Wednesday, May 09, 2012
Gay Rites
I believe that gay people should be allowed to get married in the sense that I believe accused terrorists deserve a trial by jury with full legal representation in the sense that I believe black men should be able to drive automobiles within the legal limits without being pulled over all the time. That is to say that I advocate a situational equality within the context of the society we are given even though such equality is in the broader sense fundamentally absurd. That a state can ban a relationship between individuals, or that a President's view on the matter is of national significance, is really awful to contemplate. I know marriage is supposed to be some, like, basic physical property of the human universe, paired protons and neutrons or quark spin or some shit or whatever, but really, uh, like, what if the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania banned slightly awkward social acquaintances in which you do have each other's cell numbers but you don't really feel comfortable calling even though you need to borrow his pick-up and you're pretty sure he'd be cool with it but maybe you'll just text him instead. Then the 3rd Circuit overturns the law on twenty-first amendment grounds. The President of the United States says that although he would probably have sent a private Facebook message, his views on the issue are evolving. Then Joe Biden, literally, explodes.
Yes, the right to marry is just like slightly awkward social situations. A precise and illuminating analogy as always. You've truly expanded our knowledge and awareness and should be commended.
ReplyDeleteI've seen : before, Dude, and this guy can ::. I've never been so certain of anything in my life.
ReplyDeleteWell said and gets to the root of the issue. The promotion of civil rights of whatever kind presupposes a governing authority empowered to grant or "secure" such rights. I'll trade you some fictitious rights if you just back the fuck off. How's that?
ReplyDeleteYes, but how will this affect Obama’s re-election? Every night I lay awake pondering what will affect his re-election and how because obviously this is the most important aspect of life. I’m always but never amazed how talking heads worry about and turn every issue into centering about the re-election of some cheap con man in a blue suit as if there was actually any importance to it or as if the blue suit actually gave a flying fuck about the talking heads or anyone else for that matter.
ReplyDeleteIt's a cogent enough critique, but, it does no good to underestimate the widespread human capacity to burrow deeper into hierarchies and their controlling systems, in the name of escaping them. The entire liberal discourse - the "progressive" expansion of rights - which followed from the so-called Enlightenment and is only very recently in any danger of collapsing into its own singularity of self-contradiction, depends upon a belief in an absurdly unrealistic core conviction: namely, that those who inhabit the higher reaches of hierarchies can be persuaded to relinquish their advantages. It is only by accident, or that curious admixture of happenstance and callow opportunism, that the democratic-seeming states' histories have coincided with the increase in the number of permissions (usually, called "rights") allowed to the educated and professional castes and classes, which factions cling most religiously to this ridiculous notion of permissive rights. That coincidence has had a profound effect upon their beliefs about the power of "the masses," the value of the allegedly isonomic individual to those with power, and the degree to which lower level chattering and nattering filters upward to those who rule. But, because we live in the last decades of universal education - the one true victory of the middling castes - their "rights" dogma has become the universal doctrine foisted upon the multitude, shaping their discourse, if not their everyday conduct. That the lowest orders of our current society live as if rights are unreal is a testament not to the failure of universal education, but to the brutalizing and liberating agoge that is daily contact with the sharp end of police powers and the clerk's faceless bureaucratism.
ReplyDeleteThe ruling class and its factions don't hear the middlers, and don't care about their problems, in equal measures. They have nonetheless fashioned a clever political apparatus, whereby they pretend to listen to their support classes by taking their money and distracting them with elections. It is a banal and unremarkable observation, but: the middle classes are obsessed with it.
By comparison, our earthly lords and masters can be expected to be "persuaded" with violence, but only in so much as it gets their attention by threatening their wealth and property.
Since violence against one's better armed betters is always a dodgy prospect, at best, and generally a ticket to press gangs, prison houses and cemetery plots, as a norm - it should probably surprise no one that the compensatory middler response, the reemergence of the repressed, if you will, is the aforementioned belief that rights matter, and that yammering at the people with guns and money gets their attention.
Jeez Louise, Jack, you've taken all poetry out of it!
ReplyDeleteJC for the win...
ReplyDeleteBreaking news: Barack Obama says that if he were president he would do something about this gay marriage thing.
ReplyDeleteBreaking News: After a long night of killing Pakistanis, President Obama says he will endorse equal marriage rights for gay couples.
ReplyDeleteThe sense in which gay marriage matters is the sense in which it provides the rights and privileges granted by that legal arrangement within the society. The state can't ban a relationship between individuals, but it doesn't have to extend a privileged status to it.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry to intrude, but I was told this might be a good place to find out whether Fashion Police is well-received in the gay community, and to get a rough idea about what proportion of gays might be watching it regularly.
ReplyDeleteAnyone care to help me out here?
Shit, Ioz, we got a mind meld or something?
ReplyDeleteShows his priorities that he got gays in the ranks of the military before he got em in the ranks of the married, nony, don't it?
ReplyDeletean absurdly unrealistic core conviction: namely, that those who inhabit the higher reaches of hierarchies can be persuaded to relinquish their advantages.
ReplyDeleteOh posh. They are persuaded all the time. Of course they are coerced much more frequently, so I am not sure why you think it really matters whether or not they are persuadable.
The absurd and unrealistic core conviction of the powerful is this: that people should be equal. They know we aren't. And they know why we can't be. But does this stop them? No way. Equality is the rage of the age.
Oh Uncle Leonard, I do so love your stories. Tell me again the one about the good guy getting rewarded and the bad guy getting punished!
ReplyDeleteHere's a fantastic discussion of Obama's momentous announcement:
ReplyDeletehttp://gawker.com/5909002/?comment=48489755
It's all about the Big Man upstairs, ok!
ReplyDeleteThere really ought to be a law that makes Joe Biden explode. & a law that makes Facebook explode. If this world deals with fake rights, then so be it.
ReplyDeleteOK - I'll ask the question that's gotta be on everybody's mind -
ReplyDeletedoes legitimization of same-sex marriage imply that marriage is no longer a patriarchal conspiracy?
Or is it still a patriarchal conspiracy when a dude and dudette get hitched?
gay rights...why not. there is no one worth offending anymore. keep us the good fight leonard.
ReplyDeleteJack,
ReplyDeleteMake that a blog post over at your place. Pretty please?
Crow FTW!
Well, sure, I guess the state of PA could ban such but I just fail to see any plausible scenario under which it would actually do so. Kinda like Scalia and his "You Will All Eat Broccoli Now" amendment to the Constitution.
ReplyDeleteBob
Well, sure, I guess the state of PA could ban such but I just fail to see any plausible scenario under which it would actually do so. Kinda like Scalia and his "You Will All Eat Broccoli Now" amendment to the Constitution.
ReplyDeleteBob
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