From: dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu
Date: Sun Aug 03 1997 - 14:31:15 MDT
On Sat, 2 Aug 1997, Kathryn Aegis wrote:
> Dale:
> >I would like to think that the legalization of gay marriages would indeed
> >be a step in a trajectory of ever-broadening legally sanctioned modes of
> >intimate association -- polygamy, for one, but the whole gamut of familial
> >relationships one finds in, say, Heinlein as well.
>
> From a tactic standpoint, no one has ever presented an effective
> strategy for linking gay marriage to polygamy, although I suppose
> every little bit helps.
At this point the connection is less explicitly tactical than it is simply
thematic. Legalization of lesbian and gay marriages -- like the ongoing
consolidation of reproductive freedoms, right to abortion and use of
contraception -- has the effect of further unmooring desire from
reproduction, linking modes of intimate association ever more
conspicuously to the imperatives of self-expression and self-creation
rather than to outdated imperatives concerning reproductive fitness
presently governed by judeochrislamic ideologies and the medico-juridical
discourses favored by State-sponsored bureaucrats over the last century or
so. It is no mistake that it is through the ongoing articulations of
these rights to reproductive freedom that the Supreme Court is (*was*)
slowly institutionalizing a Right to Privacy here in the United States.
The fact that the clearest philosophical expression of this right to
privacy is expressed in Justice Harry Blackmun's *dissent* in
_Bowers_v._Hardwick_ (you know, the decision in which it was determined
that States had the right to make sodomy illegal within their borders
without the pesky whiff of unconstitutionality) is something that should
concern *everybody* -- gay and straight alike. Anyway, my guess is that
once intimate association has been thoroughly disarticulated from
reproduction by the trajectory of these shifts in legal imperatives and
cultural mores (attitudes toward divorce, contraception, nonheterosexual
marriages, etc.), then the culture will be better prepared to embrace an
ever fuller range of modes of intimate association: polygamy, line
marriage, etc. Best, Dale
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Dale Carrico | dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu
University of California at Berkeley, Department of Rhetoric
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If you want to tell people the truth be sure to make them laugh.
Otherwise, they will kill you. -- George Bernard Shaw
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State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. -- Nietzsche
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