Cast Off the Shackles of Yesterday

New Drive Afoot to Pass Equal Rights Amendment

The above article is from the 3/28 Washington Post and is about a new drive to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA. To date, women are not guaranteed equality with men in the Constitution.

I wanted to briefly address this paragraph:

In the 1970s, Schlafly and others argued that the ERA would lead to women being drafted by the military and to public unisex bathrooms. Today, she warns lawmakers that its passage would compel courts to approve same-sex marriages and deny Social Security benefits for housewives and widows.

For starters, an ERA should make women should eligible for military draft. Even if the military continues to refuse to put women on the front lines, they can still serve invaluably in support functions, like as trained medical staff. And sacrifices which are expected of men can and should be expected of women, assuming that women have been granted the same privileges as men.

Second, the issue of possibly being forced to use unisex bathrooms (and who would want them so badly they would use their constitutional right as a basis for suing for unisex bathrooms is beyond me) pales in comparison to the fact that women are not guaranteed equal pay for equal work or equal consideration for promotions.

We'll skip over the same-sex marriage business, as I think it has been discussed enough in this blog for everyone to know how I feel about it. I'm not even sure that the argument is reasonable, though I suppose I could petition that my right to marry a woman should be equal to a man's right to marry a woman, and that a man's right to marry a man should be equal to a woman's right to marry a man. But any judge could say that everyone in society has the right to marry a person of the opposite sex, so there's no sex-based descrimination.

Finally, equality between the sexes wouldn't mean that widows and housewives don't get support. It would mean that widowers and househusbands do. We now live in an era where the vast majority of women work and men are beginning to take the option to stay at home with the kids. So we need to worry about men whose wives make more money than they do as much as we worry about women who are supported by paychecks made out to their husbands.

True equality guarantees that nobody gets left behind.

A Marriage of Equals

Here are two pieces from the Washington Post:

Gay Marriage amendment Fails in Senate

Washington Sketch

The first is an article, the second an editorial. Both concern the re-introduced marriage amendment. All I can say is, I am ashamed for my country. Let us ignore, for the moment, whether I support gay marriage or not. This matter is not for the federal constitution. Marriage is a matter of interpersonal relationships, not a crucial government issue. If the marriage amendment, which would define marriage as the union between a man and a woman, became a part of the Constitution, it would be the only constitutional article of its kind. To incorporate marriage into the Constitution is to say that the very structure of our government and our nation is dependent upon a particular type of personal relationship among our citizens. How incredibly weak and ridiculous does that make the USA sound?

Now to what the amendment is about. To define marriage as the union between one man and one woman is to leave democracy behind and turn the USA into a theocracy. There is no secular reason to keep homosexuals from marrying. After all, partnership is partnership. Two people of the same sex can have a joint household, combine their assets, and care for each other in times of need just as two people of opposite sexes can. There is no anthropological reason to assume the necessity of the nuclear family with one father, one mother, and 2.3 children. In fact, societies where there is traditionally strong ties between extended kin generally have lower incidences of major depression.

The religious reason lies in the belief of orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims that sexuality cannot be separated from procreation without being sinful. Hence the protester quoted in the editorial who cites the danger of homosexuality encouraging masturbation. After all, one cannot create children through masturbation, so masturbation is sinful. Edited to add, in response to a note: I know that Orthodox Jews do not consider sexuality per se sinful, and that enjoyment of the sex act is considered necessary for both partners and that physical and spiritual fulfillment in this case are intertwined. However, my understanding is that Orthodox Jews understand the story of Onan and Tamar as an injunction against masturbation, and of course Leviticus forbids a person to lay with a man as with a woman, which is hard to interpret in any way that doesn't relate to homosexuality. So sex only becomes legitimate in a procreative model, i.e., man and woman. However, I do not know what the opinion of Orthodox Jews on birth control is, so I am more than willing to be educated on this, or corrected if my understanding about the Orthodox Jews and the Onanian dogma is wrong.

This belief is incredibly archaic. We live in an era where contraceptive is safer and more reliable than ever, AIDS is sweeping through Africa and India, and the globe is becoming grossly over-populated. Besides which, how is this anyone's business? How did these "activists" ever get the idea that what goes on in other people's private lives is their concern? If I choose to marry another woman, how does that affect anyone else? It certainly doesn't demean heterosexual marriages. Denmark, the first country to legalize same-sex marriage, has a divorce rate of 2.81 per 1000 people, as opposed to the prejudiced USA's number of 4.95 per 1000 people.

The truth is that numerous kinds of sex acts, including masturbation and homosexuality, are known in nature. In fact, anyone who has ever had a dog hump his leg knows this. So there goes the belief that homosexuality is unnatural, practiced only by degenerates. Of course, there are some who would argue that the bestial nature of these acts is what makes them so reprehensible. In which case, I can only suggest that these people stop eating, sleeping, or going to the bathroom.

Modern marriage is the joining of two individuals who enter into a partnership not because they need each other, but because they want each other. Today women can work and men can stay home and raise children. As we have dispensed with strict gender roles, so have we negated the need to only consider marriage as occurring between a man and a woman. We live in a nation which was one of the earliest to separate church and state. So why should the religious convictions of some be allowed to affect the civil liberties of others?

I'd like to conclude with a link to Glaukopis's satire and this thought: we are created in God's image, so why not revere our bodies in all the ways possible?