TEACH YOUR CHILDREN: Eve Tushnet replies to Jonathan Rauch and sundry

[This was written (longhand, I'm old-fashioned) over a week ago, but I was super busy and lame and didn't post it until today.]

I'm writing this at my volunteer job, while I'm waiting for the evening's first client. That seems appropriate, since in my job I mostly work with unwed mothers and women who fear they may be pregnant out of wedlock. That's where I start from in considering all marriage issues. I don't start thinking about same-sex marriage in terms of gay rights--I understand that's part of the story, but I start with "fatherless America," with the women I work with and their children and the men in their lives.

Maybe that's why the section on children in Jonathan Rauch's Gay Marriage was so unsatisfying to me. The chapter's title gives you a sense of its focus: "Married, Without Children." Rauch addresses arguments surrounding procreation, so he deploys the "Unbeatable Infertility Argument." He's replying to what strike me as overly abstract discussions--and I was a philosophy major! I'm really, really into what Pope John Paul II calls the "theology of the body"--how embodiment and sex reveal meaning and demand that we give ourselves wholly to one another--and yet even I often just don't get it when people in the SSM debate start rattling on about "one-flesh unions" and so forth. So I sympathize with Jonathan's bewilderment!

But I wonder why he never addresses a much less abstruse and more obvious claim: Marriage is the place where society promotes childrearing, because marriage links children to mothers and fathers. SSM either makes marriage no longer the norm, the place where it is good to have kids; or it says that children do not need mothers and fathers at all, only unisex "parents."

Scandinavia has taken option #1, allowing same-sex couples to wed but denying them the ability to adopt. Now Scandinavia has marriages where childrearing is actively discouraged.

America seems to be taking option #2. That's understandable--gender, with its emphasis on the constraints of the body, is unattractive to Americans, who tend to prefer unfettered intellects and wills. So for us, SSM will intentionally create legally fatherless and legally motherless children--and will say that these family forms are just as normative as families with father and mother.

I really can't sign on to that. I have little experience with motherless families--although the shock of the spiritual "Motherless Child," and the deep emotions almost all of us feel toward our own mothers, suggest that mothers do play a special role in our lives. (I've noted before that women who have troubled relationships with their mothers often need to work to forgive their mothers before they can forgive themselves and build their own identities. These ties run deep.) But fatherless families--wow, I see them all the livelong day. I see women raising kids alone. I see women raising kids with their own mothers. I see women raising kids with their sisters, with their cousins, with their best friends. But almost never with their babies' fathers.

And I've heard too many women discuss the trouble they have showing their sons that men have a necessary and beneficial role in the family: that men are not destructive, not fly-by-night interlopers, but integral parts of the family. I've heard too many women describe their own fatherless upbringings, their own hard-fought attempts to teach their daughters to expect more from men rather than hanging around with trifling males, their own struggles to find men who know they are needed in their children's lives.

Proponents of SSM often argue that the problem of "fatherless America" isn't fatherlessness. It's poverty; or it's the generational clash between mother, daughter, and granchild. And yeah, poverty sucks. Generational conflicts do happen. But far more often than I hear about either of those two problems, I hear really simple pleas: "My son misses his daddy."

So I don't know. Maybe it's "awful" and "egregious" to say that SSM works against efforts to make sure kids have mothers and fathers. But I at least want us to start from this discussion, and not from stuff about whether 80-year-olds can marry, or whether (gasp! oh I'm shocked!) there are married couples who don't have children.
posted by Eve at 3:31 PM VOTE

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home