LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD... OF SYMBOLS: This has been your only Pat Benatar reference of the day, I promise

...The thing is, though, that keeping gays from marrying isn't the point. The point is to preserve loving, socially rich family relationships against the percieved encroachment of distanced, individualized, contractarian interactions. To put it in Marxist terms, they fear the commodification of social interaction. Gay marriage is simply a symbol of this cold and lonely world. We can't make a law that says spouses have to love each other (rather than simply making a convenient deal), so the struggle is fought out on the symbolic terrain of gay rights.

Divorce used to be the proxy battle for the love-versus-contract struggle. Though divorce could easily be seen as helping the cause of love -- by allowing people to get out of marriages that could never be loving -- it was seen as the opposite, as an affirmation that marriage was a contract that could be cancelled rather than a social obligation. Today, gay rights make the most convenient avatar for fears about the dissolution of loving marriage because this is the biggest public question about marriage being asked today, and because the libertarian justifications often given for the right to marriage evoke the kind of depersonalized society that social conservatives fear.

...My response to these fears is twofold. First, I think that, while "thick" relationships are very important (especially within a family), creeping commodification is not quite as prevalent or as undesirable as social conservatives fear. ...Second, I think fighting gay marriage is a counterproductive symbolic struggle for defending loving and non-commodified relationships.

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posted by Eve at 1:47 AM VOTE

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