question was phrased makes the issue not about whether the woman knows the guy is gay or not, but about the marriage altogether.
Now, the question is rhetorical; and like I said, the either/or was odd and put me in a double-bind. Either I as a gay man would tell the man not to marry the woman, or if I didn’t, I was suggesting all the straight people out there telling him not to marry her are heterosexist. First off, it’s very possible for a straight person to tell a gay person not to marry a straight person for heterosexist reasons. An as example, a straight Mormon could say: “Don’t marry her. You’re not good enough for her. You’re broken in a way she shouldn’t have to put up with.” Heterosexism is not an on-or-off switch; there are gradations, just like there is with racism and sexism. I’m not just going to assume a best-case scenario, certainly not in a Mormon context. Secondly, I don’t think any of us can say that in every instance, a mixed-orientation marriage is a bad idea, but the question required this to be the case.
Moreover, the question seemed to me about a responsibility of me and an imagined gay guy for the welfare of an imagined straight woman, and if we weren’t responsible, then imagined straight people out there would be “mislabeled” as heterosexist. It seemed a very one-sided framing to me that placed responsibility on the gays to do their “half” since the straights were already doing “theirs.” It seemed to me to miss the point of an overarching heterosexism affecting everybody.
Alan — very good! You caught most of them. But not quite all.
First, there’s a meta-problem. Notice that at this point in the thread I had merely asked for clarification regarding your comment @4. I hadn’t said anything about my position yet. Yet, instead of answering my questions, you wrote about what (you assume) my position is.
As a matter of discussion strategy, let’s consider the following scenario:
Someone makes statement X. You think statement X implies belief Y. You may have objections or comments regarding belief Y. There are many ways to proceed, among them are the following:
(a) “You said X, and it seems to me that X implies Y. Do you agree with Y?”
(b) “You said X, and X implies Y for the following reasons: (…), and Y is wrong because…”
(c) “Your belief, Y, is wrong because…”
My intention was stick with strategy (a) because I don’t want to waste time debating something that isn’t your position. I want to give you the opportunity to explain whether you agree with Y, and — if you don’t — what you think the difference is. I need to know what your position is before I can analyze how/whether mine is different.
That’s why my first batch of comments to you were all questions. They were not meant to be rhetorical or facetious questions. The third question in my first comment may look like I was being facetious (or trying to bait you), but I wasn’t — it was a serious question. And given your statement that it’s heterosexist to assume your (Mormon) fiance is straight and your statement that North Star will soon be able to point to so many successful MOMs that CLP won’t have a leg to stand on (which echo some stuff you had said earlier), I don’t think it’s rude or unreasonable for me to ask you for clarification on these points.
You could have, for example, answered as follows:
If he knew, the situation would (not?) be different because…
In this case, I would advise him…
Advising him not to marry a woman is (not?) heterosexist because…
Instead of doing that, however, you chose to speculate about my position. Let’s have a look:
As you correctly point out, this is close to one of my earlier statements. However, I object a bit to your changing the terms to “stopping” and especially “harm” because of the possible transitive connotations (eg. some third party stopping someone else, someone harming someone else). Also, at this point I was really just interested in clarifying what you meant in your comment. But this one isn’t such a big deal.
This one is the biggie.
If I can be said to have a mantra, it would be this: I want to increase people’s access to information and opportunities so that they can make good choices for themselves. But I don’t want to make those decisions for them. I don’t want to have the arrogance to say “I know what’s best for you in your life.” Because I don’t! I may have an opinion to offer if asked for advice, but my opinion may well be wrong. If I see that you have access to opportunities and information, then that’s where my interest ends. I trust people to make their own decisions for themselves.
One of my most popular post was on this topic (especially w.r.t. trying to deconvert people from Mormonism): If there’s no solution, there’s no problem. I’ve also written a series about this regarding feminists judging other women’s choices, and specifically about feminists trying to protect/stop other adult women from making choices other women find unempowering or degrading, see my feminism topic.
I feel the same way about mixed-orientation marriage: if people choose to go into it with their eyes open, then that’s their business, not mine. If they don’t have access to good information, I’m not blaming anyone for that, I’m just saying that having access to more information when making a big decision is a good thing (especially including relationship experience, in the case of choosing a spouse).
Are you saying that I framed the situation this way? I didn’t, and (for the record) I don’t think any harm comes from gayness.
I think this is a false dichotomy. I think that looking at how heterosexism affects individuals is a part of understanding heterosexisms effect on both/everybody.
Can you maybe explain more what it is I said @4 that lead to your questions @5?
Of course I can. And I will, if you think it wasn’t clear from my comment at 12.
Can you first tell me whether or not you understand why I don’t think your response (the one we just deconstructed) was conducive to having a civil, constructive discussion? Do you agree/disagree with my assessment (about the constructiveness of such a comment)? Why or why not?
@chanson
From reading the opinion, I felt that they wanted to keep those two issues completely separate. If you read the BC court opinion that legalized same sex marriage it doesn’t say anything about the history of monogamy, at least not going back to Greco-Roman times. It focuses on equality rights versus religious freedom rights.
As for your comment about what you disagree with in the opinion, the most interesting part of the opinion is where the FLDS argued that the harm that experts say were caused by polygamy were actually caused by a confluence of several of FLDS teachings and not because of polygamy per se. Basically, polygamy doesn’t hurt people, but FLDS polygamy does, so don’t outlaw it just because of what we do with it.
My own personal opinion is that you can’t legalize same sex marriage without legalizing polygamy. That’s not an argument for polygamy or against same sex marriage; it’s an argument that to be logically consistent, you can’t have one without the other. If marriage was traditionally defined as the union of (1) 2 people of (2) the opposite sex and you argue that (2) is irrelevant than why wouldn’t (1) be irrelevant as well?
Plus criminalizing polygamy may not be the narrowest way to avoid the problems caused by FLDS polygamy. The law could be changed so that no one under the age of 18 could enter into a polygamous marriage and that would end the teenage bride/young, uneducated mother problem. It’s an interesting debate. We’ll have to wait and see how the Canadian Supreme Court deals with it, although I suspect that they will uphold most of the provisions of the current law.
@chino
Obviously I’m using hyperbole, and, yes, I don’t have much skin in the fight, excpet to the extent that societal change may impact me. The whole Prop 8 debate has been a waste of time. The two sides are fighting over the meaning of the word marriage. That’s it. It didn’t involve any substantive rights at all. The only difference between the day before and after it was passed is that same sex couples couldn’t refer to their civil unions as marriage for legal purposes. $80 million to fight over the meaning of a word seems a bit much to me. Plus, going forward, marriage in general is falling out of favor. Why waste so much time and effort on something that could be resolved using less expensive and less divisive ways? Government can have a greater impact on society through things like taxing and spending than it can through defining terms and assigning rights based on those definitions.
I think that the LDS church probably figured that a compromise solution to the same sex marriage debate is that same sex civil unions would have all the benefits of marriage, it just wouldn’t be called marriage. That’s why it entered the fray in California because that was the very issue being voted upon. It was a bellwether to see if that position could be maintained.
I actually agree with that logic. And with respect to abuses like underage marriages, I think one can make a case that it’s easier to prevent them if you don’t drive the entire community outside the realm of ordinary law enforcement (eg. nobody will call the police for any reason if they’re afraid the police will break up their family).
I tend to agree with this position. However, I think there’s a real case to be made that same-sex-marriage doesn’t necessarily require legal recognition for polygamy. Specifically, marriage confers some specific rights and responsibilities that make sense for a pair of people but don’t generalize in an obvious way. For example: if your spouse is your next-of-kin and has the right to inherit your property after death, then adding another spouse diminishes the first spouse’s rights and claims (and what if the first spouse isn’t OK with that — do they have legal recourse?). Similarly, marriage generally confers the right to live and work in the country where your spouse is a citizen. So if I marry five people, do they all get green cards?
I don’t think these are insurmountable legal questions to tackle, but they kind of indicate that the leap from same-sex marriage to polygamy isn’t trivial.
I do understand.
Let me put this way: I find it more constructive than the questions it was responding to. If I read through those questions again, you’re basically asking me, “So you think only gay people can advise gay men to not marry women?” How is that a constructive question? If anything, my response tries to redirect rudeness. So please elaborate how my @4 lead to that question, since your @12 on this thread cites words I said before and after @4. And even what you say above doesn’t de facto lead to that question (i.e, my saying it’s heterosexist to assume your Mormon fiance is straight and that North Star will
soonsomeday be able to point to many successful MOMs….btw, there’s an estimated over 2 million MoMs in America, so this is not an unreasonable supposition.)Alan — I am totally willing to grant that my choice of questions served to raise the hostility level rather than lower it. That was a mistake on my part, considering that the your initial comment was already leaning in a hostile direction. I should have started with just the first question alone and waited for a response to that one before posing follow-up questions. Especially since the first one was the only one that was really relevant to your statements on that thread — the others were more follow-ups to points you’d made on another thread.
It leads to the question because it wasn’t clear to me what your response would be. That’s why I asked. I wanted to give you the opportunity to clarify.
Here you’re doing it again. I never said or implied it was an unreasonable supposition. I said I was asking you to clarify your position.
Alan, I don’t want to fight with you. Don’t you see that? All I want is for you to stop suggesting that I said/believe stuff that I didn’t say and don’t believe, in the interest of having a reasonable discussion of the points you are making.
dpc:
In California it might seem a waste of time and money that the whole debate pivoted on the meaning of a word, but in other states, such as Utah, nothing resembling marriage, including civil unions, is permitted for anyone but a man and a woman. So, from a national perspective, the “meaning of the word” becomes far more substantial in terms of tangible rights, and as you probably know, the Church involved itself in the California fight in fear that the laws in California would eventually bleed over to Utah. (This is why Dallin Oaks has stepped up his federalist arguments in recent years.)
The reason man + woman is thought to be a “required” definition of marriage is to maintain patriarchy and heterosexism. Strip those two things away, and there’s no reason any two people shouldn’t be allowed to marry.
The reason no polygamy is a “required” definition of marriage is to maintain a certain brand of capitalism. 19th century thinker Francis Lieber argued that Mormon polygamy was a “continual process of annihilating or preventing the accumulation of values [property and wives], and, therefore, of destroying one of the great means of spreading civilization, and the establishment of firmer security and public peace. So if modern Western anti-polygamy judicial opinions are citing the “history of monogamy,” this is why. It has to do with how wealth is distributed amongst families, and in the 19th century, Mormons were compared with “backwards” “Hindus and Mohammadans.” Lieber is known for his elaboration on “the process by which even the Caucasian race is divided into superior and inferior divisions” — that is, the relationship between “family” and “capital” (and race). These are things that underpin a lot in the West, and polygamy threatens to tear it asunder. Chanson is right to point out, for example, the problem of how Canada would potentially have to hand out green cards like candy if polygamy was legalized.
I personally think people should have a right to marry polygamously, but how to get there legally given the legalistic hurdles is beyond me.
@4 was hostile toward Mormon discourse on MoMs. I don’t see how this is a crime on a “post-Mormon” forum.
I hope you recognize that I’ve been ganged up on many times on this forum for my “unreasonable” positions, called all kinds of names, because of my critiques of gay rights discourse to critiques of white feminism to now my critiques of Mormon discourse on MoMs. So, when I have a chance to “clarify,” I take it. I’m tired of being cornered like a rat around here, and then blamed for “picking a fight.”
Alan — in the interest of resolving this in a friendly and constructive manner, I am more than willing to admit and apologize for my errors. Are you willing to discuss yours?
I thought we were.
Thought we were what? Discussing my allegation that you misrepresented my position? Fab. So, did you? Or didn’t you?
If you say I misrepresented your position, then I don’t think it makes sense for me to argue otherwise. If you’re asking whether I intentionally misrepresented your position to make you look bad, the answer is no. I’m merely responded to what I perceived as rhetoric. If you’re asking whether I can be more thoughtful about what your position is, regardless of what you say and how you say it, the answer is yes. More clarity from an outset never hurts. What I can do to change my behavior is to ask for more clarity more often.
Excellent Alan, thank you!!
Perfect. I love the way you start this with “If you’re asking…”. In fact, I don’t think you were doing it intentionally, I think you thought you were debating against my actual position.
Close. Not regardless of what I say. Quite the contrary, I’d like to you pay closer attention to what I say and respond to that, as opposed to responding to what I said plus other stuff I didn’t say in such a way as to imply that I’d said the whole thing. And please show everyone here this same courtesy.
Also not regardless of how I say it. If you perceive my questions or comments as rude, sarcastic, or hostile, I don’t expect you to silently put up with rude treatment. I will make a special effort to be more careful in the tone of my remarks, and if you catch me screwing up on this, call me on it.
I don’t expect you to put up with rude treatment from others either. If someone else directs hostile remarks to you, it’s best if you can try to diffuse it by asking them to present their arguments in a more civil and constructive manner, and I will do what I can to ask people to keep things civil as well.
Thank you. I really appreciate it.
I’d be curious to get Alan’s (or anyone else’s) take on the post/podcast that’s up over at the FAIR blog…
Part 1 | Part 2