beccastareyes

"The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions." -- Claude Levi-Strauss

So, this was in response to Orson Scott Card's essay against same-sex marriage. I don't agree with Mister Card, and I think his argument has some fundamental flaws. One of them I will be addressing here.

Mister Card asserts that the union of a man and a woman is natural, and he seems to act like opposite-sex marriage is a universally defined thing that is hard-wired into our genes. Let us assume that Mister Card views opposite-sex polygyny and polyandry as a number of male-female relationships, or else he looks rather silly in claiming that opposite-sex monogamy is universal, since I can think of a number of cultural sources I know he would be familiar with (read: the Old Testament of the Bible) that depict polygyny. (For that matter, here I note that Mister Card is a member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, and the history of his religion* shows that monogamy is by no means universal.)

* Not to mention that I'm sure, as a LDS member, Mister Card has occasionally had to deal with the people who mistake the splinter groups (such as Warren Jeffs's Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints) as the mainstream group. Which means he has heard about people who practice polygyny today, in the United States.

It's still a dumb argument, though. Because it's not true, and can be shown to be not true by studying some anthropology. Or... well, I got it from reading Robert Heinlein. For which I want to thank him -- whatever questionable things he might have written, he clued me in that I shouldn't necessarily assume because the world works in a certain way for me, that that is the only or best way it can work. (He also gave me the first book I really argued with, in Starship Troopers.)

So, there's a scene in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where Manny (Manuel O'Kelly Davis the main character, and a native of the prison colony on the Moon -- Manny himself is not a prisoner, but he was the descendent of prisoners) and Prof (Professor Bernardo de la Paz, the Obvious Heinlein Stand-In*, an elderly Latino political dissident.) are on Earth, campaigning for the recognition of lunar independence. They are in the Southeast US, and Manny is talking about his family to listeners. Manny is in what the Loonies call a line-marriage -- a polygamous situation where alternating men and women marry into the family. Every indication is that in a line marriage, you are married to the whole family, though Heinlein implies that only opposite-sex interactions go on -- Manny is shown with several of his wives, but none of his husbands (and similar with other wives or husbands in the Davis family). He still calls them his husbands, though. He's trying to explain how this works to a Terrestrial woman, and admits he's pretty biased towards his family, and then Prof butts in and explains that marriages are shaped by the society, and that a line-marriage was a wonderful way to deal with a society that had no economic security and no biological extended family.

* It's a Heinlein trope -- you get used to it, or you get sick of it.

And this is where I got the Cluebat of 'See? Not everywhere has to work like Late 20th Century Nebraska?' (also 'things happen for a reason in societies'). And, it was a good Cluebat, both for me as a writer and me as a person. It showed me that hey, people do what works, and what works changes in time and space. Now, just because something works doesn't mean it's the best possible solution, and there can be social conflict when a group says 'Hey, this doesn't work for me' or 'hey, this has this undesirable side effect, so let's try it this way'. Like... oh, the same-sex marriage thing. We have a bunch of people pointing out that 'hey, heterosexual monogamy doesn't work for me, because our culture stresses finding a partner you are romantically and sexually compatible with, and I'm attracted to a person of my own sex'. And, heck, it's happening now, because we've already made a shift to stress marriage base don love rather than one based on economic factors or care for children.

Not that children and economics aren't important, but there are now alternate means for both, and a marriage doesn't need either. For example, I recall reading an article about how some single mothers will find friends or siblings or parents to help them out with childrearing and income. As for economics, I know plenty of economically-sucessful single folk. Furthermore, if you had a childless two-income household, marriage doesn't add as much to the equation as the one-income-with-kids household. If the former dissolved, all the people involved would still function in society. The latter... not so much.

So, it's up to us to decide what we want marriage to be, since right now it is a number of things. It's getting insurance benefits and next-of-kin rights, and making sure your spouse can't be deported. It's also making paternity a lot easier. But, it's also a way of adopting a lover into your family, not just in your heart, but in the wider social sphere. And a declaration of love. And, for many people, it might be standing before God and saying 'this person and I are joined'. And a thousand other things. Those aren't universal. What marriage means to two people in the USA might be different -- I can tell you right now that if I and, Mister Card, or someone like Reverend Phelps, got down to discussing it, we'd probably disagree. (Then again, my feelings towards Fred Phelps are such that if he said the sky was blue, I'd have to look out the window to confirm. I have never heard of a man who has become more of a caricature of his cause than him.) Now, get together humans from all different points on Earth and points in time... yeah, not gonna happen.

The reason I have the quote at the top of this is because of the point. Mister Heinlein didn't always have the right answers. But, he at least got me asking the right questions. Not just about my writing, but about the world around me.