Every time there’s another landmark on the way to gay marriage, several people send me links and jubilant emails about it. They expect me to jump up and down and cheer about it, but I can barely register even polite interest.
It isn’t that I don’t want to be able to legally formalize a commitment to the woman of my choice. I want that more than anything else, as a matter of fact. But I’ve been paying enough attention to know that even if I were a man, I wouldn’t have that option anymore.
Half of marriages now end in divorce. Women initiate the vast majority of divorces, at least two-thirds. In a heterosexual divorce, the woman is virtually guaranteed to be granted the children, alimony, and a large chunk of her husband’s money. We’re only beginning to see how this will work out in a gay marriage, but the Fairchild-Leach splitup indicates that it’s probably going to be pretty much the same. And considering that what I want is a marriage on the pre-60’s heterosexual model, where I am the breadwinner and my wife raises our children – who, given my age, will probably have to be biologically hers – the odds are good that I would be the one to come home one day to find my wife and kids gone and a judge giving her a pile of my money, even though she is no longer rendering the services for which husbands support wives.
Our divorce, custody and alimony laws make it easy and profitable for women to abandon their spouses. Men are becoming more and more reluctant to marry. Magazines like Cosmopolitan try to blame this on male “immaturity”, but it’s more likely they’ve just been paying attention to what happens to other men who tie the knot. Seeing their buddies impoverished, evicted from their houses, and only allowed to see their children on alternate weekends, what man wouldn’t hesitate to marry? Attention, Cosmo, here is the answer to the mystery you’re always pondering, the reason men won’t commit: because women don’t commit.
Even as the traditional expectations that used to go with marriage are dissolving, brand new ones are being invented. Nowadays, if your spouse is admitted to the hospital with brain damage caused by highly suspicious injuries, you can deny her medical care for years and then have her slowly starved to death. The alleged domineering patriarch of the 1950’s did not imagine he had any right to do such a thing, and yet Democrats are attempting to pretend that being married doesn’t mean fidelity, doesn’t mean commitment, but does mean the right to inflict a slow and agonizing death. Andrew Sullivan actually complained that because he is gay, courts probably wouldn’t recognize his “right” to have his partner starved to death. Isn’t that terribly unfair?
Personally, for me the murder of Terri Schiavo was the end of my enthusiasm for gay marriage.
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What do gay marriage and Terri Schiavo have to do with each other? - Disabled Soapbox said,
April 3, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Denis said,
“We are taught, encouraged, moulded by and lulled into accepting a range of false notions about the family. As a source of some of our most profound experiences, it continues to be such an integral part of our emotional lives that it appears beyond criticism. Yet hiding from the truth of family life leaves women and children vulnerable.”
- Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women
” How will the family unit be destroyed? …[T]he demand alone will throw the whole ideology of the family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and we can fight collectively. Women will feel freer to leave their husbands and become economically independent, either through a job or welfare.”
In “Female Liberation” - Roxanne Dunbarr
“Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers; these same men are religious prophets, poets, heroes, figures of romance, adventure, accomplishment, figures ennobled by tragedy and defeat. Men have claimed the earth, called it “Her”. Men ruin Her. Men have airplanes, guns, bombs, poisonous gases, weapons so perverse and deadly that they defy any authentically human imagination.”
Pornography: Men Possessing Women - Andrea Dworkin
“The traditional flowers of courtship are the traditional flowers of the grave, delivered to the victim before the kill. The cadaver is dressed up and made up and laid down and ritually violated and consecrated to an eternity of being used.”
- Andrea Dworkin
“Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women’s bodies.”
- Andrea Dworkin
“The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations - for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right - these institutions are real and they must be destroyed.”
- Andrea Dworkin
“My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don’t even need to shrug. I simply don’t care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don’t matter.”
The Woman’s Room - Marilyn French
“The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together…. Whatever its ultimate meaning, the breakup of families now is an objectively revolutionary process…. No woman should have to deny herself any opportunities because of her special responsibilities to her children….”
“Functions of the Family,” WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation, Fall, 1969 - Linda Gordon
“When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression…”
- Sheila Jeffrys
“I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He’s just incapable of it.”
Former Congresswoman - Barbara Jordan
“You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.”
(Prominent legal feminist scholar; University of Michigan, & Yale.) - Catherine MacKinnon
“All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.”
- Catherine MacKinnon
“We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.”
From Sisterhood Is Powerful, (ed), 1970, p. 537 - Robin Morgan
“All men are good for is fucking, and running over with a truck”
Statement made by A University of Maine Feminist Administrator, quoted by Richard Dinsmore, who brought a successful civil suit against the University in the amount of $600,000.
“I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.”
Ice And Fire - Andrea Dworkin
“Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience.”
Vassar College. Assistant Dean of Students - Catherine Comin
“All men are rapists and that’s all they are.”
Author; (later, advisor to Al Gore’s Presidential Campaign.) - Marilyn French
“I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.”
Ms. Magazine Editor. - Robin Morgan
“I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire.”
Ms. Magazine Editor. - Robin Morgan
“‘To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo.”
Scum Manifesto - Valerie Solanas
“(Rape) is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear”
Against Our Will p.6. - Susan Brownmiller
The feminists brought us this nightmare.
The women selfishly went along because they thought they would have advantages over men-AND THOUGHT MEN WOULD JUST GO ALONG.
The destruction of marriage, family, and men will come back and hurt all women. Big Time.
April 3, 2008 at 2:27 pm
The Gonzman said,
A piece of paper maketh not a marriage. The people make it. You want to be married. Do so. Find the clergy of your choice and make that “forever” vow. Execute any other legal documents you wish.
Have no such beliefs. Well … good luck to you with that. I’m sure there is a Grand Druid of Secular Humanism somewhere happy to make a fifty off ya.
Someone else wants to not recognize it? Shake the dust off your feet, as the saying goes….
Ah - you want to force your choices down their throat in “payback” for some wrongs you feel done to you and yours in the past?
Ah … now we come to the meat of it…..
April 3, 2008 at 7:51 pm
The Gonzman said,
…So, instead of THEM forcing their choices on you, you become them. I see.
You know, if people hadn’t given away their freedom to marry and delegated that right to the government in order to keep them darn Mormons from having a lot of wives and to keep those darkies from sniffing around our fine white women… ah well.
I’ll leave you with the thoughts of Bob Heinlein:
“Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws - always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: Please pass this so that I won’t be able to so something I know I should stop. Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them for their own good.”
******************The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966).
Make them be “straight” for their own good.
Make them be “tolerant” for their own good.
Same song. Different verse.
April 3, 2008 at 7:55 pm
neonleon said,
For the good and protection of straight men, outlaw heterosexual marriage instead.
LOL
Marriage is really a very dumb thing to risk…I mean gamble half of all you have and much of what you ever hope to have on a 50/50 bet…a flip of a coin? Remember 100% are happy walking the aisle but 50% fail and more would fail if more people had the intestinal fortitude to visit a lawyer.
April 3, 2008 at 10:04 pm