Queering marriage? ? re:fractions

I?ve been pondering whether to write anything after last night?s Newsnight ?debate? on marriage for same-sex couples infringed the Trades Description Act and placed a greater burden on the word ?debate? than it could reasonable be expected to bear. You can watch it on iPlayer for a while if you have masochistic tendencies. Here are some of the things I?ve been thinking.

(While I think there is also a theological argument to be had ? and you will find theologians arguing both sides of the debate too ? I have deliberately here prescinded from those to focus on what I feel are more general issues.)

It is demonstrably the case that, historically, marriage has been quite a variable institution, not least in the number and age of wives permitted to one husband, the ease and motivations for divorce, and the concomitant understandings of marriage. There have been significant economic and community interests shaping it as a means of social alliance and peace, and a continuing regulation of procreation within those constraints for family inheritance and species survival.

Yet within that wide ranging diversity a continuing emphasis on the good of ?the procreation of children and their proper upbringing (and therefore the survival of the community) is perhaps the most constant theme of what marriage was about. The household was where the next generation was conceived, and learnt to live in a community as well as being part of a unit of economic survival. Marriage, administered variously by church and state in Western society, was a single institution felt to have significant enough social ramifications beyond the relationship of two people to need regulating.

It is a pertinent question whether so many centuries of traditioned practice of a single institution of marriage recognised across society should be changed without a significant ?period of reflection and conversation on why it should be changed, rather than simply how to change it.

I think it further relevant that the government has seriously muddied its own equality argument by saying it will continue to provide civil partnerships for same-sex couples. It is in danger of creating new inequalities: straight couples will be able to choose between new civil marriage and new religious marriage, but not civil partnerships; gay couples can choose between civil partnerships and civil marriages, but not religious ones (even for religions that permit or encourage it).

At the heart of the debate (as I see it) is one question: is a committed romantic relationship between people of the same sex sufficiently like one between those of the opposite sex that it should be served by the same social institution. If the answer is ?yes? then equal rights in the same institution is indeed the vital issue.?If the answer is ?no?, the question is not equality or equal rights in the same institution, but the provision of a equal but different institution with the same equal rights before the law.

That is a genuine question. There are those who will say the relationships are the same, taking romantic love as the sole or primary defining qualification for them. There are those who will say they are not, insisting on the place of procreation as fundamental.?I have not yet been overwhelmed by a conviction of the rightness of either answer.

And, lest we forget, there are those who will continue to argue for a queer critique of all marriage (much of it shared with womanist approaches)?as hopelessly tainted by patriarchy and heterosexist history, and celebrate a different kind of model for relationships. In this argument the queering of marriage is not only a positive virtue, but a testimony to same-sex relationships being different from marriage, and perhaps even better by being freed from the taint of historic patriarchy and property rights.

There is a sense (to adapt Marx on religion) in which the criticism of marriage is the premise of all social criticism. Does the new gay desire for marriage represent the death of queer criticism and the triumph of hetero-normativity? Will only a celibate Catholic clergy, sworn to preach the virtues of marriage, be the last bastion of a lived out critique queering domesticity and romantic love? That would be irony indeed.

There are, in short, new queer as well as old straight voices insisting that the two relationships are not the same kind of thing. Whether these relationships should be given equality in the same institution, or be given two equal but different institutions is a serious and genuine question. And that is the debate I think we should be having first, before we are ?consulted? on how to do it.

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Source: http://dougchaplin.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/queering-marriage/

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