Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Puzzled about Fair Marriage

there's no link
As far as civil rights issues of our time go, Fair Marriage is definitely in the top ten in terms of currency -- there are a lot of worse injustices, but Fair Marriage takes up a lot of attention (for example, yesterday's ballot measure in Maine in our political sphere. And it puzzles me as an issue.

I have kind of two pole view of politics. There are people who believe in human rights, human dignity, human freedom, people who desire the future to be better than the present and for harmony to reign. We'll call such a person a 'Malech' and use the Hebrew pluralization style to call them collectively 'Malechem.' And issues get created when a powerful, entrenched interest sees a way to seek advantage by spreading confusion. Either they feel threatened -- and we get political issues around Climate Change -- see a way to benefit -- and we get private prisons and the Iraq War -- or just want to divert attention -- and we get US Weekly. I want to be super clear here: I don't believe 'values voters' have any values. I think issues generally are thrust on an unsuspecting public by the wealthy and powerful. I know that makes me explicitly a conspiracy theorist, so let's take back the term.

Nobody's pressuring Goldman Sachs to marry anybody, and I don't believe there's a material benefit to keeping homosexuals single (although tax codes always surprise me,) so it has to be a distracting measure. But, it simply doesn't seem to be tied to anything, or get called into service in response to an upswelling of interest in anything in particular, so it's not just a generic 'focus on the irrelevant' issue like abortion. Somebody really wants to keep gays from marrying.

More married couples would probably buy more houses and adopt more children, but there's a surfeit of both. So, one might think the intention is to keep the political activism of LGBT on marriage so they don't move on to the next thing. What would that even be? Whom would it threaten?

I just don't even have a clue here. Feel free to help me out.

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