Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
This book convinced me that gay marriage is not a human right and is indeed, probably detrimental to gay communities in jurisdictions where it has been permitted.
http://www.amazon.ca/Trouble-Normal-...7214063&sr=1-2
This isn't about human rights, it's about enforcing a code of bourgeois morality. It's okay to be gay, as long as you are monogamous and live in a house with a white picket fence. People who support it should think about how monolithic and "the same" our communities are becoming through the intervention of the State. |
Peter, this isn't actually an argument against gay marriage. It's, at its core, an argument against
marriage. To use it as an argument against gay marriage is a massive distortion, and is also self-defeating, as I'll illustrate below.
Marriage is optional, not normative--and to the extent that it promotes what you call "bourgeois morality," it is an effect of that morality, not the cause of it. People choose to enter marriage, or choose not to enter into it at their option, and although certain social and economic benefits are conferred on those who participate, it's also true that many people prefer to be single, and many couples (especially nowadays) prefer not to formalize their union in this way. So marriage
is a choice--I think we can agree.
In the end, the issue of gay marriage is a question of the restriction of that choice by the government, and this is actually most easily illustrated through negative choice. If a heterosexual person chooses not to get married, that is their right. However, if you think about it no gay person could "choose not to get married" until gay marriage was recognized by the state. Their choice was made for them by the paternalistic (and yes, bourgeois) morals of the state.
In that context, a gay person remaining single can
never be a rejection of bourgeois norms unless gay marriage is
also legal and mainstream. You can't take away someone's right to vote and then say "look how he's resisting the status quo by refusing to vote!"