If California defeats Proposition 8, it will open the floodgates for same-sex marriage in all the other states.

Cause it’s not like same-sex marriage has been legal in say Massachussetts for years or anything…

denelian, if two men are married, who’s the wife?  Which one submits and does all the shitty scutwork and gets the beers for the ‘man’ watching sports?  GAWD said women were supposed to submit, and if there aren’t clearly defined sex roles in a marriage, why women might think they were equal or something and expect men to do half the housework, which is clearly defined as WOMAN’S WORK.  Men mow the lawn and take out the garbage.  Daily chores?  WOMEN’S WORK.

That’s the only way same-sex marriage can affect hetero-sex marriage—by example.  If there are happy couples with happy children without at least playing at the “Leave it to Beaver” lifestyle, why the world will go to hell.

It’s the only reason I’ve ever been able to come up with for why same-sex marriage scares them so much.  As with most things, it’s the patriarchy.

Or else they’re afraid all their religious leaders and Congresscritters will suddenly mate off with each other b/c they don’t have to meet in the bathrooms anymore.  Or they’re afraid that they won’t be able to meet in the bathroom stalls anymore and have to be open.  (which again, is patriarchy)

denelian,

The immediate issue fundies have with gay marriage is that they hate gayness, and so are determined to resist it.

This answers your question but raises the deeper question of why they care if anyone is gay. Clearly their objection is not as you suggest promiscuity, although they like to harp on that too.

It is all very well to just say as Samatha does that this hatred is “irrational,” or as she goes deeper, to point to their imaginary construct of a Gay-Hating God who will hold everyone, faithful believers especially, direly accountable for the “sin” of toleration, let alone acceptance or welcoming. But really what is the basis of this hatred, if not the actual command of God? (And this “command” comes largely from a strained interpretation of the sacred texts—and of course, if God exists and arbitrarily commands hatred of actual gay people, with no further reason given, that would be a God in direct conflict with any reasonable notion of human decency, a basically demonic power we would obviously be the better for resisting, regardless of the cruel fate we might inevitably suffer.)

I think the reason behind the hatred boils down to the dominator paradigm. That is, the societies that have pretty much made all history for the past several thousand years are deeply committed to militaristic competition, to a polarized world view of Us Versus Them that seeks to first of all break down all natural, inherent individual self-worth and dignity in a manner comparable to a military boot camp, reducing us all to quivering dependency and fear, so that we can then be “offered” the redemption of being built back up as followers of a socially dictated model that leaves our self-worth contingent on rewards from the command hierarchy—the patriarchy. There are a number of objective reasons why the patriarchy seeks to dictate a strictly heterosexual (and hierarchial) model of marriage and family, including the desirability of rapid reproduction to replace men lost in the wastefulness of warfare and other forms of compulsive competitiveness (such as for instance capitalist working and living conditions, which demand high stress for most workers).

We shouldn’t underestimate the functionality of hypocrisy as a vital form of Othering in such a system. This is why the so-called Red States have higher incidences of the social dysfunctions the dominator-Christians call “the wages of sin,” such as extra-marital pregnancy (seen as a problem, not a chosen option), STDs, substance abuse, child abuse, spousal abuse, etc. Since the basic dynamic of a dominator society is Us Versus Them, a certain number of black sheep are desirable to have around, as examples of the kind of suffering the Loving God metes out—and since righteousness in the system is really defined as a relationship to the power structure and not really what one actually does, the Black Sheep also provide hedonistic services (booze, drugs, sex, not to mention the fun of kicking them around) to the privileged “good” men who can get away with these “sins” without being called on it. In fact a major motivator to be successful within the hierarchy is to gain access to the privilege of flouting the rules; aside from any inherent pleasure, the real goal is the status symbol such hypocritically sanctioned abuse is.

What all this is a social structure, a way of organizing human activity that for all its obvious brutality and wastefulness, has been robust and successful at displacing or remaking all other societies in its image.

(more)

(finished!)

Now I obviously think we humans can do better, and in fact we have always known we can live better, and every real dominator society has actually been compromisied with less brutal, more humane, visions and practices. Indeed the most sophisticated dominator societies rely heavily on more or less encapsulating the best human perspectives, claiming that the higher vision is precisely what their more sordid structures exist to foster and Protect—from those evildoers, outside and within, who would subvert the whole grand structure.

It is not just in backward outposts here and there that there is fear that the most progressive elements of our society threaten to undermine hard but necessary customs. I think that the whole arc of modern “conservatism” is accounted for by the consensus that in the end, society must be fundamentally a dominator society or we will all somehow perish. If we try to envision a society completely free of the terroristic compulsion our past millenia of dominator society have assumed, we as progressives do make some rather risky leaps of faith, proposing to rely on something other than hatred and fear as we do. For many reasons this is scary to many people, and the fact that they too clearly benefit from getting some distance from the harshest, crudest verison of the dominator paradigm doesn’t assure them that things will just keep getting better the farther they get from that nightmare. Some people of course are highly privileged in our system—as a patriarchy for instance all men are offered at least some symbolic status over all women. But quite a few people are vastly privileged, and their material and perhaps more important, status, benefits would be undermined if we didn’t view the world as fundamentally a war of Us Against Them. These people are quite capable of great cynicism in fanning the fears of those below them—hence, the Culture War.

Gay people—perhaps I should say Queer people, anyone who undermines the standard-issue White Sheep model of patriarchial marriage—are functional in the system as Black Sheep, to be shorn, slaughtered as scapegoats, or otherwise used. But for them to boldly claim the same rights of marriage for instance as properly submissive and zealous White Sheep would indeed undermine the dominator message and tend to spread unrulyness among the masses.

There is of course a spectrum of feeling, just as Amanda recently outlined about abortion, where lots of people who have conflicted feelings are willing to say that queer folk do after all have some rights and some (more or less) respectability, but perhaps it would somehow still be dangerous or wrong to grant full recognition—like, you know, marriage for instance. They are “squicked out” and if we challenge their reasons for such ambiguity, either they will come to realize they don’t really know why gay marriages would be dangerous—or they will move, defensively, deeper into the many camps of reactionary bigotry. Some will more or less consciously recognize that our civilization is largely built on hate and fear and forthrightly embrace that as the only possible basis of society and their status in it, and to hell with pretenses of humanity—these are more or less fascist, and represent the more forthright and sane (if demonic) aspect of modern “conservatism.” Others will shelter in mysticism that has dominator imperitives written in its memes.

I do believe and trust that the basic trend is for more and more people to come into the light, to recognize that brutality, whatever its justificiation, is wrong, and that we can develop new structures around trust and openness. Thus I agree that ultimately the violence born of fear is irrational. But it has a rational structure of its own, one we overlook or dismiss at our peril. Someday we can laugh it off, but not yet.