However, Laura Kipnis -- I know not one of your big heroines, Doug, but a smart lady -- observes that it's interesting that gays are now talking about marriage instead of abolshing heteronormativity, as it was called in pre-AIDs days -- the theoretical ideal of an Ozzie & Harriet Christian-model lifetime companionate monogamous arrangement.
Which of course has worked so well that divorce rates hover in the neighborhood of 50%, serial monogamy is a term of sociological art, and estimates of adultery based on self-reporting run 20-50% for men and 50-70% for men, and never mind unhappy marriages that people, typically women, but we might say the economically weaker partner, feel trapped in because they can't bring themselves to contemplate the alterrnatives.
In another time gays and lesbians and sexual radicals might had advocated decoupling, as it were, the specific incidents of marriage, such as property inheritance rights and entitlements to insurance coverage, from marriage. That would be radical. Having gays and lesbians shoehorn themselves into a model of a relationship that is fundamentally conservative --and has won the approbation of gay conservatives like Andrew Sullivan -- is not an unqualified defeat for traditionalists.
These are not reasons to oppose gay marriage. They are reasons to contemplate how radical a challenge it is to traditionalist norms.
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> snitsnat quoted:
>
> >American Family Association boycotts Ford over gay
> issues
>
> We watched Pat Buchanan talking about his new book
> on how the right
> has lost the culture war on O'Reilly the other
> night. Buchanan said
> the very fact that we're talking about gay marriage
> at all is proof
> of the traditionalists' defeat. He's right. They can
> still cause a
> lot of trouble, and it may take a long time, but the
> social
> reactionaries are on the wane.
>
> Doug
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