There was actually an implied abortion-for-health-of-mother on Fringe this last Friday, though it wasn’t actually implemented and was only referred to obliquely as “the procedure”. It wasn’t great, but it was the most overt and “this is just a medical procedure, not something controversial, you guys” mention of abortion that I’d seen in scripted media… oh, ever.

That sounds right to me.

I still see the push for maintaining “tradition” as being by and large a form of organized trolling. I think that “tradition” is so vague and often entirely false that it quite often devolves into little more than flailing out and fighting for the fighting’s sake. I think the movement against gay marriage, for example, generally has no idea of what they really wanted, and that’s why it’s falling apart. Or like you said, if they really were for tradition, a situation of gay marriage is actually better for them than a situation of no gay marriage. Unless you’re going to eradicate homosexuality (which I’m sure some of these people would love to do), gay marriage is a step forward, not a step back.

Abortion is trickier because it brings up all the BABIES!! emotions, in my opinion, and people simply can’t get past that. A lot of people simply can’t understand why someone wouldn’t want a “bundle of joy”. And it goes past abortion, in my experience.

Oops. Cont’d.

My wife gets basically taunted on a regular basis when she informs people that for medical reasons she has no interest in having children. And that’s for medical reasons. It goes WAY past abortion.

The anti-same-sex-marriage argument was, “We support traditional marriage.  Gay marriage undermines traditional marriage by redefining it.”  Which opened up a discussion about that people considered “traditional marriage”, and “tradition”, as you noted, Karmakin, is an empty word.  At the end of the day, the only tradition for marriage that’s defensible is the love-and-stability argument, and it’s hard not to see gay marriage as supporting that and not subverting it.  There’s nothing more stable about a man-woman relationship than a man-man or woman-woman relationship, and if you try to argue otherwise, you trip over Americans’ desire to also be fair.

Karm, I’d also dial that “BABIES” thing down a little further, saying it’s about women conforming or not conforming to their gender roles.  Abortion is associated with not conforming to the role that you’re supposed to want as a woman, to be a mother.  It therefore provokes defensiveness.  A lot of people are unnerved by the idea that not everyone should want the same things.  But a lot of straight people who want to get married are attracted to the idea that gay people are the same as them.  It’s conformity vs. non-conformity.

That is, of course, all on an abstract symbolic plane.  In reality, these things are messier.  That a couple is married doesn’t mean they are conforming, for instance, and that a woman is aborting doesn’t mean she’s not.  People make choices often for reasons that fall outside of the conforming/not-conforming framework.  But symbolically, how these choices are seen in that framework matters a lot.

It’s also, I feel, a straight-up visuals thing. Kurt and Brandon getting their sweet mack on? Adorable. Going to a clinic for out-patient surgery in your squishy bits? Not adorable.

One useful way to consider the comparison is by thinking about it in terms of the civil rights movement and portrayal of African Americans on television. By the 1980s, shows like “The Cosby Show” were portraying African American families in a much more positive fashion than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, but this wasn’t through celebration of their uniqueness as African American families - it was by making them white in all the ways that counted, like socioeconomic status, nuclear family status, accent, clothing, words used, schools attended, and basically every other aspect of personality, culture, and appearance. The Huxtables were a white family that happened to have dark skin, and were portrayed very positively; that does not make it a positive portrayal of actually-existing African American family life.

The Glee kiss, and other portrayals of gay couples on television, is much the same, only they’re making them straight instead of white. The Glee kids shared a monogamous and fairly chaste kiss, of the sort you would expect to see from straight kids on TV. The only way they are “gay” is in socially accepted gay-stereotypical ways, like enjoying singing. (Which is, at least according to my high school, SO GAY. I don’t have any idea.) They’re straight in all the ways that count, except they’re dudes kissing other dudes. This can also be seen in other portrayals of gay couples on TV, too, like the couple on ‘Modern Family’, who are straight in all the ways that count, except for the kissing dudes. Gay is apparently the African American of the 2010s - close enough to the patriarchy to be subsumed, if you fit the right mould otherwise.

The problem with portraying abortion on television is that it’s not possible to do that. First, you need to get over the “all women that have abortions are baby-murdering sluts who like to eat fetuses for breakfast, preferably on toast” stereotype, which is quite a bit more vicious than most (though not all) stereotypes directed at African Americans or gay men. Second, you need to get over the fact that it is most cases a one-time event rather than an inherent identity. There’s nothing special about me that reflects the fact that I’ve had an abortion, anymore than there’s anything special about me that reflects the fact that I’ve been to Australia or don’t have my appendix. It’s just a thing that happens. Third and most importantly, though, I think you need to get over the hump of women not being anywhere close to the patriarchy. The Huxtables were rich people with just a teeny thing “wrong”; gay men are still men, with all the privilege that entails. By subsuming women into the patriarchy on an unconditional basis (which you would have to do in order to allow abortion to be portrayed as part of the patriarchy in the same way) would be to destroy the patriarchy, and we wouldnt’ want that, would we? So women, as a class, must remain wholly outside, and must individually gain entrance through doing things like shooting wolves from helicopters. Otherwise, it all falls apart.

So really, there ‘s a difference between gay men and women and their tv portrayal, and what that means for (eventual) social acceptance, and it’s not one that has to do with the queer rights or women’s rights movements - it’s one that has to do with the oppressors, rather than the oppressed.

That framing isn’t exactly how I’d put it, katy, since you’re in the unfortunate position of saying that middle class black people aren’t “really” black, and monogamous gay people aren’t “really” gay, and that’s just not true.  I’d say it’s more that in certain cases, the balance between fairness and tradition is uncomfortably struck, but that in doing so, social justice in its deeper forms is averted.  Gay people who want to marry should be able to do so without any implications of treachery.  But we can’t be satisfied with gay marriage.  We should have equality for all, regardless of sexual or marital status.

As a big knee-jerk traditionalist, I myself find the concept of tradition to be so slippery as to be almost useless analytically.  I adore traditions, but I have to admit that all that is far more likely what grooves along to my brain chemistry and sense of personal insecurity, than anything from any authority that has any real meaning.  All it is, is stuff that makes me feel connected to stuff—and other people—both over distance, and over time. 
I flatter myself that at least I recognize that, which puts me more ahead of the game than a lot of people.  But I can also see how intensely powerful that appeal is—that appeal to be connected to something that feels so important, so much bigger than oneself.  There have to be real reasons why all these intensely irrational inequities persist no matter how much we learn, why so many people feel that they are, in some way, actually sacred.  And there has to be a better reason than just that “people are assholes.”
All that said,  one of my personal, drive me straight up the effin’ wall peeves about the whole marriage question is when you try to drill down what “traditional” marriage means.  When we talk about “Biblical” marriage, aren’t we really talking about something more like fundamentalist Mormons than Ozzie and Harriet?

That’s not what I said at all, actually. I said that the portrayal of African American people and queer people on television is carefully framed in order to make them as much like the “norm” as possible. In effect, the black middle class can only be portrayed on television if they are like the white middle class, and gay couples can only be portrayed on television if they are monogamous and otherwise “acceptable”.  This this presents a flat affect that relies on stereotypes and belies the variety of life for these groups, which is the price paid for representation in a light that is interpreted as positive by white/straight viewers. (Of course, the anti-normed essentialist stereotype may also be presented, but in that case “acceptance” (i.e. ratings) is based on the viewer’s levity or derision rather than identification with the character.)This is not a problem straight white people suffer from - compare “Roseanne”, “Criminal Minds,” and “Sex in the City,” for example, all of which present varied, detailed, and complex views of their primarily white characters.

Since you’ve brought it up, though, I’d like to point out that the position and experience of the black middle class actually are substantially different from that of the white middle class - in particular, there are serious problems of downward mobility and a much smaller proportionate size. The Wikipedia article actually has a fairly good summary of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_middle_class

The interpretation you’ve placed on my comment - that “middle class black people aren’t “really” black” - is in fact pretty much the opposite - it’s that the black middle class is not the same as the white middle class, actually. That’s why the portrayal of the Huxtables as “typical” only works if you do not consider their experience to be representative of the black middle class (which in fact it’s not), but instead a projection of the experience of the white middle class.

(By the way, the Huxtables weren’t really “middle class”, either - analysis of the set and backstory indicates a likely income of $100K a year plus. That’s upper middle class these days; it was well above middle class in the 1980s. Just one more way the media sets our expectations too high.)

Six Feet under also had an abortion episode, which I thought was handled pretty well.

This is intriguing to me, because it gets at an idea I’ve been gnawing at for a little while now—that is, how to balance the forces of progression and change with the forces of stability and conservation. Any society that is both stable and durable must be able to do that. In ours, liberals and progressives do an okay job of valuing change and progression—adopting mostly positive values by which to introduce change into society, like fairness and scientific discovery. On the other hand, you have conservatives. Now, preserving traditions is a valuable and useful thing to do in any society. But not ALL traditions are going to be preserved—so you have to pick and choose which ones are worth keeping around and which ones we don’t need any more. The problem is, conservatives seem to have a piss-poor metric by which to choose which ones to preserve. Probably because they don’t really accept that not all traditions can be preserved. I don’t know. I just wish that they’d be a little more thoughtful about it, you know? And take the responsibility of preserving tradition seriously, rather than treating it as a cudgel with which to knock their enemies over the head. I’d also like a pony, while I’m at it…

“They’re straight in all the ways that count, except they’re dudes kissing other dudes.”

It seems to me that you have the notion that being gay involves something other than being a dude and liking to kiss (and do other things with) other dudes.  Now, I’ve been doing this “being gay” thing for a fairly long time now—pretty much all my life—but I must be doing it wrong, because I’m darned if I can see what it involves besides the “kissing, etc., other dudes” thing.  You seem to thing that rejection of mongamy is part of it.  If you say so, I must defer to your obviously superior experience, but do you have any ideas on how I explain to the guy with whom I’ve been having a monogamous relationship for the last 20 years that we’re supposed to have been sleeping around all this time?

This sort of analysis was sorta why I was always unenthusiastic about making gay marriage a priority.  The chance of indulging in perverse norms doesn’t seem like a very great reward, and it bypasses the issues that would be the real fight, say…many gay couple adopting (all those “christian” families surely don’t want competition), and these issues will inevitably come up

Much of “tradition” is about who gets to live messy lives and who has to clean up after the privileged.  Gay marriage, without real gay rights, is just like gays in the military—offering victims to the current hierarchal system in order to increase the cognitive dissonance to high levels.  Gonna have to be lots of work to keep that going.

Lastly, not a huge fan of ActUp, my reading of some of their actions feels like they were pretty masturbatory and ultimately counterproductive.  But that’s on a personal fragmentary knowledge base.

“There have to be real reasons why all these intensely irrational inequities persist no matter how much we learn, why so many people feel that they are, in some way, actually sacred.”

I don’t know what you would consider “real reasons”, but there is little in “traditional” American patriarchal culture that is there for purely rational reasons.  Most things we believe or take for granted as “proper” behavior, food, language, fashion, are there because they’re there. 

Cultures and Traditions are sets of self-perpetuating memes.  The fact that these collections of memes are different across different civilizations and eras (and often in direct conflict with other collections of memes from different civilizations and eras) demonstrates that for the most part they are arbitrary.

Your example of “traditional marriage” is perfect.  In the time of the Bible and in the cultures portrayed, “traditional marriage” (as least ideally) was one (rich) man and many wives, with concubines available if all those wives were not enough to keep the man satisfied.  The whole book is full of this stuff, yet when some fundamentalist nutcase bloviates in the media, it’s always “marriage is one man and one woman, and always has been.”  3,000-years ago the same sort of fundamentalist nutcase (and yes they had them back then too) would have said the exact opposite.

The problem is that even though these things are arbitrary, they are so closely integrated with the overall culture that they take on the appearance (to some) of some sort of set of “natural laws”, so those so inclined (and this would be stronger for those who worship authority for its own sake: wingnuts) convince themselves that these traditions are indeed “natural”, and possibly given to us by the hand of God, which makes changing them a long, painful, and (sometimes) lethal process. 

“And there has to be a better reason than just that “people are assholes.””

For most people, the conscious thought of them being assholes by enforcing cultural norms is the last thing on their minds.  For some, the idea of using cultural norms as a cudgel against others is a feature and not a bug, which by definition makes them “assholes”.

So it isn’t that “people are assholes” (although there’s probably more truth in that statement than most of us want to believe), but that “some people are assholes”.  Welcome to the human race…

MikeEss, I’d dispute your assertion that traditions and norms are entirely arbitrary and “there because they’re there”. Absolutely there is momentum involved in maintaining and propelling traditions, but they are also there because they continue to work for the society they’ve been invented by.

To take your example of Biblical polygamy; polygamy in the ancient world is strongly correlated with pastoral lifestyles. Agrarian cultures such as the Greeks or Romans were much less given to it than seminomadic pastoral cultures like the Arabian peninsula peoples, North African tribes or even the Masai. There’s all kinds of theories about this (one compelling one that I’ve heard is that the virginity and chastity of women represents a type of currency in a pre-monetary economy where wealth is measured in cattle, which is also movable), but the fact remians that polygamy survivied in Arabia and Africa but did thrive in Europes, even after these cultures were all gathered under the umbrella of the Abrahamic religions.

Marriage in the one-man-one-woman sense works; it works for capitalism and it works for the consumer society. It works (and how) for the patriarchy by making sure that every family is made up of one member who is socially disenfrachised relative to the other, but isolated within this false couple-grouping from having free and unrestricted access to a community of like opressed, lest they pool their labour and create pockets of leisure for organising a rebellion. In other words, you’re not toppling the patriarchy while you’re doing the weekly Target run. Which is why a lot of feminists (myself included) are jsut flat out anti-marriage and wish to see it abolished or turned into a niche lifestyle choice.

No, traditions are traditions because they work, at least at the macro level. There’s a lot of stuff that would need to be let go, among it the capitalist construction of the two parent family as the basic value-creating unit in society, before it could be reduced to the status of a fuddy duddy old tradition like putting carrots out for Rudolph and gently edged out to the margins of society.

It seems to me that you have the notion that being gay involves something other than being a dude and liking to kiss (and do other things with) other dudes.  Now, I’ve been doing this “being gay” thing for a fairly long time now—pretty much all my life—but I must be doing it wrong, because I’m darned if I can see what it involves besides the “kissing, etc., other dudes” thing.

Didn’t you know? As far as we heteros are concerned, all you gay men have to abide by the stereotypes we’ve decided fit you. Oh, sure, there’s some variation around the average, but not too much. You are either supposed to be hairy and wearing leather and hanging out in bars called “The Blue Oyster”, dressing like a woman and pretending to be one, or well-dressed metrosexuals with high-pitched voices who love showtunes. No exceptions. The idea that gay men might display as wide a variation in behaviour, habits and lifestyle as heterosexual men (or lesbians as straight women) with the minor exception of who you have sex with is clearly Not Allowed.

The Steph Herold essay had some weak spots where Herold lost the thread and muddled TV with reality, but its basic point was correct.  Abortion restrictions come from pure undiluted misogyny.  Nothing else explains them.  I agree with commenters here who noted the hollowness of Tradition, a word that means whatever anyone wants it to mean, to account for these denials of rights.  Civil liberties, parity of all racial groups, sexual privacy etc. also get called traditions when somebody feels like it.

Homophobic laws and customs come from less pure and more diluted misogyny.  It makes sense that they are faring worse now than anti-abortion oppressions.  The Patriarchy knows which battle is more urgent.

I think there is something to katydid’s point though.  If there had been a kiss between two boys and a girl in a polyamourous relationship, or even just a plain old hetero girl kissing one boy, then a second boy, and then the first boy again, it would have been treated as far less acceptable than two monogamous gay boys.  There are plenty of different ways to have a gay relationship, just like with hetero relationships, but the vast majority of them are still unacceptable to the tv producers.  Even though the standards have loosened slightly to include same sex couples, there’s still a whole lot of baggage and judgment for those that don’t conform to monogamy.

It works (and how) for the patriarchy by making sure that every family is made up of one member who is socially disenfrachised relative to the other, but isolated within this false couple-grouping from having free and unrestricted access to a community of like opressed, lest they pool their labour and create pockets of leisure for organising a rebellion.

A patriarchal society where women, to be blunt, are there to produce and care for children is entirely logical and rational from the point of view of a mostly agrarian, pre-industrial society without modern medical technology or knowledge. It had nothing to do with isolating and preventing rebellion. It has everything with two facts: children provide free labour for the family farm, especially without modern industry; and infant mortality without modern medicine can be rather high. A society that didn’t basically force (most) women to have as many children as possible, and focus on caring for them, was going to quickly become an ex-society if the people across the river didn’t have a problem with setting up that kind of system.

It’s only been in the last century or so that humanity has made the change from mostly farmer to mostly urban, technological innovation has meant fewer people can produce more food, and medicine means you have much better odds of getting an infant to adulthood so the focus doesn’t have to be an having as many as you can. It’s not surprising that it’s taking some time for that change to work it’s way through human culture after we’ve had a few thousand years of doing it one way for good reason (relatively speaking), and have set up everything from religions to laws to tradition to support it. The fact that we don’t need to do it any more takes effort to hammer through that morass.

TheLady, as marriage rates here and elsewhere keep falling, it becomes more and more clear that marriage, at least as practiced in the West, does not work, at least not well enough to prevent its own erosion.

As far as cultures “working”, every culture that doesn’t quickly disappear “works”, at least to some extent (Soviet culture “worked” for 70-odd years or so before it collapsed, and it was extremely disfunctional, Nazi Germany “worked” for a couple of decades, and might have worked longer if Hitler could have kept himself from invading Russia, and there are a great many other examples), and given that none of them last for more than a few centuries, at least not without huge changes, it seems that none of them “work” very well.

Given how drastically different cultures can be from each other, I say again that it seems (at least to me) that the actual contents of cultures is mostly arbitrary.  IMHO…

KeithM and Rea, I cannot speak for Katydid and I have not seen any episode of Glee. There are still ways that the media portrayal of gays/lesbians/bisexuals is really bad and creates characters who are straight but just happen to fool around with the same sex.

My own experience with this happened when I was a teenager and one of my friends introduced me to Japanese boy’s love and girl’s love comics. These comics had nothing in them that remotely resembled my experience as a queer person, nor (as I would later discover) any Japanese person’s experiences either.

I have felt this disconnect nearly every time I have seen “gay” characters in any media.

It would be great if being gay was just being a dude that likes kissing other dudes, but due to our toxic culture, it is not. Being a gay teenager tends to involve having a way higher than average suicide rate, extreme social ostracism, and losing friends and family when you come out. Even at my high school in Philadelphia less than ten years ago, two gay students were expelled for being caught in a closet together. This same situation played out many many times with straight students and no disciplinary action was ever taken. It is horrible to know that if you were ever caught with someone of the same sex you might be expelled, even if you were just kissing. There were countless other horrible things. People spit gum on me, when I came out I was transfered to a different guidance counselor because my previous one didn’t want anything to do with me, at every single club fair the Straight and Gay Alliance was put in a booth next to the Fellowship of Christian Students; it was endless.

I have yet to see any indication that my experience is uncommon or even exceptionally bad, yet it is basically not even acknowledged whenever the media deigns to show a “gay” character. That’s not to say that showing two men kissing on television is a bad thing. Kirk and Uhura’s kiss is also important, but it is not an example of an interracial couple.

True Blood recently had a sort-of-depiction of abortion recently - more accurately a failed, “herbal” abortion (dressed up with ritual and such-like - although in the True Blood world, this could turn out to be real). 

The interesting thing about it was that it was a classic, “abortion is wrong, but not for me” scenario, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen depicted on television.  The character in question, when the subject first came up, declared that abortion was wrong and that she wouldn’t have anything to do with it, which slowly morphed into a realisation that she really didn’t want this child and didn’t want to bring it into the world and forever fear it (because this is True Blood, and the father is a mass murdering mysogynist and she thus fears the child will turn out to be a mass murdering demon, or something).  Virtually the last thing she says before drinking the abortificient “tea” is “abortion is wrong but…”

I have to add my voice to the ‘traditions aren’t arbitrary’ bandwagon. Traditions exist because, consciously or not, they promote the current social organisation, and some people have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are. It is a common liberal error to see everything as some sort of misunderstanding where lots of people are just ignorant and enough teach-ins will make them change their minds around. They’re culture WARS for a reason. Think of it as fighting over territory, except the territory is a mental landscape. Our opponents want to hold that ground for their own perfectly rational (self-interested) reasons. Kicking them out of there will not be done by reeducation, but by supplanting their power and replacing it with ours.

It seems to me that you have the notion that being gay involves something other than being a dude and liking to kiss (and do other things with) other dudes.  Now, I’ve been doing this “being gay” thing for a fairly long time now—pretty much all my life—but I must be doing it wrong, because I’m darned if I can see what it involves besides the “kissing, etc., other dudes” thing.  You seem to thing that rejection of mongamy is part of it.  If you say so, I must defer to your obviously superior experience, but do you have any ideas on how I explain to the guy with whom I’ve been having a monogamous relationship for the last 20 years that we’re supposed to have been sleeping around all this time?

Hey rea. I’m glad you’re happy in your monogamous and conveniently heteronormative life, but would you agree that not all gay gays are either a) chino-wearing, monogamous family men that happen to be in families with other men (see Modern Family and proto-Glee) or b) hilaaaaaaaaaarious queeny flamers (see Will and Grace)? Just because you happen to fit the stereotype doesn’t mean that being monogamous and shopping at the Gap is all there is to being a gay man like TV would have you believe.

And believe me, this is not just an issue I have with depictions of gay men. Depictions of bisexual women make me want to chuck my television out the window, even when they happen to be fairly close to the bookish man-shy women’s college nerd girl stereotype that I actually fit quite well. That doesn’t mean it’s not a stereotype that’s been softened and simplified for consumption of people that don’t believe bisexuals actually exist or only happen because a girl can’t get dicked reliably.

The idea that gay men might display as wide a variation in behaviour, habits and lifestyle as heterosexual men (or lesbians as straight women) with the minor exception of who you have sex with is clearly Not Allowed.

Ironically, Keith, that was precisely my point - on television, variation in the habits and lifestyles of the Other is not allowed, unless it’s to make people laugh or to show how horrible the Other really is. A sympathetic character who doesn’t meet a predefined “positive” stereotype that is as close to the norm as possble? Absolutely not. That’s not saying anything about how gay men (or African American families, or women that have abortion) are in real life, it’s saying something about how they’re packaged for television - that is, as one-sided stereotypes that never develop complexity or depth. That one monogamous straight-acting gay man reads this blog doesn’t negate the fact that it’s a stereotype.

I have fairly a fairly traditional temperament, but that extends to my preferences. I think “theme weddings” are tacky and prefer “traditional weddings,” but the existence of non traditional weddings (of any sort) does not interfere with my ability to have a traditional wedding myself, so the “tradition” argument against gay marriage doesn’t hold any weight with me.

I think Amanda’s got most of the answer when she observes that in actuality, abortion rights are doing better than gay rights, despite the lack of positive / neutral treatments in the culture, in that Roe is the law of the land and has majority public support and attacks on abortion rights are, even though very bad for women, more on the periphery of the right than its core, whereas in most of the country, there’s not only no gay marriage or civil unions, but discrimination against gays is still perfectly lawful.

But the other thing about this is that, like it or not, a lot of people have moral qualms about abortion. Essentially, one of the reasons gay rights has had the successes it has had recently is that our politics has absorbed some form of the harm principle (that the legal system should act only to prevent actual harm to other people). And gay rights advocates have succeed in showing that recognition of gay rights is completely harmless, e.g., no straight marriage will ever suffer because gays have the right to get married.

The harm principle doesn’t work on abortion for that portion of the population that sees the fetus as a human person. That includes not only pro-lifers but a lot of pro-choicers who find the procedure morally troublesome but who believe it should remain legal. Pro-choicers have excellent arguments about why abortion must be legal and available, but they are not based on the idea that the procedure is harmless.

Note that this is not the same thing as a claim that what really motivates pro-lifers is their concern for fetuses. Obviously, there’s a lot of sexist worldviews about sex and gender that go into the decision to identify as pro-life. Rather, it’s an observation that as long as there is a separation between many Americans’ positions on the morality of abortion and their positions on the legality of it (a separation that benefits the pro-choice movement and which we want to maintain—we do want the support of people who are troubled by the procedure but want to keep it legal), that’s probably going to be reflected in the cultural treatment of the issue.

My goodness, katydid, you have some very strange notions about gays, and think you can tell the kind of clothes I wear from the fact that I’m a monogamous.  Your position—that TV shouldn’t show gays in romantic, monogamous relationships because gays suppsoedly aren’t like that—is as offensive, bigoted, homophobic a stereotype as I’ve ever encountered over the course of my 56 years, and I’ve encountered a few. Gays are as capable of fidning their one true love as anyone else, as I can testify.

On this front, I dispute that gay rights are doing better…You can legally get an abortion in all 50 states in the country, even though it’s really hard to nearly impossible in some.  You are still allowed to cross state lines to get an abortion in states that are more favorable to the right.  With gay marriage, neither is true.

Yes but both movements are dynamic processes, not snapshots. Gay rights are spreading and there is increasing acceptance of gay relationships and gay marriage. Most people would be shocked if they got a visit from a time traveler from 2060 who told them “oh yeah, gay marriage totally peaked in like 2010 and now it’s illegal most places”.

Abortion rights, on the other hand, appear to be in a measured retreat, with decreasing public acceptance and a legislative trend towards restriction and regulation. People would be surprised to hear that it was illegal in 2060, but they wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the restrictions hedging around it were thicker and thicker, or that it was very difficult to procure an abortion in most places.

You have to look at trend lines, not just current situations. Gay rights is on the ascendant, abortion rights are in decline.

“They’re culture WARS for a reason. Think of it as fighting over territory, except the territory is a mental landscape. Our opponents want to hold that ground for their own perfectly rational (self-interested) reasons. Kicking them out of there will not be done by reeducation, but by supplanting their power and replacing it with ours.”

...power comes from the end of a gun?...

***

The reason I say that cultural components are arbitrary is because they can be so different across cultures.  And every one of those cultures, as different as they are from each other, will claim that the reason they support X and condemn Y is “the family”, “social cohesion”, “morality”, religion, etc., despite the fact another culture will use the same arguments for the opposite stance.  That’s arbitrary.

Now, within any given cultural system, the memes largely reinforce themselves (but not always), and since they typically grew in an organic fashion over a period of time, they will usually be seen as some sort of internally coherent whole.

However, I think you’d find that any deep (culturally neutral) investigation would destroy much of the coherence pretty severely. 

Example: “I’m against abortion because I’m Pro-Life” + “I’m against contraception because I’m Pro-Life” (despite more resulting pregnancies that will lead to more abortions) + “I’m in favor of the Death Penalty” (Not “Pro-Life”, pro-death) + “I’m in favor of more wars in the Middle East” (pro-death) + “I want to decimate the social safety nets so I can get tax cuts” (despite death and harm done to people affected by those cuts), etc.  But they still think of themselves as “Pro-Life”...

rea, have you figured out by now that I’m not talking about you or your relationship, but about the depiction of gay men on television? Do you really believe there is nothing and no one that identifies as gay between the poles of gay male depictions on television? Do you even know any other gay men at all?

-that TV shouldn’t show gays in romantic, monogamous relationships because gays suppsoedly aren’t like that

That’s not my position, which you would know if you actually read my comment instead of saw “gay man” and “stereotype” in the same comment and flipped your wig. (Not that all gay men wear wigs, of course. I’m sure you don’t, being straight-except-for-liking-dick and all.) My position is that by “normalizing” gay men by only showing the elements of the queer community that are closest to the heteronormative, patriarchal ideal, and only having those characters being about this heteronormative style of gayness, there is no service done to the queer community. This isn’t about you, or your “true love”, or monogamy, or even Glee - it’s about bland and inoffensive stereotypes, instead of real people, being held out as representative to the population at large. If you want to be a stereotype, well, that’s fine. I can’t stop you. It’s not going to stop me from pointing out that the gay men on television are stereotypical and heteronormative.

As for my comments being “offensive, bigoted, homophobic”... you know what? Fuck you. I find your idea that just because you’re “just the same as a straight man” (really? You have absolutely no life experience that sets you apart from straight men other than kissing boys? None at all?) that you get to set the standard for which heteronormative depictions of gay men are OK on television to be… well, bigoted and homophobic. You are what is wrong with the queer community, and you want so badly to be straight-except-for-kissing-guys that you appear to have lost your critical thinking capacity, assuming you ever had any.

@31—wrong, Dilan Esper: it doesn’t matter if the fetus is what you call a human person, because American law mandates no other sacrifice of bodily integrity to benefit or save other people.  That extra kidney you’ve got, or your bone marrow?  You don’t have to give it to your child who will die without it.  This child is a lot more of “a human person” than the blastocysts that abortion destroys.

This blog has covered the point many times.  Abortion restrictions = misogyny.

“A patriarchal society where women, to be blunt, are there to produce and care for children is entirely logical and rational from the point of view of a mostly agrarian, pre-industrial society without modern medical technology or knowledge. It had nothing to do with isolating and preventing rebellion. It has everything with two facts: children provide free labour for the family farm, especially without modern industry; and infant mortality without modern medicine can be rather high. A society that didn’t basically force (most) women to have as many children as possible, and focus on caring for them, was going to quickly become an ex-society if the people across the river didn’t have a problem with setting up that kind of system.”

I dispute this notion that a society based on sexual enslavement of women (let’s call this what it is) is the only possible and productive society, or that the evolutionary advantage lies all on the side of enslaving women.

For example, the isolation of a marriage dyad is not the only, or even the most, efficient way to produce offspring or manage a large amount of agriculture; you could set up the very same amount of farming on a communal-living basis, including the encouragement/management of childrearing, and be just as productive; unless you believe that women are inherently incapable of managing property or dealing with outside threats. 

That is, you could do all of these things, IF you do not see women as property but as fellow persons, and if you are therefore unconcerned with their sexual choices.  But isolating a couple and their children to one farm dilutes resources and makes those families more vulnerable; it also makes the father’s rule more despotic.

MikeEss, I’d dispute your assertion that traditions and norms are entirely arbitrary and “there because they’re there”. Absolutely there is momentum involved in maintaining and propelling traditions, but they are also there because they continue to work for the society they’ve been invented by.

Which society would this be again?  Contemporary American mores haven’t adjusted for the Pill yet, and are still feeling the effects of the invention of the automobile.

Meanwhile kids are sexting away, if you pardon the expression, promisciously…

it’s about bland and inoffensive stereotypes, instead of real people, being held out as representative to the population at large.

That is pretty much to be expected for everyone portrayed in a mass-market medium like television.

Katy you are being really offensive and you do come off as a bigot who believes their intellect is so deep that nobody else but them can understand why they’re not bigoted.

That is all.

One of your best essays, Amanda.

We’re gonna get queer here…
But, I think another reason why the abortion rights movement, while formally recognized as a private civil right by law and practically restrained by fellow citizens, has literally lost ground (clinics closing all over and the attack on funding for Planned Parenthood) is because nobody says that they are pro-abortion.  Its all this choice crap.  Choice is the correct frame if you want your personal right, and want to be the least offensive about it.  Just label it “your choice”. 
But, its not really about choice in the larger scheme of things (forgive me, I’m male, so its not my choice anyway).  Instead, I believe that it is about the concept of female bodily autonomy and personal bodily autonomy in general.  Choice discourse assumes you have choices in the first place.

If pro-abortion activists want to even fight on the same field as anti-abortion activists it needs to be framed that way, as a cultural war not a personal “choice”.  I find that the theoretical conception of this movement might be served better by linking it with the “right to die” (which we currently do not have).  This is so because both issues are basically about Christianity forcing its way into medical science.  If you link abortion to the right to die, and you happen to win the “right to die” argument (which i think has a far better chance because it sidesteps female sexuality and all that “ickieness”) then we are much closer to removing Puritanism and Patriarchy from the medical world in general.

I just think that this is an unexplored way to advocate for the right (practical and legal) to have an abortion.  This is the way that the enemy fights this war, by circumventing the actual discussion and coming back around to it.  We should too.

Oh ya,

And I love being able to read this blog every morning to stir my thoughts around.  Agree, disagree, attack my arguments (instead of me), tell me why they’re wrong cause that’s how people learn

First of all, I agree with the main thrust of this posting.  Second, I feel that the battles being fought are just battles that we will have to perpetually fight until we accomplish the main goals of feminism and gay activism.

Finally, I disagree with this passage:  “...I feel that the two movements are functionally fighting for the same goal, an overturn of the patriarchy.”  I see the two movements as fighting FOR equal rights, not AGAINST the patriarchy.  The patriarchy will cease to be a patriarchy when we have equal rights.  I know that may seem semantic argument to some, but to me it is more a matter of motivation.  I am motivated by the positive goal of equal rights for all.  I, a man, do not have equal rights because women and gays (and many other subsets within our species) do not have equal rights.  My personal philosophy has always been one of enlightened self-interest.  I am a selfish person.  If I have equal rights, then I will have a better life.  I do not have equal rights; I may, as a male, be privileged.  Privilege, believe it or not, does not benefit the privileged because the imbalances cause tensions and grief which ultimately destroy the quality of life of all within a given society.  Bada bing!  I want equal rights.

Oh, and I support abortion because I believe individuals should always have autonomy over their own bodies.  If a government can deny a person abortion, they can also force people to have abortions.  Government shouldn’t have that kind of control.  Women who want to have children should be able to bring their pregnancies to term without government interference.  If you don’t support the freedom to have an abortion, you support the government having the power to force women to have abortions.

@31—wrong, Dilan Esper: it doesn’t matter if the fetus is what you call a human person, because American law mandates no other sacrifice of bodily integrity to benefit or save other people.  That extra kidney you’ve got, or your bone marrow?  You don’t have to give it to your child who will die without it.  This child is a lot more of “a human person” than the blastocysts that abortion destroys.

You missed my point. People very often do have sexist and misogynist reasons for adopting a pro-life stance. But the question on the table is “why is gay rights having so much more success ingraining itself into the culture than abortion rights has had?”. And the answer to that, in part, is that gay rights advocates have advanced their cause with an argument that is not really available to pro-choicers (especially given the number of pro-choicers who do have moral qualms about abortion), which is that recognition of gay rights doesn’t harm anyone.

#42:

The problems with openly advocating a pro-abortion stance are: (1) political / pragmatic, because a lot of pro-choicers whose votes and money we need have moral concerns about abortion, and (2) and, to a lesser extent, accuracy, in that obviously no pro-choicer favors coerced abortions (making the rhetoric of “choice” more accurate) and most pro-choicers would probably at least say that abortion is costly, inefficient, and involves a surgical procedure and on that ground alone, without even reaching the issue of the status of the fetus, other forms of preventing pregnancy are generally preferable.

That said, I’d vote for a politician who openly said that in many situations, abortion is the right choice. I won’t hold my breath waiting for one to show up, however.

Daisy: congratulations on your lack of reading comprehension. You are in plentiful if not good company here, apparently.

I’m not sure why people are having trouble reading katydid’s comments and actually understanding what she’s saying, as it seems pretty damned clear to me. But hey, go on with your bad selves. Who needs reading comprehension when they have indignation.

“it’s about bland and inoffensive stereotypes, instead of real people, being held out as representative to the population at large.”

“That is pretty much to be expected for everyone portrayed in a mass-market medium like television.”

Except that it’s not the case for the majority of people portrayed, as the majority are straight white males. If they can do it right the majority of the time, we should expect them to do it right the rest of the time too.

With regards to gays, there are basically two types shown in mass media, model minority gays and horrible perverted gays. I think everyone knows that showing gays as purely sexual, and showing any and all of that sexuality as bad, is horribly bigoted. However, treating gays as a just-like-us model minority is also bigoted for a number of reasons.

1) Do these depictions usually acknowledge the prejudice and oppression that gays face in their day to day life? Does it acknowledge how this experience may have affected a character?
1b) If homophobia is acknowledged is it portrayed as an isolated incident which is only carried out by extremists?
2) Are these relationships typically depicted as completely chaste?
3) Does the relationship follow a patriarchal ideal, ie one partner is submissive in decision making, parenting, does all the chores etc?
3b) If they aren’t totally sexless, is the submissive partner also submissive in bed?

Some very traditional straight relationships work along those kinds of lines. Gay relationships most often do not. I don’t know how many people I’ve met who have been frustrated by sincere questions along the lines of “Who’s the woman?” These depictions are part of a narrative that says “A relationship is between a man and a woman. If a same sex relationship exists, one of the pair will forever fill the opposite sex’s role.” That narrative is horrifically bigoted. Pointing out that the typical portrayal of gays in monogamous relationships is damaging shouldn’t be taken to mean that monogamous gays do not exit.

I dispute this notion that a society based on sexual enslavement of women (let’s call this what it is) is the only possible and productive society, or that the evolutionary advantage lies all on the side of enslaving women.

For example, the isolation of a marriage dyad is not the only, or even the most, efficient way to produce offspring or manage a large amount of agriculture; you could set up the very same amount of farming on a communal-living basis, including the encouragement/management of childrearing, and be just as productive; unless you believe that women are inherently incapable of managing property or dealing with outside threats.

Theoretical examples, good.  Actual historical examples…pretty much rare to non-existent. Any kind of stable communal arrangement on a medium to largish scale is doomed to failure for the same reason that communism and libertarianism are: they require something that isn’t human in order to function. What you propose requires that parents have no inclination to be biased toward their children over others, to not give Jenny a little more favourtism because she’s your daughter over Tiffany over there who happens to be the daughter of a person you utterly despise.

You let me know how that works out. I’ve got a hundred million years of mammalian evolution that says without an artificial method of ensuring that both parents don’t know who their offspring are, it won’t work.

I’m not saying that the “traditional” setup is the only possible or productive variation, merely the one that, over and over again, has developed and dominated. There are other variations out there but they’ve tended to be marginal.  I don’t particularly like it at all, and love modern technology for the fact that it promotes and forces equality as it removes the excuse of physical advantage. Until the development of firearms and other tech, women were at a serious disadvantage in dealing with physical threats for the simple reason men are, on average, bigger and stronger. Take two people of equal skill and equivalent weapons and the bigger, stronger one will win the majority of the time, regardless of what their reproductive system looks like.

I’m queer and I fail to see how monogamy is heteronormative. In fact, I find it hard to see how any queer relationship can be regarded as heteronormative, as I take the definition of the term to be ‘assuming heterosexuality as normal and default.’ Just by taking a same sex partner, one flies in the face of that. Maybe, one can argue that gay relationships with a strict butch/femme dynamic is heteronormative in a way (and I’d argue against you, but it’s at least a respectable position), but monogamy alone doesn’t cut it.

I take your point about depictions of queer people being somewhat toothless and not representative of large swaths of the queer experience. There is a huge dearth of lower class or blue collar queers. Trans people are usually the butts of jokes or horribly mishandled. And you know what, I’m one of your more revolutionary queers with an open relationship and a fluid gender identity and a fluid orientation (pansexual), but I still find it deeply offensive to characterize my friends’ relationships as somehow upholding heteronormativity. Putting “true love” in scare quotes is particularly egregious to me, as heteronormative society is always trying to show queer love as somehow false or less meaningful. Maybe you can argue that it’s a more traditionalist or hegemonic arrangement, but to suggest that a gay wedding can be heteronormative is nonsense.

I’m not saying that the “traditional” setup is the only possible or productive variation, merely the one that, over and over again, has developed and dominated.

Uh-huh.  Wikipedia.

Not all marriages are socially monogamous. Anthropological studies have reported that 80–85% of societies allow polygamous marriage.[36][37][38][verification needed] However, most of the men in societies that allow polygamy do not obtain sufficient wealth or status to have multiple wives, so the majority of marriages in these societies involve one husband and one wife. Murdock has estimated that 80% of marriages in societies that allow polygamy involve only one husband and one wife.[38] White has analyzed the distribution of husbands by number of wives in societies that allow polygamy (see Table 1 in White, 1988, pages 535-539).[39] His analysis also supports the claim that around 80% of marriages in these societies involve only one husband and one wife. In fact, so many marriages are socially monogamous that Murdock had years earlier stated:

  “An impartial observer employing the criterion of numerical preponderance, consequently, would be compelled to characterize nearly every known human society as monogamous, despite the preference for and frequency of polygyny in the overwhelming majority.” (Murdock, 1949, pages 27-28)[40]

The “preferred” set-up is polygamy - men with multiple wives.  That monogamy dominates even in the vast majority of cultures that allow for polygamy is a logistical matter - there are only so many women to go around.  And, indeed, consider in how many of our “modern” societies was it considered normal that an upper class male might be keeping another woman as a mistress while supposedly married.  Women - especially in the form of wives - have historically been a status symbol for men, both socially and homosocially.

The Western social norm towards monogamy is a product of capitalism.  It has in itself broken down into serial monogamy as women have actually obtained de facto as well as de jure equal rights.

I’ve got a hundred million years of mammalian evolution that says without an artificial method of ensuring that both parents don’t know who their offspring are, it won’t work.

You’ve got about five thousands years of recorded history and ten thousand years of civilization that back up that statement.  One-hundred million years of mammalian history demonstrate that different species have wildly different survival and social strategies, and that the best conclusion you can draw is that different strategies serve different populations in different ways.

I mean, the two species most closely related to humans have wildly different gender relationships, and neither of them mirrors humanity’s.

It really bothers me when people talk assume that the social survival strategies of homo sapiens are inevitable, widespread, or really anything but accidental.  We are who we are because of our history, not because of our fate.

i don¿t think is just as easy as think or say what’s correct or not, or what is right now and not late, only time and generations will tell

I think this discussion is misleading in part because the two things being compared are of different categories. Sure, gay marriage is fine, but look at the freakouts every time some show incorporates a same-sex kiss. Much less the queer equivalent of the strategically implied sex and nudity that barely raises an eyebrow when it’s between straight people.

Similarly, you have plenty of images and narratives of women having sex without having babies, but the detailed mechanics of how those babies don’t appear almost never makes it onto the screen.

The tradition being upheld here is “ethereal spiritual stuff good, bodies icky.” (Yeah, I know there are plenty of excepts to that, but this is a blog comment.) I think you could have plenty of people who think that gay marriage is only fair, but would still be squicked by two people of the same sex making out. Talking about abortion brings you right down out of the ethereal—women’s right to control their fertility and chldbearing—and into the icky bodily stuff of blood and tissue.

Now sure, there are the anti-choicers who are against contraception and against sex and probably against dancing that’s any more adventurous than a waltz. But there are a lot of people for whom bodies and sex are simply icky and not something they want to talk or think about. And by framing the debate as being about a specific medical procedure the misogynists have managed to tap into a lot of anxiety.

(And yeah, that anxiety about bodies and sex is ultimately a product of patriarchy, but in a much more second-order way.)

katydid, how do you feel about Jack Harkness?

I would comment on the post, but I disagree with the premise.  The “gay marriage” movement is not the “queer rights” movement, and their goal is not to bring patriarchy down.

“katydid, how do you feel about Jack Harkness?”

I can’t speak for katydid, but I’m only partway into Season 2 of Torchwood and I’ve seen Captain Jack open mouth kiss, long and hard, about 3 or 4 guys between the first season and what I’ve seen so far in the second.

As a straight, white male, it was a little odd seeing it the first time, but after 2 or 3 times, realizing they’re two guys gissing doesn’t make as much of an impression as the emotion underlying the kisses.  You get used to it because you realize they’re just people, like everyone else.  (duh!)

I like that John Barrowman is gay himself, rather than yet another straight guy pretending to be gay.  Stuff like that gives me hope for further progress, and a sense that things really are getting better, even if it seems like the progress is glacially slow. 

Since these Torchwood episodes are already several years old, the recentness of the Glee episode mentioned here just demonstrates how far behind we in the US are when it comes to recognizing gay people and their relationships…

I mean, the two species most closely related to humans have wildly different gender relationships, and neither of them mirrors humanity’s.

And in both of them a parent will show preference for their offspring over those of others, which is the point I was making. It has nothing to do with gender relationships at all, but relationships between parent(s) and offspring.

That’s why communal raising of children, which was the idea I was replying to, won’t work.  Well, I shouldn’t say that: I can think of a way it would work on a society-wide level: as soon as a child is born it is removed from its mother, and anonymously made part of a creche so that parent(s) and child never know each other. And the only way that could work is as some kind of mass program run by a government which has the resources to do that sort of thing.

Like I said, let me know how that works out.

”...and probably against dancing that’s any more adventurous than a waltz.”

Mark my words!  That “waltzing” stuff is indicative of the kind of vulgar and licentious behavior that will tear down society and turn us into nothing more than grunting and rutting animals!  We must do everything we can to outlaw dancing of any kind!  We must act now, before it’s too late!...

katydid, how do you feel about Jack Harkness?

I think he and River Song need to team up and have time traveling antics while the Eleventh Doctor awkwardly tries to avoid their flirting with him.

I like that John Barrowman is gay himself, rather than yet another straight guy pretending to be gay.

You think?

A new blog, and promised ‘zine, is throwing light on the abortion experience by publishing women’s accounts of their procedures, or thoughts on the issue (they’ll also take poetry and whatever you else you feel compelled to say on the subject.)

They’ve republished my account of the Pre-Roe era, aspects of which I’ve also written in comments at Pandagon.

http://ourstotell.tumblr.com/post/4102442441/tell-your-story

I think he and River Song need to team up and have time traveling antics while the Eleventh Doctor awkwardly tries to avoid their flirting with him.

With this image in my mind, season 6 is going to be a letdown no matter what.

There are societies in which no distinction is made between the word “mother” and the word “aunt” or “father” and “uncle,” and effectively the word means “female (or male) of my parents’ generation”

There are societies were children are the primary caregivers for younger siblings

There are societies which live sex-segregated, with male and female children old enough to quit breast-feeding living only with their same-sex parent and other same-sex society members

There are societies in which extended families live together and it is explicitly taboo to show extra affection to your own biological children

But dude. Please, go on and tell us how communal raising will neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeever work for anyone ever.

Better question: draw us a plausible path from our current paradigm of child rearing to some kind of it-takes-a-village communal child rearing.

You guys laugh, but waltzing was seriously controversial during the late 19th and early 20th century. There are even a couple of books on the phenomenon. For example, “The Wicked Waltz and other Scandalous Dances,” by Mark A. Knowles.

“The waltz, perhaps the most beloved social dance of the 19th and early 20th centuries, provoked outrage from religious leaders and other self-appointed arbiters of social morality. Decrying the corrupting influence of social dancing on decency and health, they failed to suppress the popularity of the waltz or other dance crazes of the period, such as the Charleston, the Tango, and Ragtime dances such as the Turkey Trot, Grizzly Bear, and Bunny Hug.”

The waltz was scandalous because the two partners grasped each other in their arms and faced each other throughout the dance, rather than only occasionally lightly touching hands, as one would in a minuet.

All dancing is sin.  Repent or yadda yadda yadda.

Can you yadda yadda yadda a sermon on sin?

I’m not saying that the “traditional” setup is the only possible or productive variation, merely the one that, over and over again, has <strike>developed and dominated</strike> deliberately gone out of its way to destroy every other setup it has ever encountered by any means necessary.

Fixed.

That’s why communal raising of children, which was the idea I was replying to, won’t work.

Except in, you know, practically every other society that has ever existed. Sure, there are varying degrees of communality, but the idea of the nuclear family (consisting solely of two parents and their immediate children) is a recent invention, and even today, is not widely practised across the rest of the world.

Just one point about non-hysterical media narratives about abortion: why do people forget the THIRD WATCH episode in which Yokas, the female police officer, decides to have an abortion because her marriage is breaking down? She isn’t sick; the child isn’t in danger.  Her family is financially and emotionally stressed and another child right now would be like throwing a lit match into a firecracker store. And not only did she have the abortion, she did it without telling her husband.

It was a dramatic, reasonable, and totally private decision, and presented by the writers and actors without hysteria.

But dude. Please, go on and tell us how communal raising will neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeever work for anyone ever.

You’re confusing two separate issues: kinship relationships and actual parental care.

The Hawaiian system (no distinction between members of a generation) still doesn’t have communal raising of children in which whose child is whose doesn’t matter. You may call all the members of the older generation of your family “father” and “mother”, and all your relatives “sister” and “brother”, but everyone still knows who everyone is actually related most closely to and that effects how the children are raised.

For instance, and to use a specific example from Hawai’i, Keōua Nui, father of Kamehameha I. His father was a Kalani-Keeaumoku-nui, his paternal grandmother Kalanikauleleieiwi (herself the daughter of Chiefess Keakealani-wahine) and paternal grandfather Keaweikekahialiʻiokamoku, the King of Hawai’i island; his mother was Kamakaʻimoku, his half-brother Kalaniʻōpuʻu (after his mother married Kalaninui’iamamao).

So that sort of negates the premise that said sort of system somehow makes who is who’s child unimportant. Most such societies know damn well who’s kids are who’s even if there isn’t a specific word to distinguish my biological parents from my cousin’s (or “brother’s” biological parents).

Except in, you know, practically every other society that has ever existed. Sure, there are varying degrees of communality, but the idea of the nuclear family (consisting solely of two parents and their immediate children) is a recent invention, and even today, is not widely practised across the rest of the world.

I think we’re in a mutual misunderstanding problem here.

My point is that I have doubts about any system where who the parents are doesn’t matter. It has nothing to do with raising the kids but whose kids they are, and that who the parents are will have effects on the child. It doesn’t matter if the grandparents are helping, or older siblings, or that other relatives are considered part of the same household.

If that wasn’t what was being suggested initially, then I misunderstood what was being stated and apologize for the confusion.

Except in, you know, practically every other society that has ever existed. Sure, there are varying degrees of communality, but the idea of the nuclear family (consisting solely of two parents and their immediate children) is a recent invention, and even today, is not widely practised across the rest of the world.

Sure, as long as you consider “recent” as “found as far back as we can find”. The term “nuclear family” is a new one, but the basic concept (parents and children living at least partly independently from the rest of the family) is a hell of an old one. Morgan’s 1871 classification of the types of kinship systems would have had it fall under the “Eskimo” classification.

Going back to my reply waaaay up there, I think there is a different way I can make my assertion.

Being hostile against women having the ability to get an abortion is a direct bullying-trip for the misogynists.

Being hostile against gay marriage doesn’t have the same force…It’s all ballot measures and tv/radio rants, with very little community participation like heading out to the local PP and heckling some poor woman.

When the potential victims themselves are inaccessible to the asshole, the issue dies down.  It’s going to be gay couples inheriting, adopting, and doing all the other things people do in public life, around other people, that’s where the ol’ societal violence will happen at.  A normal life for gay people, with little need for gayborhoods and few gay kids committing suicide, and all that other rainbows and sparkles and shit…that’s what the assholes will fight hardest to prevent.

Except in, you know, practically every other society that has ever existed. Sure, there are varying degrees of communality, but the idea of the nuclear family (consisting solely of two parents and their immediate children) is a recent invention, and even today, is not widely practised across the rest of the world.

Comment #67: Dunc

Heck, growing up on a military base in the 80’s was pretty communal.  There were childless families that let me into their homes, large open areas with kids roaming unsupervized and parents ALWAYS found out if we F’d up no matter where on base we were.

There are societies in which no distinction is made between the word “mother” and the word “aunt” or “father” and “uncle,” and effectively the word means “female (or male) of my parents’ generation”

There are societies were children are the primary caregivers for younger siblings

There are societies which live sex-segregated, with male and female children old enough to quit breast-feeding living only with their same-sex parent and other same-sex society members

There are societies in which extended families live together and it is explicitly taboo to show extra affection to your own biological children

But dude. Please, go on and tell us how communal raising will neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeever work for anyone ever.

It’s important to remember that when people say “[thing I don’t agree with] can’t exist because of human nature” they in fact mean the nature of them at that instant and the people they casually observe in their lives.  No one who says “blah blah blah can’t work because human nature” actually has any idea about human nature-most of the time when I hear people say that, they don’t even have the level of knowledge that comes from reading Cracked.com, much less any actual knowledge of human psychology or sociology.

Double post because we don’t have an edit function.  The best quote I’ve ever heard about human nature was this:

The only thing you can say with any certainty about human nature is that it varies.  And sometimes, it doesn’t even do that.

hp @28: The great news is that at least one Dalton Academy-style gay-friendly ‘safe space’ really does exist. The private high school I attended from 84-88 became very gay-friendly and accepting over the years I was there; practically the entire male arts faculty was openly gay, and a local drama troupe which specialized in gay-themed plays (Equus, Kiss of the Spider Woman) was considered ‘artists-in-residence’.

While understandably this isn’t something they trumpet in their literature, I have no reason to think my alma mater has changed this stance. It is a private school, which makes issues…different, possibly easier or harder depending on the benefactors. While I was a total loner and at least theoretically heterosexual while attending, the fact that nobody important made a big deal about homosexuality really did help shape my world view.

Amanda, thanks for posting this.  It has (indirectly, maybe) helped me understand my reactions trying to follow US discourse on LGBT and reproductive health issues.

Here (Scandinavia), I’d say that reproductive justice clearly leads gays marriage and other LGBT issues.  Right to abortion is largely unquestioned; only lunatic-fringe Christians would ever make an issue of it. There might be arguments that there are “too many” abortions and that we collectively ought to do more to prevent it, and there might be all kinds of blaming going on about that.  But the right of individual woman to have easy access to abortion is not on the political agenda. 

Same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption, same-sex families-with-children - all these are much more up for debate.  There’s strong popular support, but it’s definitely not issues that go without debate or controversy.

What I realized reading you is that, here, LGBT issues remain *minority* issues.  Abortion otoh is mainstream - it’s a right that concerns everyone. It’s a minority that may need same-sex marriage; not so for abortion. As a result, it’s hard to imagine who would be opposed to the right to abortion. Realizing that difference helped me understand why I can relate to the US LGBT discourse but remain completely baffled by the abortion discourse.

Amanda, thanks for posting this.  It has (indirectly, maybe) helped me understand my reactions trying to follow US discourse on LGBT and reproductive health issues.

Here (Scandinavia), I’d say that reproductive justice clearly leads gays marriage and other LGBT issues.  Right to abortion is largely unquestioned; only lunatic-fringe Christians would ever make an issue of it. There might be arguments that there are “too many” abortions and that we collectively ought to do more to prevent it, and there might be all kinds of blaming going on about that.  But the right of individual woman to have easy access to abortion is not on the political agenda. 

Same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption, same-sex families-with-children - all these are much more up for debate.  There’s strong popular support, but it’s definitely not issues that go without debate or controversy.

What I realized reading you is that, here, LGBT issues remain *minority* issues.  Abortion otoh is mainstream - it’s a right that concerns everyone. It’s a minority that may need same-sex marriage; not so for abortion. As a result, it’s hard to imagine who would be opposed to the right to abortion. Realizing that difference helped me understand why I can relate to the US LGBT discourse but remain completely baffled by the abortion discourse.

I’m intrigued by the reaction to katydid’s points. I agree with them pretty solidly, though when the disagreements came up, I though that the principal point got lost.

As I see it, it isn’t so much that (as some people tried to say) that things like monogamous gay couples are only allowed because real gay people who aren’t monogamous aren’t “real gays” or whatever it was.

I think the point is that there is a default neutral from which any character or show is allowed to diverge only so far, especially on US network TV.

That default is essentially, white, upper-middle class shown as though it was plain-old middle class, monogamous if in a relationship, or celibate (but dating) if single, vaguely Protestant in a “we don’t show them going to church but nobody would be shocked if they did” way, politically neutral, and gender-role conforming.

From that, characters can diverge, but they can only diverge a bit, and in an easy to relate to way.

So a character can be all those things, and sexually adventurous - the ladies man or sex-in-the-city gay.
A character can be all those things and more religious, or in a different financial class, or of a different ethnicity.

But they can’t usually get away with diverging in more than one way, especially not in unrelated ways.

So, simply being gay is exotic enough to push the envelope, and therefore, the character has to fit all the other neutral defaults in order to be a regular character.  Monogamous, white, middle class, etc.

It’s why you so often see things like “The smart character, the artsy character, the stuck up character, and the black character (or the gay character.)”

A straight white character can be a womanizing asshole (Barney on How I Met Your Mother), but you couldn’t get away with the gay character being a similarly sexual user - people “wouldn’t relate.”

So we essentially end up with a situation only on a “gay show” like Queer As Folk that we see a variety of gay characters, because only in those settings is the fact of their being gay not exotic enough to throw the audience.

For the Huxtables to play to a white audience, they had to be exotic in only a limited way - which was simply being black, and only over time could they add in actually diverse African American characters or situations - and even then it was usually wonderful culturally uplifting things, not the darker side of the African American experience. (Not that I’m objecting, especially since it was one of the only places on TV that we even saw hints of uplifting aspects of the black American cultural experience.)

Kurt and Blaine HAVE to be squeaky clean, because simply being gay makes them exotic. The other kids can swap partners and get pregnant or whatever, but if the gay kids did that, they’d be too weird.

Or at least thats what the FOX execs clearly think.