Michael Ventura: "Questions of Marriage"

Ventura, again, hitting nail on head...

Questions of marriage

Letters at 3AM
BY MICHAEL VENTURA




Say you're married, and, somewhere, two people whom you don't even know are also married -- how does that threaten your marriage? If you have kids, how do those two unknown people threaten the possible future marriages of your kids? How are you being harmed by the actions of these other two unknown people who are, after all, only doing what you're doing and only wish to enjoy what you claim to enjoy? Say you're a heterosexual married couple and, five minutes ago, somewhere, two gay people got married -- how, exactly, does that undermine your marriage?

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The institution of marriage is under attack, but that's got nothing to do with whom you rub your private parts against and what orifices you favor. As gays, too, will discover once the novelty of legalized marriage wears off, the institution is under attack by the very technological progress America has fostered with such boastful pride.

Until roughly the first third of the American 20th century, marriage and an extended blood family were essential for the individual survival of all but the most adventurous -- because, very simply, basic survival took so much work. Clothes to be sewn and darned. Loaves of bread to be baked from scratch. Washing that took at least a day, often two. Small businesses and farms required a whole family to manage. Chores, chores, chores, without which the basics of life would be lacking. Illness, old age, and death, were tended at home. No Social Security, no Medicare, no nursing homes, minimal hospital care -- the family took care of you or no one took care of you. Women, especially, were lost without marriage; or, if they were to be "old maids," were lost without their extended birth family -- in other words, were lost without the strength of their parents' marriage. Marriage defined the possibilities of private and communal life ... for a world that no longer exists.

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No one who sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act, no one in a fury over the Massachusetts Supreme Court's decision, and no one advocating a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage also wants a return to the technological limitations of, say, 1900. On the contrary, the same factions that want to "defend" (read: restrict) marriage also want unfettered markets for technologies and commerce. Yet everywhere modern technological capitalism has taken root, the traditional family has been severely undermined. That's the common factor -- not gay or even women's liberation.

A world awash in fundamentalisms of all kinds is a world in panic at technology's shattering of old forms. But you can't get the old forms back. They cannot be defended from the very technologies that you, at the same time, desire and invent and use and expand. On that scale, gay people getting married don't matter one way or the other. They are but one expression of a search for new forms. Stopping them won't stop the social space from expanding, and certainly won't make anyone's marriage more secure.

http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2003-11-28/cols_ventura.html