[Assimilation = Death sticker.]
So the Supreme Court has started to talk about Prop 8, which means that my Twitter feed is suddenly full of people using the word “assimilationist” in cold blood. Unfortunately, shouting at people in incoherent rage does not actually get them to stop using the word, so ugh.
Worry about assimilation is a common thread that runs through a lot of social justice movements– race, disability, even atheism– but I’m going to specifically be talking about it in a queer context, because that’s the one I’m most familiar with.
The assimilationist mindset is “we’re people just like you, you should give us rights.” Which, as strategies go, has the advantage of totally working. Seriously! The single thing that correlates best with having changed your mind to support same-sex marriage is knowing a queer person– that is, your mental image of queers shifts from “Pride Parade and anonymous bathroom sex” to “Joe down the street who grows really nice roses.” It also really cleverly defangs a pretty major squick-based anti-queer argument: it’s hard to argue that LGBT people are sick disgusting perverts who live loveless lives full of casual sex when observably the queer rights movement is advocating for their right to have spouses, children, a white picket fence, and a golden retriever.
The problem here is that if you say “we fall in love and want to get married! We’re people just like you!”, you’re implicitly saying that people who don’t fall in love and get married are not people just like you. Which is kind of a dick move. Assimilationism sanitizes queerness to make it more acceptable to Jane Homophobe: if she’s still vaguely threatened by Ellen, she’s just not ready for “and also anonymous bathroom sex is a totally valid lifestyle choice.” This is simultaneously an understandable political tactic and really, really shitty.
Where this gets absolutely toxic is that, for various reasons, Joe Homophobe tends to find a lot of the most marginalized queer people the most threatening. Trans people are scary and confusing! It is much easier to sweep us under the rug and just focus on same-sex marriage, particularly if the activists involved are kinda transphobic themselves. The HRC in particular has a history of being shitty to trans people.
But trans people, don’t rest on your laurels, we totally pull this shit too– the trans movement as a whole regularly ignores trans addicts, mentally ill people, sex workers, homeless people, survivors, and other groups, partially because they’re alien and scary and partially because we’re afraid embracing these issues will just reinforce the stereotypes and make us look alien and scary. If the only time you talk about trans women and sex work is to criticize the idea that all trans women are sex workers, you need to check yourself.
As it happens, the basic strategy is the same. I’m a nonbinary kinky poly queer sex worker and I’m basically a normal person. I have shitty customers and sometimes don’t really want to go to work! I like cuddling my partners a lot! I have deep feelings about Hey There Delilah! I sometimes eat a pint of ice cream in one sitting! I am basically a person, not a Terrifying Monster or a Pitiable Creature Who Needs To Be Saved or a Horrible Slutty Slut Slut, and my life is neither alien nor scary. The problem with assimilationism is that the tactics haven’t been applied enough.
Occasionally people will object to LGBT people getting the right to marry because marriage is a highly problematic institution, and then they will proceed to talk about misogyny and rape culture and capitalism and elevating monogamous romantic-sexual relationships over other forms of love and make a lot of really salient critiques most of which I agree with.
The problem with this line of thought is that, near as I can figure, about 98% of married people are cishets. Therefore, to be fair, solving the problems of marriage is 98% cishet people’s job. I don’t see why I should have to not get married just because cishet people fucked it up.
…Also even in a society where we didn’t have any misogyny or rape culture or capitalism or elevation of monogamous romantic-sexual relationships over other forms of love, people would still probably want to be life partners with each other sometimes, and there are certain rights the government should give to people who want to be life partners. We might as well call that “marriage,” and we ought to extend it to all genders. (Some people think that these rights should be extended to everyone regardless of relationship status– but that ends up obviously absurd. Married couples don’t have to testify against each other in court, which is fair and just. Making everyone not have to testify against anyone in court seems like it would end poorly.)
The final form of anti-assimilationist thought, using the term generously, I wish to address is the idea that queer people are radical and rebellious and fighting the patriarchy and wanting to get married and have kids is like, so not cool man. To which I say:
FUCK.
OFF.
The whole point is that people end up with more choices. Sometimes, if people have more choices, it means they make choices you don’t like. You do NOT get to take away their choices because YOU disapprove of them, as long as they are not hurting anyone else. If you do, you are basically the same thing as the homophobes– just with less political power.
Thing of Things 
The idea that my sexuality is inherently political (inherently left-wing/progressive) just ticks me off. It makes it harder for folks to recognize that this is just who I am, that there’s nothing I’m trying to be. I wish there were more apolitical representation of LGBT people/issues.
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Unfortunately anything to do with public policy in the United States inevitably gets claimed as part of either Blue territory or Red territory. And, like in most wars, the people who get hurt most are the people living on that contested territory.
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It’s really hard to imagine a way to represent LGBT people’s issues that isn’t political. I presume you mean that isn’t party political, but even then, when you have one party that is way more responsive to LGBT rights issues than another party*, it seems difficult to claim LGBT activists should engage with all political perspectives equally.
*and no, this situation is not limited to the USA
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We’re not single issue voters any more than everyone else. We come from all walks of life, and for some of us our gender/sexuality isn’t our defining political trait.
As far as the general point about politicization goes, who I sleep with or what box I tick at the DMV are terribly boring things to make a stink over. I don’t enjoy being used as a summoning tool for one party and a scapegoat for another on the basis of something that has next to zero measurable impact on anyone else. Could we talk about poverty, please? Or flu epidemics? Or anything but who I fuck? Living in a well-informed, intelligent political climate is in my best interest, too.
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Yes, it would be nice if everybody magically stopped caring about LGBT people’s sex lives. But that’s not going to happen any time soon, and I can’t see a path to getting there that doesn’t involve political action (if not party political action).
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@kalvarnsen: There’s a big difference between “my orientation is political: it forces me to engage in politics in order to defend myself and those like me from assholes” and “my orientation is political: it’s radical and transgressive, and therefore puts me on the side of radicalism and transgression, so I should support other radical and transgressive things too!”
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Kalvernsen: wouldn’t the most efficient form of political action, for ninecarpels, be to give out to anyone who engages in other forms of political action for or against “gay rights”?
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@MugSofer: Your question wasn’t addressed to me, but it did involve me, and I can’t quite parse the grammar. Could you rephrase?
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@ninecarpals:
You said that you don’t like people going on about your sexual orientation – rather than things that are actually important – whether they’re arguing “for” you or “against” you, right?
Kalvernsen then pointed out that making one’s sexual orientation into something unremarkable, like hair colour, would require actual effort to shift society towards. Which is true. (With the implication that one side – liberals – are pushing society in this direction, and the other side are actively pushing things the other way.)
I was saying that – if your only goal was to stop people discussing who you want to fuck instead of, say, global poverty – then it would be more efficient to simply attack both sides whenever they bring up the subject, to encourage people to talk about other topics, rather than signing up for a general “let’s reorganize everything!” plan that might eventually have that effect in the event of it’s success.
This sort of thing is a form of political action, but only in the same sense that voting for Hitler is a form of democracy.
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@MugaSofer.
I suppose it’s my fault for not offering more context, but under most circumstances when the position you assume another person is holding could be compared to voting for Hitler, odds are there’s been a miscommunication.
I live in the US, which has a de facto two party system. What that means is that in the case of a culture war, all one side has to do is be slightly more on your side than the other in order to claim that you have no choice but to vote for them. This has been the consistent behavior of the Democratic party: stake out a space just barely to the left of the Republican party and then loudly proclaim that they’re on my side, and won’t I really be screwed if I let the other team win? In many cases the politician in question has no intention of prioritizing the needs of my community, but even when they do I find the tactic extremely distasteful. It’s either bribery or blackmail depending on the tone, and it’s condescending to boot, like we’re too stupid or selfish to pay attention to the rest of our lives or the lives of others.
I also live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the queer community holds a degree of political power seen almost nowhere else on the planet. That doesn’t mean it’s a perfect place to live as a queer person, but what it does mean is that politicians play up their supposed connection to me in order to win my vote. There was a billboard up before last November’s election in San Francisco where one candidate (an openly gay one) had his picture next to Harvey Milk’s with a slogan about continuing Milk’s legacy. Even setting aside the fact that Milk had almost no legacy as a Supervisor (not his fault), the billboard was a crude identity politics play.
There are also queers on both sides of the political aisle who like to play the loyalty card against each other. Liberal queers turn their noses up at the Log Cabin Republicans because of their perceived preference for their wealth over everyone’s well-being, while conservative queers scoff at liberals who denounce same-sex marriage because it’s not radical enough. Both groups assume that my life begins and ends with who I fuck.
None of this is to suggest that there aren’t important issues that impact my community, or that they don’t exist in a political context. What I’m sick of is, as I said, “being used as a summoning tool for one party and a scapegoat for another.”
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Yeah, it’s a dilemma that may not actually have any kind of a resolution.
If you are an activist who campaigns for wide acceptance of queer people, or women, or emacs users, or whatever, then the first thing you have to do is build an organization of people who are on your side. The second thing you need to do is to motivate them into action. But in order to do these things, you must, by necessity, find something that unites them — and whatever unites them is inevitably the same thing that makes them different from their oppressors. So, you end up emphasizing these differences in order to build a stronger sense of personal identity: “we are emacs users, and as emacs users, we all shout with one voice: no more !”, etc.
So, your organization is now somewhat self-defeating. Your win condition is irrelevance, because in a society where being queer, female, or an emacs user is seen as completely unremarkable, there’d be no need for any organization that fights for the rights of emacs users. I’d be like fighting for the rights of people with brown eyes, i.e. a completely nonsensical proposition.
But you will probably never reach that win condition, because none of your goals can be achieved without tactics that emphasize all the ways in which emacs users/women/gay people/etc. are unlike everyone else.
I am not aware of any good solutions to this problem 😦
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@osberend: Yes, that’s true, and I agree that one’s orientation is not innately political, except to the extent that we’re all political simply by being sentient and having wants and needs. And I’m certainly not saying that queer people must vote for one party or another. But at the same time, it’s hard to imagine any conceivable form of productive LGBT activism that is totally party neutral, when the policies of the two parties are so far apart.
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Well, the left is largely involved with the issues of poor folks, but I don’t encounter people inherently linking poverty with progressivism.
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There’s definitely the weak form of linkage, progressives arguing that all poor people should be progressive. But it’s true that no one claims that daring to be poor is an inherently progressive act.
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Frankly, I think the progressive movement as a whole could stand to link itself a lot more closely to poverty.
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I always wanted queer activists to promote civil unions to not just being equal to, but better than traditional marriages. More flexibility in terms, options for more than two people, things like Raikoth’s thing for divorce where you have to make a months-long trek into the wilderness or whatever. Make civil unions cool. Assimilate the other way. Not “we’re normal like you” but “you’re weird like us.”
But that’s just because it’d be more fun, and not because it’s a realistic goal. Still, I think it’s the sort of thing that could build bridges between groups but not unilaterally on the terms of the powerful.
And it’s yet another part of why I get annoyed with the misapplication of “appropriation” but it probably falls into the same broad class of things like learning sign language or stimming, where greater acceptance of aspects of XYZ culture benefits the members of group XYZ.
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When the country where I lived legalised civil unions, there was a lot of talk of promoting them as an equally valid alternative to marriage. Hetero couples got civil unions because they wanted to disassociate themselves from what they saw as marriage’s toxic associations. Some hetero couples even converted their previous marriages into civil unions.
But after a few years of civil unions being available for everyone and marriage being available for heterosexual couples only, same sex marriage was eventually allowed, and interest in civil unions seems to be fading. I’m not sure how I feel about this.
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Queer activists didn’t do so because it would have been pointless. First, because let’s face it, civil unions were largely intended to fob off same-sex marriage: here, you perverts, have an anemic version of what you’re really asking for and leave precious straight marriage alone! Second, because nobody is really going to buy that civil unions are better than marriage. It’s too ensconced in the culture. When civil unions were the only option, you probably remember people joking about “are we going to tell our parents that we’re getting civilized, or that we’re getting unionized?”
Also, the problem with flexibility is that it also lacks strength. When you get legally married, you’re signing up for a pre-set package of rights and responsibilities with rules that are pretty well determined. This obviously has drawbacks, but the advantages are that you aren’t going to find out twenty years down the line that, sorry, the provision of your civil union that you thought protected you from financial ruin actually means nothing, or that what the two of you thought made you a legal parent of your children really didn’t. Or that while your civil union agreement was fabulous when you lived in California, it doesn’t make a lick of difference when your partner gets transferred to Italy and would like to bring you along.
To be clear, I’m not anti-civil union in the least. But they have a lot of limitations and are not really a smarter better version of marriage. That’s why they never gained much traction.
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“civil unions were largely intended to fob off same-sex marriage: here, you perverts, have an anemic version of what you’re really asking”
Like I say, I know a lot of straight couples who opted for civil unions because they wanted to disassociate themselves from marriage.
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Sure. I was one of them for a long time. But that was an unintentionally side effect. Civil unions weren’t intended for people like me; they were a crumb thrown to shut up those people who were trying to get their gay all over the marriage.
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I think that most types of utilitarianism, especially Preference Utilitarianism, are basically applying the logic of assimilationism (“I’m a person just like you”) to its logical conclusion. Preference utilitarians define “person just like you” as “a person who has preferences about how to live their life, just like you.” No one gets excluded because everyone is a “person just like you” in all the ways that matter.
And just to be clear, I consider this a point in favor of preference utilitarianism and assimilationism.
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Assimilationism has some less pleasant consequences than “extend empathy to everyone” in practice, though. In the context of this discussion, queer explorations of alternative ways to manage romance and sexuality are being… Not lost, but perhaps ignored compared to how they could be?
I don’t think preference utilitarianism is a central case of assimilationism, or vice versa.
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What romantic and sexual alternatives are you thinking of? All the ones that come to mind for me are seeping into the straight/cis communities where I live, and they’re starting to make the news.
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“In the context of this discussion, queer explorations of alternative ways to manage romance and sexuality are being… Not lost, but perhaps ignored compared to how they could be?”
It’s not as either/or as this. For one thing there is a certain amount of regionalism. My partner and I have been together for 16 years – about as committed as it gets. Like many other similar couples here in the Seattle area, and apparently this is true in California – and our relationship was kinda sorta sexually open, for a while, but always emotionally exclusive. But in the Midwest and back east this was not the case at all. Back there it was very much more the 50s ideal.
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But you *have* to sanitize your group. Everyone does.
To give a concrete example, suppose some members of your group like to use a lot of insults. You, on the other hand, think using lots of insults is bad. Are you obliged to say “I’m not going to sanitize this group, so I must refuse to dissociate myself from them”?
(Of course, either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ answer to that has its own problems.)
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I’ve said some pretty combative things in the past on the topic of how absurd it is that the queer community of all groups likes to throw around the term “assimilationist”, but instead of repeating myself I’m going to raise another point.
As a nonmonogamous bisexual trans man with kink proclivities that are weird even in kink communities, I’m a peculiar person on paper. I also roleplay, work for a queer clothing company, collect stuffed animals, dance the Viennese waltz to get high, and create pretty art based on the Apollonian gasket, none of which are any more normal.
And yet, in my mind, I’m a spectacularly boring person. I go to my day job, come home, cook some dinner, and dick around online unless there’s something interesting going on outside my apartment. I wish I were cooler, like my sister the aerialist, but I was born to be a giant square.
Everyone has some mix of those two sides. No one can be strange all the time, or go the other direction and be entirely banal. Even my friend who regularly paints themselves green works at Starbucks and ordered one of our suits. Judging each other for harmless peculiarities (or lack of them) is a hypocritical, self-righteous, utterly pointless status-seeking game, and it infuriates me when my community engages in it.
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Is the point you’re not repeating that most queers are born into mainstream society, and therefore the idea that they’re “assimilating” by adopting its basic values is exceptionally stupid?
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Right. Except for the tiny percentage of us born to out queer parents, we’re all raised by straight and cis people – it’s queer culture we may or may not assimilate into later.
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You know this is a very penetrating insight with application all over. What you are identifying is the same level of stupidity in claiming Christians “appropriated” memes and symbols – Christmas trees, the trinitarian model, a lot Mexican Catholicism – from pagan cultures, when in fact those Christians came out of those cultures and had those memes and symbols as their cultural inheritance. The assumption seems to be that Christians are some kind of separate tribe distinct form the surrounding cultures. There’s no excuse for this of course, rejecting that model was the main issue at the very first church council.
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Fair, although in my observation (YMMV), most of the people talking about how much of Christian symbolism is appropriated from pagan cultures are doing so in response to right-wing Christians attack them for appropriating symbolism from Christianity. “Stop stealing our sacred imagery!” naturally invites a response of “You stole it first!”
Granted, there are also some very dumb Wiccans who actually think that Wicca is a pre-Christian religion and will whine endlessly about how Christians have stolen Yule logs and so forth from them, but that’s just stupids stupiding.
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Okay, got it. Makes sense.
I have a hard time remembering these people are Christian – American Protestantism’s loony fringe is the Evangelicals, so that’s marginal on top of marginal. But I was referring to the early centuries in Europe.
“right-wing Christians attack them for appropriating symbolism from Christianity. “Stop stealing our sacred imagery!” naturally invites a response of “You stole it first!””
This goes to this whole “cultural appropriation ” mess. First off, what you say about the circularity in this is spot on. Second, cultural borrowing is the norm, not some kind of pillage. It’s always circular too. The verse pattern of Delta Blues is British Isles, although because of the huge originality of the artists that kind of thing is not readily apparent, then fifty years later British musicians fell in love with that music and started building on it.
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> …dance the Viennese waltz to get high…
Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
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When I have one you’ll be the first to know.
But seriously, the Viennese waltz is better than sex, and I’ve had some damn good sex. I say that not just to demonstrate its ecstatic value, but because it feels very much like having sex, with the moment you wobble off the floor and collapse onto the bench as the orgasm equivalent – again, not only due to its intensity, but because it feels very much like having an orgasm. After my last go-round I was too blissed out to dance the next number: just sat there, stupid lolling grin on my face, unable to move for the next five minutes. Had a morning after swagger, too.
It’s a natural exercise high, plus the rising action of whatever music you’re dancing to (I prefer pop music because it tends to be very dramatic), and the personal connection you build with your partner. I describe it as flying, and the two best moments of my life without question were dancing the Viennese with an especially talented follower. I can’t recommend the Viennese highly enough.
It’s tough to find good examples on YouTube because social Viennese isn’t very impressive to look at. All the filmed is done with American competition styling – lots of breaking away from your partner, lifts, highly exaggerated lines – which is understandable, given that the Viennese I dance is mostly just spinning at a high speed with other moves thrown in as accents during appropriate points in the music. None of it is arranged ahead of time; if I break contact with my partner, they’re not going to know to twirl in place and wait for me to collect them. (Conversely, all the examples of International competition styling are done to the kind of stuffy music I don’t enjoy at all.)
#3 here has a few moves I employ occasionally, though #1 has my second favorite song. This one here uses my favorite song and does have some moments that would be realistic on the social dance floor, though it doesn’t capture the intensity very well.
Now I’m all worked up. Phew!
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@ninecarpals:
Huh, I had no idea — in fact, I didn’t even know that “Viennese waltz” was a style of dance that can be applied to any kind of music. That’s pretty cool, thanks for the info ! Out of curiosity, how common are the euphoric effects — i.e., do they work for most people, or just you ?
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@Bugmaster
Not quite any music: It’s a waltz, so you need something in triple time, like 3/4 or 6/8. Pop music is primarily done in duple time so there’s less material than you’d hope for. It also has to be specific tempo (roughly 180bpm) to give it the right feel.There’s plenty of stuff out there, but you really have to pay attention and keep track.
I don’t know how common the euphoria is since I don’t ask. When I’ve danced with novices they’re usually too concerned with the placement of their feet to really get into it, but the veterans all leave with the same smiles I’m wearing. Like every activity I’m sure it’s not for everyone, but if it’s your thing…hoooo boy, is it ever your thing.
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@ninecarpals: So what you’re saying is that International style has better moves and better music, right? </trolling>
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@Osberend: I know you said you’re joking, but I’m going to clarify anyway.
The videos on YouTube mostly depict two sets of dance/music pairs: international/instrumental and American/pop. That’s because American style is showier and more suitable for solo acts, while international makes more sense as part of a competition where everyone is dancing simultaneously and pretending to be overly dignified. The Trans-Siberian Orchestra choreography was able to use pop music with (some) international moves because multiple dancers moving in sync makes the basic rotation more beautiful.
What I dance is a social style, which means that I share the floor with other couples and have no choreography ahead of time. Most American moves don’t work in that context. However, because there’s no pretension, pop music is totally allowed.
And that’s more than you probably cared to know about the Viennese waltz!
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That sounds about like what I expected. And if that were sufficient to be “more than I care to know” about a subject that I felt a need to comment on at all, I wouldn’t spend so much time writing absurdly long comments on all sorts of shit.
That said, I’d say we’re in agreement about dance style, and in disagreement about music. I don’t think that pretension is required to have a preference for common practice* instrumental* music as an accompaniment for partnered dancing.
My tastes are pretty broad though—on Pandora, I have 3 stations I actually listen to: One for alt-country, one for baroque, and one for psychobilly.
*Of course, now I’m wondering what Notre Dame school polyphony sung at 180 bpm and in something approximating triple time would sound like, and whether it would be danceable. Hmm.
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Yeah, the autistic community and neurodiversity as a whole has the same issue. The people who had Asperger’s back when it was still a thing can often benefit tremendously by differentiating themselves from the rest of the autistic community, the autistics as a whole want to distance themselves from the mentally ill whenever we get accused of being violent (see: every mass shooting that gets into the papers, even though the perpetrators are hardly ever actually autistic), the intellectual/developmental disability groups and the autistic community both want to distance themselves from each other, except where they overlap.
Also, as you said, anti-assimilation stuff is not always the greatest. Case in point: the alleged feminists who are all about “valuing female strengths” in a way that seems to suggest that I am, despite all evidence to the contrary, not female. I had no clue that digit ratio, emotion-reading skills, and empathy-based morality were the basis of femininity now. Fetal testosterone levels may have an effect on gender, but they should not be the basis for assigning gender!
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What? How? If we lived in a society that didn’t elevate typical relationships over non-typical relationships, the government would not grant special rights to people who want to be in typical relationships. Spousal privilege only exists because we view the husband-wife relationship as special and worth protecting, even at the expense of justice. If we didn’t elevate that relationship over other relationships, then there would need to be some kind of fact-sensitive inquiry before we granted that privilege, or else nobody would get it. And maybe nobody should get it. Or maybe the government shouldn’t be able to force people to testify at all. Or maybe the right against self-incrimination should extend to a right against incriminating others. Or maybe something else that I can’t think of right now. But the ONLY way to justify spousal privilege is to elevate the spousal relationship over other relationships. Spousal privilege wouldn’t be a thing if we lived in a society that didn’t do that.
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I said “life partners.” Why are you assuming that life partners have to be in monogamous romantic-sexual relationships?
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The point that I think wfenza was trying to make is that, since life partner relationships are not in any way objectively better than non life partner relationships, why should we expect the government to extend certain rights to people who have or aspire to the first, but not the second?
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Life partner relationships bring benefits to society by enabling instant, on-demand support among the partners. The more you can rely on your (chosen) family, the less you have to lean on the slow and heavy-handed mechanisms provided by the state.
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So just for the record, you’re arguing that life partner relationships are objectively better than non-life partner relationships?
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It was inferred from the indication that what we should do with marriage is to extend it to all genders, which I now see was an unjustified inference. But the analysis still holds true if you’re talking about “life partners.” To justify giving special rights to life partners, you’d have to view the life partner relationship as more important than relationships that aren’t expected to last forever. It’s still an elevation of the typical relationship over the non-typical. For any type of relationship to get special rights, there has to be a decision that it’s more important, worthy of protection, or better for society than other relationships. Outside of dependent relationships (such as parent-child), I don’t see a justification for that.
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Life partnership + no-fault divorce + no social requirement that they be monogamous romantic-sexual relationships is a way of informing the government what your most important relationship is.
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@kalvarnsen
Well, obviously, not “morally better” or “better for every individual”. But from the state’s perspective, yes — all relationships between law-obeying citizens are good, but life partner and family relationships are the best.
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ok, if by “life partners” you don’t mean “partners for life” (as in, people can be life partners without the expectation that it’s forever) and people can choose life partners for any reason, and people can have as many life partners as they want, then that’s probably a nonjudgmental way of informing the government of what your most important relationships are. Those relationships could be given special privileges without any indication that the government is favoring a certain type of relationship over another.
We’d also need a way better system than no-fault divorce. I’m a divorce attorney. No-fault divorce is hell, and needs substantial reforms.
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@Nita: Possibly, from the narrowly self-interested view of the state as an entity that wants to minimise its costs and maximise its benefits. But I don’t want the state to make laws based on what is best for the state as a discrete entity, but what is best for the people the state supervises. And having the state validate certain types of relationships over others is an extremely bad idea.
And while I accept that you didn’t mean to make moral claims, I’d be careful there – when discussing different kinds of relationships, there’s a long and rich tradition of using economic arguments as a trojan horse for moral arguments. Listen to a Republican talking about the importance of marriage, and he will swap pretty seamlessly from talking about jesus and morality to talking about stable families providing for each other so the government doesn’t have to.
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If one’s most important relationships get special privileges, what exactly are these privileges?
And what about one-sided relationships? Or projects (like, say, research) that aren’t personal relationships, but can benefit strangers? Or projects (like reading one’s favorite books) that don’t affect others much, but can still be important to the person doing them? If you think one’s most important mutual personal relationships should get privileges, do you think such projects should get some, too?
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I for one am against both spousal privilege and the right not to self-incriminate.
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Why against the right to self incriminate?
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“The right not to self-incriminate” applies to the innocent as much as it does to the guilty. If THEY can make you reveal “the truth”, then THEY can make you lie as well – it’s a protection against being forced to give a false confession.
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I’m going to explain the legal principles involved, under the assumption that you don’t understand them. I recognize that you could also be making an debatble but non-crazy pragmatic argument, and just leaving several steps out.
The right not to self-incriminate is, strictly speaking the right not to “be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against [your]self.” See, neither the police nor prosecutors are allowed to force anyone to answer questions a particular way, but a prosecutor can force* someone with pertinent information to answer particular questions . . . unless doing so would implicate them in criminal activity.
So if I don’t want to answer a prosecutor’s questions for a legitimate reason (e.g. fear of retaliatory violence) or a somewhat dubious one (e.g. loyalty to a criminal friend), too bad, so sad, I have to. But if I don’t want to answer a prosecutor’s question for the most illegitimate reason possible (I’m guilty, and I don’t want to be justly punished), then I can refrain from doing so.
That’s insane.
*By otherwise fining or jailing them for contempt of court.
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Doug, why doesn’t that apply to all witness testimony?
(Actually, maybe it should?)
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Who’s Doug? And by “that,” do you mean the right to refuse to testify?
If so, it’s because the Constitution says “No person [. . .]shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself” [emphasis mine].
Note that you can invoke the right not to self-incriminate in a case that’s against someone else if testifying would incriminate you in either the same or some other crime. So, for example, if the prosecutor asks where you were when the shooting started, and you were visiting a prostitute (in a country where that’s illegal), you can refuse to testify. However, the prosecution can get around this by giving you immunity in exchange for your testimony. So you can still be forced to publicly admit that you were getting blown by a hooker, as long as the prosecutor is willing to not go after you legally for it.
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I was replying to the comment by “Doug S”, above?
They said that “If THEY can make you reveal “the truth”, then THEY can make you lie as well – it’s a protection against being forced to give a false confession.” Y’know, as a justification for not having people testify against themselves.
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Ah, I see. Your comment showed up in my feed as I reply to mine (because of nesting depth issues) and I took it as such without checking. It seems we are actually in agreement.
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Some of my relationships are more important than others, and that’s fine with me. I am glad for the many practical legal rights associated with certain kinds of close relationships, and an official institution to recognize which relationships are deserving of these rights.
I also have a relationship with you, and that relationship is called “stranger”. I am glad that the rights associated with marriage are not also associated with strangers. Not that there’s anything wrong with strangers. I am glad to have so many billions of strangers in my life, it is the best thing.
When I think of one relationship-type being privileged over another, mere recognition that some relationships are closer than others is not sufficient. Legal rights associated with relationships are not sufficient. However, some legal regulations can be inappropriate (why can’t I designate multiple close relationships, or temporary close relationships, and why is there only one level of closeness?), and there can be social norms which unduly elevate certain relationship types (married couples are supposed to be sexual/romantic, monogamous, and permanent, and being single is the worst possible life).
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It’s the “official institution to recognize which relationships are deserving of these rights” that makes me nervous. It’s basically an institution whose purpose is to determine which relationships are important enough to merit protection.
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Any time the government wants to selectively affect some people, you need some bureaucracy to determine which ones. eg If you want income tax, you need a device to determine people’s income. I don’t see this as intrinsically problematic.
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@Siggy: I’m much more comfortable with bureaucrats making decisions based on economics than I am their making decisions based on intimate emotions.
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But the reason to elevate those relationships and grant them rights is that they also come with significant, mandatory responsibilities. Spouses have legal obligations regarding each other that don’t exist between roommates or unmarried lovers.
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Relevant to your “the only thing that changes your mind”:
When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality. Michael J. LaCour and Donald P. Green, Science, 2014.
“Personal contact between in-group and out-group individuals of equivalent status can reduce perceived differences and thus improve intergroup relations. LaCour and Green demonstrate that simply a 20-minute conversation with a gay canvasser produced a large and sustained shift in attitudes toward same-sex marriage for Los Angeles County residents. Surveys showed persistent change up to 9 months after the initial conversation. Indeed, the magnitude of the shift for the person who answered the door was as large as the difference between attitudes in Georgia and Massachusetts.”
Abstract here.
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I think that’s a bit too charitable (and, as a result, uncharitable to anti-assimilationists).
The problem is that, to large groups of people, personhood is not sufficient. Only people who try to make the “correct” lifestyle choices, and feel very guilty if they don’t, qualify for respect and protection. And their idea of “correct” is rooted in theology or their pet theory of civilization — good luck arguing against it.
So, under this model, there’s no smooth path from accepting nice white-picket-fence couples to accepting nice sex workers — the non-acceptance is not temporary, but inherent in yielding to normality enforcers.
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But “normality” itself can shift, with enough pressure. A century ago divorce was scandalous, but now it evokes no more comment than the color of your shoes.
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This in turn seems a bit under-charitable. Both ozymandias’s framing of assimilationism and yours strike me as non-central, on opposite sides. When I think of assimilationist argumentation (which I broadly tend to favor), what I think of is more along the lines of “We are like you with respect to essentials, and different only in incidentals. Therefore, because rights pertain chiefly to essentials, and not to incidentals, we should have the same rights as you do.”
This, to me, seems to be the logic behind the frequent comparisons to infertile couples: It’s an assertion that the capacity for biological reproduction within a marriage is an incidental, not an essential.
On the other hand, “born this way” lines of argumentation seem to come a lot closer to the “pity us; we’re doing the best we can” line of thought that you seem to see as central, which is a big part of why they strike me as so distasteful.
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obserend, that’s an interesting argument re infertile couples. Perhaps this is because of coming from a legal perspective, but I think it is a bit off, and would rephrase as: heterosexuals have classified the capacity for biological reproduction within marriage as an incidental, and so it is dishonest and ineffective to try and redefine it as an essential only when same-sex couples wish to marry.
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The best counterargument to the “infertile couples” line is that infertility isn’t perfectly legible. Are you going to force everyone who wants to marry to get a fertility test? And is there a completely accurate fertility test?
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There is a very good (though not perfect) test for a couple which is tolerate pre-marital sex (even if one otherwise would not) following a conditionally binding engagement, but only allow a marriage once the woman quickens*, and cancel the engagement if this does not occur within a certain time. This (or it’s riskier-for-women variant of the same thing, but without the binding engagement) has been an established practice at various times in various places.
Alternatively, one could allow a marriage without proof of fertility, but annul it if a healthy child is not born within some reasonable amount of time. On the whole, I think that this is inferior to the first option (if the engagement truly is binding, ideally with an additional requirement for the man to provide some degree of support during (known) pregnancy even prior to quickening).
But even if one is not willing to resort to either of these approaches, one could certainly forbid individuals that are known with high probability to be infertile (e.g. individuals with certain genetic defects, individuals who have been irreversibly sterilized, women past the age of menopause, etc.).
*Or conceives, but given that some women have repetitive early miscarriages, it seems better to wait. The best option in that regard would be wait for delivery of a healthy child, but that has the downside of not allowing the child to be born in wedlock, for those who care about such matters.
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Or allow infertility as cause for divorce, which was also done.
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That’s still not treating fertility as an essential though, because it only invalidates the marriage if one or both parties choose to do so. I think that must marriage equality advocates would be perfectly happy to accept “I’ve decided that I want to be able to able to produce children with my spouse after all” being a valid grounds for divorce in a same-sex marriage, especially since most of them support no-fault divorce anyway.
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Many states apparently did have such laws at one time – people getting married had to sign a firm stating they were “neither infirm nor impotent”. This came up back in 1993 when the Hawaii Supreme Court really got the ball rolling on same-sex marriage; the court noted that the affidavit was abolished by the Hawaii legislature years before, so it was a little dishonest for them to turn around and say that marriage is all about the babymaking. IIRC, it was also common in the US for marriages to be ‘voidable’ if one person turned out to be infertile or unable to engage in sex (that is, the marriage could be nullified).
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>The problem is that, to large groups of people, personhood is not sufficient. Only people who try to make the “correct” lifestyle choices, and feel very guilty if they don’t, qualify for respect and protection. And their idea of “correct” is rooted in theology or their pet theory of civilization — good luck arguing against it.
You realize that this describes all morality, right?
I personally happen to disapprove quite strongly of the “incorrect” lifestyle choices of murder, rape, theft etc. In fact, I even lobby the government to prosecute them! The horror!
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No, there is a difference. In case of murder, rape and theft people can point out concrete harms, and other people can bring their own evidence to show either that these acts aren’t actually harmful, or that prosecuting them would cause even greater harm.
But when a religious person tells me that I am damaging my partner’s soul by having premarital sex with him, or when a neoreactionary claims that being nice to transgender people will ruin Western civilization, what arguments can I use to persuade them?
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Ah, so your true rejection isn’t that they’re obsessed with policing the “correct” lifestyle choices; it’s that they’re wrong about which ones to police.
… which, y’know, they are.
I should think it’s pretty easy to argue with those people; their claims aren’t untestable, after all, since they support them with (claimed) evidence.
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You must have been hanging out with very different Christians, then. The religious people I’m familiar with tend to have this thing called “faith”, which they consider a virtue.
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You’re thinking of *blind* faith, which is neither a virtue nor something people like admitting to when in the middle of arguing politics.
In the case of premarital sex, have you actually talked to religious people about it?
Because yeah, the ones I’ve talked to all talked about virtue-ethics style problems where it leads to immorality; and, more importantly, widespread social issues.
Which, um, are issues secular liberal should be fairly familiar with? Heck, we object to people just *saying* things that could encourage racism and sexism.
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I have to admit I’m not an expert on different types of faith. Perhaps you could explain to me the difference between blind faith and the other, virtuous kind of faith?
Here’s what I would call a typical case against premarital sex, aimed at Christians: http://www.focusonthefamily.com/faith/christian-singles/being-single-and-faithful/three-lies-about-sex-before-marriage
The first argument is based on the Bible. OK, let’s move on…
The next is that premarital sex can cause “dissatisfaction in their present marriages, unhappiness with the level of sexual intimacy and the prevalence of low self-esteem” in women. Unfortunately, I was unable to track down the “study of 100,000 women” mentioned in the article. My best guess is that their secondary source is Donald Joy’s book “Bonding” — but even that required some sleuthing. Since I can’t find the original source of this claim, I can’t evaluate or dispute it.
And finally, they argue that comparing your spouse to previous partners can cause dissatisfaction, and the possibility of being compared can deprive your spouse of “emotional safety”. The latter is just insecurity — I have felt threatened when my partner spent time with friends, should we eradicate friendship? As for dissatisfaction, 1) people can and do improve their bedroom skills, 2) if you’re incapable of loving someone unless they’re 100% perfect, you aren’t ready for a committed relationship, and ignorance won’t fix that.
Personally, I consider these arguments rather shaky. But how likely are my objections to persuade someone who believes that agreeing with me would get them tortured for eternity?
Here’s a more thoughtful article, seemingly aimed at the general public: http://www.gotquestions.org/premarital-sex.html
Again, they start with faith-based arguments: “God designed sex to ..”, various Bible verses… moving on.
From a more general perspective, they bring the following:
(1) acceptance of sex in committed relationships leads to acceptance of casual sex
(2) casual sex makes people incapable of commitment:
They support (2) with the infamous sticky note analogy. This is a tame version of the “proof” — I’ve heard of “sex ed” lessons where the kids take turns spitting into a glass. So, having sex makes you disgusting like a glass full of spit, or at least useless like a dirty sticky note. No one will want you. You’ll be a broken person, incapable of true love. Wow, no wonder Christian couples who have had premarital sex experience so much guilt and turmoil!
So far, I haven’t seen any convincing evidence that putting blowjobs-for-boyfriends and murder in the same moral category (“sin”) is less harmful than letting every person decide what level of intimacy they’re comfortable with in their relationships. And instead of providing such evidence, the authors of these articles seem content to “cite” elusive studies they haven’t seen and compare love to glue.
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@Nita:
>I have to admit I’m not an expert on different types of faith. Perhaps you could explain to me the difference between blind faith and the other, virtuous kind of faith?
Well, I’m no expert, but in common parlance, “faith” refers to sticking by an ideal in the face of hardship; while “blind faith” refers to sticking to a potentially-dangerous goal regardless of evidence.
>Personally, I consider these arguments rather shaky.
Well, yeah. Me too.
Why not tell people that, rather than dismissing their concerns as based on immutable “faith”?
>But how likely are my objections to persuade someone who believes that agreeing with me would get them tortured for eternity?
They think that agreeing with you will lead to bad consequences if you’re wrong.
>So far, I haven’t seen any convincing evidence that putting blowjobs-for-boyfriends and murder in the same moral category (“sin”) is less harmful than letting every person decide what level of intimacy they’re comfortable with in their relationships.
Ah, that’s not the same moral category. It just means “unethical”. Lying and murder are both unethical; that doesn’t make them somehow equivalent or “on the same level”.
In fact, many Christians use different categories: “mortal” sins (like murder) and “venial” sins (like lying and “fornication”.) But that’s more popular on this side of the pond, I admit.
>And instead of providing such evidence, the authors of these articles seem content to “cite” elusive studies they haven’t seen and compare love to glue.
Mate, I’m not claiming every Christian out there is right about everything. I’m just saying their arguments are about as evidence-based, and vulnerable to contradictory evidence, as your own or any other person’s.
They’re still wrong about sexuality. (Except sometimes regarding “slippery slopes”, I’ve seen some surprisingly accurate predictions there.) Neoreactionaries are wrong too. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t engage with them.
Also, um, I don’t see you showing any citations; just making vague and often untrue generalizations. Which is fine, because this is just an informal discussion, where we share our opinions and experiences?
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” Therefore, to be fair, solving the problems of marriage is 98% cishet people’s job.”
Fair enough, but speaking as a cishet person, I don’t think that marriage can be salvaged.
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Why?
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When you get down to basics, marriage is the government certifying an emotional relationship. I don’t think the government should be certifying anybody’s emotional relationships.
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As a married cisbi person, I don’t see why it needs “salvaging” – it’s not for everyone, but it works just fine for plenty of folks, even with assorted historical baggage.
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In theory, it can be. In practice, it can’t — not without all-out war against centuries of cobweb-chains of broken culture.
Marriage for love seems not to work. Marriage for love is tied into Western cultural ideas that have been around since the Middle Ages. So there’s kind of a problem.
But in practice, the people who want to preserve it will hack something together without thinking and maybe it’ll eventually stick.
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How are you defining “does not work?”
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Increasing divorce rate, increasing number of people opting out of marriage and the related life script entirely.
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Is that a problem with marriage, or with the current state of our culture?
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We don’t have an increasing divorce rate in the US. Divorce rates are stable or slightly declining.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage_divorce_tables.htm
People opting out of marriage doesn’t say much about marriage not working. It says that people have more options, in large part because women aren’t forced into marriage for economic reasons.
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A chart that starts in 2000? Really?
People opting out of marriage shows that something isn’t working. Even if two-parent families aren’t universal to every remotely functional society ever, I’d expect the counterexamples to have much lower rates of atomization. If ~it takes a village~, one person is a lot worse than two. And if people don’t reproduce at all, we have a demographic problem.
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@nydwracu: Apart from a single one-yesar blip, the divorce rate is strictly non-increasing. In a frequentist simple linear regression analysis*, the two-sided p-value for the regression coefficient is approximately 9e-9. That chart is strong evidence that one or more factors were causally driving the divorce rate down over that 11-year period. Maybe that’s a transient backlash to a longer-term trend. Or maybe it’s society settling down toward a new equilibrium. But it’s undoubtedly a real phenomenon, unless your prior against it is incredibly strong.
In terms of the fraction marrying, it’s worth noting that declining pre-reproductive mortality means that the number of children we need to collectively produce is much lower than it once was. Replacement fertility can be achieved with a bimodal distribution of children-per-woman, without the high end being extreme.
Also, while rapid demographic collapse is bad, somewhat sub-replacement fertility is desirable, given that the US is overpopulated (although not as badly as the world as a whole).
*And yes, frequentism is heuristic at best, and yes, a linear model is undoubtedly somewhat misspecified. All models are wrong, but some models are useful.
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It doesn’t matter how many statistical tools you throw at uninformative data, and a chart with eleven years of data can barely tell you anything. That’s a short-term trend, nothing more. Where is divorce now compared to 1920? 1960? 1946? (The last is a trick question, not that you’ll be able to tell.)
Maybe it has more to do with more people opting out of marriage altogether. Though “opting out” is probably a euphemism here — at least, Pew seems to think the fact that there aren’t enough single men with steady jobs around has something to do with it.
Divorce is, of course, not the only bad thing. Single motherhood has been increasing rapidly — it’s more than tripled since 1960.
Fertility isn’t a black box that pumps out undifferentiated children. Selection matters.
By what metric is the US overpopulated, and does that mean you oppose unskilled immigration?
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@nydwracu: But precisely what the (very basic, not cherry-picked) statistical analysis that I did shows is that the data is informative. It is informative about an 11-year trend, near the end of a . . . what, 55-year period you’re contemplating? That’s not negligible, particularly since the question we’re debating is whether divorce rates are currently increasing, not whether they’re going to go back to where they were in 1960. That we’re never going back to the old equilibrium doesn’t mean we can’t stabilize at a new one.
Pervasive single motherhood is genuinely troubling, much more so than divorce. But that strikes me as less a failure of marriage than a failure of our general culture. Which is a huge problem, to be sure, but abandoning marriage or coming up with alternatives to it is not going to be the solution, assuming there even is one.
I agree that selection matters, although in the short term, my biggest concern is dysmemics, not dysgenics (with dysepigenetics somewhere in there as well). But if we could get people to largely restrict their reproduction to marriage, then a low marriage rate might well improve matters in that regard. The more prudent half of the population having 4 kids each is clearly better than the whole population having two kids each. But . . . if. But again, that’s not a problem with marriage, it’s a problem with the culture that’s leading people to have large numbers of children outside of marriage, despite the ready availability of both contraception and knowledge about non-reproductive sex acts.
The US is overpopulated by a variety of metrics, but my favored one is this: I support reduction (by gradual attrition, not by massacre) of the global population to the pre-industrial level of not more than 500 million. Let us say, as a heuristic for the sake of simplicity, that a large compact land mass with variable terrain should probably have a population density of not more than twice the global average. So the US, with about 6.15% of the global land mass, should have no more than about 12.3% of the maximum desirable global population, or a little about 61.5 million. We have over 5 times that number. That’s bad. It’s bad ecologically, it’s bad for individual prosperity, and it’s bad for individual liberty.
While I don’t support the complete elimination of unskilled immigration (for a variety of reasons), I do think that both skilled and unskilled immigration should be subject to stringent limits on both the number and the character of immigrants for the indefinite future.
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Funny story, when Christine Jorgensen hit the mainstream, she made it very clear that she was a straight woman with a normal, if understated, desire for men. Furthermore, she pointed out that homosexuality was a (in her view) a mental illness, which made it totally different from transsexuality, which was a matter of having the wrong body.
In the years following Stonewall, the gay liberation movement returned the favor by insisting that gender conforming gays were just regular guys and gals and not at all like those sick gender weirdos. They made us march in the back of the parade. The wouldn’t let us on stage.
Round and round it goes.
Of course now it’s totes cool to be gay *and* trans, which is good for me I guess, since I am.
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I am a cisheteropatriarch, so maybe it’s not my place to say so, but still: this is the reason #N+1 that I do not support the modern social justice movement.
What I see when I read about them is a group of marginalized people who have been fighting for years for some measure of acceptance, official recognition, and a place in society. These are all good things, and I’m glad that, on average, at least some of these goals have been achieved — in many cases, by people who quite literally laid down their lives for the cause, and who deserve admiration for what they’d done.
But what is the first thing that the social justice activists do as soon as they’ve achieved a decent amount of social clout and political power ? That’s right — they turn around and use it to crush people who are slightly less mainstream than they themselves are ! Being gay in the traditional sense is apparently cool nowadays, but if you’re bi or trans or asexual — oh no ! Then, apparently, you deserve nothing but scorn and public shaming.
I don’t know why that attitude pisses me off so much; I realize that my response isn’t rational (because, humans being humans, I shouldn’t expect them to act in any other way), but somehow I can’t help it…
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I think you are condemning the only people working to help minority people for being *not-literally-perfect*, when the operate in a social matrix that is a thousand times worse. The LGBT scene has issues, as does any human institution. Should I prefer your “cispatriarchy”? — fuck that shit. Not even.
Where were the “cispatriarchs” during Stonewall?
I mean, seriously!
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I think there’s a difference between being “not literally perfect” and “actively working to hurt people who are weaker than you”. As for Stonewall, personally I wasn’t born yet at that time, sorry…
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That is the era of history I was talking about. Social Justice is bigger than the latest Twitter kerfuffle.
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As if cisheteropatriarchs *aren’t* actively working to hurt people weaker than them?
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Pretty sure “cisheteropatriarchs is a joking way of self-identifying as one of the cis het people you mentioned are “responsible” for marriage, not an ideology.
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Maybe. Honestly I’m not really sure what he is trying to communicate by calling himself that. Which, there is nothing wrong with the “cis-hetero” part, since there is nothing wrong with being straight. But the “patriarch” part? Really?
To be honest, it makes me think of those guys on FetLife with screen names such as “AlphaDog69” or whatever. Like, he’s saying, “Look at me I’m a commanding male presence!”
Which, uh, no.
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>I’m a nonbinary kinky poly queer sex worker and I’m basically a normal person.
um
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The whole point is that people end up with more choices
No, it really isn’t. The whole point is that people should end up having the freedom to make the choices that are best for them. “More” and “better” are not synonyms.
That is certainly not to agree with people who insist that we should reflexively reject marriage, parenthood, or anything else that is ‘traditional’ or that ‘they’ do.
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