Bigotry and Low Expectations

No, this isn’t about the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” I just did that to catch the eye. There is no heat in my office, my hands are cold, and the only way to keep myself typing is to start with something eye-grabbing. This is actually about the state of Maine (with which I have family connections) and the results of their referendum on same-sex marriage.

1) Why a referendum at all? Since when do we put constitutional rights to a popular vote? The fact that we have done it, in California and Maine, begs the question. Holding a referendum (regardless of its outcome) presumes that we don’t consider marriage a constitutional right, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in the marvelously-named Loving vs. Virginia case 40 years ago. Foo.

2) Does that mean that those who voted to repeal same-sex marriage in those states were bigoted?

3) Or does it mean that the supporters of same-sex marriage in those states were bigoted when they called their opponents bigots? Or that they were interfering with their opponents’ First Amendment rights by advocating boycotts and other non-violent demonstrations of opposition to the repealers? Conservatives seem to consider being labeled as bigots to be a fate worse than, say, Matthew Shepard’s death. Whatever happened to “sticks and stones”?

The word “bigot,” BTW, is believed to come from some Germanic sort of root meaning “by God.” There is a literal equivalent in Spanish, referring to little old ladies in black crepe who spend most of their time in churches: pordiosera. For more etymological information, see the Wikipedia entry.

Now that we’ve explicated the word as well as one can these days, let’s scrap it. It’s not useful for this discussion. Let’s, instead, use “prejudice” and “discrimination.” Mr. Wired draws a very useful distinction between them. “Prejudice” is what everybody has a bunch of, just by virtue of having been born and raised in a particular context. Most of them we don’t even notice most of the time. They’re as close to original sin as I can allow myself to believe in. But as a practical matter they’re morally neutral. It is useful to be aware of one’s own prejudices, because that enables us to avoid discrimination.

Discrimination is not morally neutral. It involves acting on one’s prejudices, to the detriment of the well-being of others. It’s a real sin. Not serving people in restaurants. Not letting them hold certain jobs. Beating them up. Hate crimes.

Very often, the way we become aware of our prejudices is by somehow associating their object with our children. Desegregating schools unveiled a lot of parental bigotry after the promulgation of Brown vs. Board of Education. White people who were willing to work with, or even for, African-Americans, or to vote for them, or to recognize the legal authority of people who had been elected mainly by the Black vote, found themselves drawing the line at the schoolhouse door.

The campaign against same-sex marriage in Maine apparently owes its success to the claim that schoolchildren would have to be taught that same-sex marriage was no different from the usual kind. So far as anybody can tell, that claim was utter hogwash, but, as other bloggers have already pointed out, it served as a proxy for the Bigotry That Dares Not Speak Its Name, opposition to allowing our children to be aware of otherwise normal people being gay. How we want to raise our children (as opposed to how we live our own lives) is often an expression of both our highest values and our lowest prejudices.

Many otherwise very decent opponents of same-sex marriage are perfectly okay with civil unions. As a practical matter, that keeps them mostly on the right side of the prejudice-discrimination line. Most same-sex couples will not suffer unduly from having civil unions rather than marriages, given proper legal drafting. Until we think about why these decent anti-same-sex-marriage opponents want to take that position. It’s really the same reason that classical and medieval authorities required prostitutes, and Jews, to wear distinctive dress. Not because Those People were so utterly different from The Rest of Us, but precisely because they weren’t. Without the yellow hat or the blond wig or the six-pointed star, they could easily be mistaken for, and treated like, Real People. We wouldn’t know whom to discriminate against.

When one of my colleagues tells me he frequents gay bars because he is “husband-hunting” (and I respond, as gently as possible, by telling him that bars are not usually great places to meet spouses), the very normality of this exchange puts any eavesdropping adolescent at the risk of concluding that gay people are just like the rest of us. For that matter, what happens when your kid’s high school class does a field trip to the local court and hears the judge, in the course of jury selection, ask a member of the panel, “Are you married or do you have a domestic partner?” (Yes, here in Cook County, they do that.) We can’t have that, can we?

Many sincere and religious people believe that homosexual behavior is a sin. Most of them also believe that adultery is a sin (one which is usually condemned in the same biblical paragraphs as homosexuality, and sentenced to the same punishment, by the way.) Many of them even believe that remarriage after divorce is a sin. But they somehow survive their children interacting with, or at least becoming very aware of, the public adulterers and remarried divorcés around them. So apparently their religiously-based discomfort with those classes of sinners does not get translated into discrimination, maybe not even into prejudice. One has to conclude that homosexuality is different for reasons that have nothing to do with biblical morality. The yuck factor, as some religious bloggers have termed it.

So, okay, I’m willing not to call same-sex-marriage opponents bigots if they’re willing to allow civil unions (or, for that matter, religious marriages) with all of the privileges that go with civil marriage in this society—so long as they don’t treat people in civil unions, and gay people in general, any differently than they treat public adulterers and remarried divorcés. Which means allowing their kids to interact with and be aware of and be taught in school by all, or none, of these public sinners.

CynThesis

The Sexual Revolution Keeps Going Around

That Other Blog keeps harping on the evils of the Sexual Revolution and why Our Culture will wither up and die if we don’t reverse it. I guess it’s time for a review of the facts, at least from the point of view of a history major-turned-lawyer who has spent a lot of time in divorce court and juvenile court:

v The Sexual Revolution didn’t start in the 1960s. In fact, it wasn’t a one-time only event at all, except to the extent that technology played a role. The Romans had one, which Augustus Caesar deplored big-time, while of course, like almost every other opponent of his era’s sexual revolution, playing a major role in it. The French had several, one in the Middle Ages, one during the Second Empire, and one in the late 19^th century. The Brits had at least one per century beginning in the late 1500s. And the good old USA had one in the early 1800s and one that began in the 1920s and is arguably still going on.

v As is obvious from the previous paragraph, no Sexual Revolution is irreversible.

v The current Sexual Revolution may be different from its predecessors because of the contribution of contraceptive technology. But even that doesn’t make it irreversible, since even in societies where contraception is readily available, not every sexually active person chooses to use it, or even considers it a matter of choice at all.

v The Good Old 1950s weren’t all that good. There was at least as much teenage sex as there is today, and somewhat more teenage pregnancies per capita. That phenomenon was cloaked by frequent resort to Shotgun Marriage.

v These days, even our most upstanding citizens (Bristol Palin, for instance) consider that an undesirable compromise. In fact, the Catholic Church ordinarily will not perform a marriage while the prospective bride is pregnant. Obviously they consider unwed motherhood preferable. Some personal anecdotal stats: in the year before I was due to start high school, half the girls in the graduating class of the public high school I would ordinarily have attended were pregnant. Including my cousin. Which undoubtedly had something to do with my spending the next four years at a convent boarding school. So far as I know, all of the young women in question got married well before their due date.

v But I suspect that the Sexual Revolution is responsible for the decrease in math skills of our younger generations. My classmates and I, all the way through high school and college, got to exercise those skills quite regularly calculating just how premarital our friends’ sexual activity was, by subtracting 9 months from the birth of the baby, and then subtracting that date from the wedding date. Probably none of the current younger generation could work that out even with a calculator.

v Not to mention, of course, the fact that today’s youth are a seriously lost generation, at least in terms of geography, since most of them can’t even find their own state on a map. Before Playboy, young men had no place to look at nekkid wimmen except National Geographic. Yes, we can blame that on the Sexual Revolution too.

But OTOH–

v Back in the Good Old Days, when a young woman was found dead of non-natural causes, the first thing the coroner checked for was pregnancy. Because pregnancy was an equally plausible motive for either suicide or homicide.

v Those shotgun marriages ended in divorce far more often than marriages contracted under less precipitous circumstances.

v Even current data tells us that such marriages are more likely to involve abuse.

v That doesn’t even begin to deal with the issue of homosexuality as a cause of blackmail, homicide, and suicide (and divorce and infidelity.) Yes, that still happens today, but not nearly as much as back in the Good Old Days.

Yes, there are things I don’t like about post-1960 attitudes toward sex:

v The fact that young girls get pressured into it to please other people (boyfriends or girlfriends or occasionally even parents) and often get absolutely no pleasure or reward from it.

v The fact that most of those young girls cannot imagine using contraception, and in fact consider pregnancy a highly desirable outcome, at least in comparison to ordinary high school life.

v The dangerous intersect between drugs and sex (although not much different from the link between alcohol and sex in the Good Old Days.)

v The fact that the major cause of death among pregnant women these days is homicide (probably an unintended consequence of our more stringent enforcement of child support laws.)

v The child support laws themselves, which seem to expect happy young couples to include in their repertoire of pillow talk an inquiry into the male’s date of birth and Social Security Number.

v The declining prestige of marriage, except among lesbians and gay men. (It enjoyed a brief boom among Catholic priests and nuns, but that population has now aged beyond marriageability and dwindled almost beyond recovery.)

So the Sexual Revolution was neither an unmixed blessing nor a universal curse. Like many other social phenomena, it is both cause and effect of our culture as a whole. It has affected some people much more than others. And we still haven’t figured out all of those effects, or how to modulate them. We certainly haven’t figured out how to repeal it. I don’t dream of trying.

Red Emma

Two Rubies Plus Ten Percent

A Thought Experiment

Rosewood. Tulsa.  Native American treaty rights cash-outs.  The American internment camps for Japanese-Americans.  The German slave labor camps.  Four hundred years of African-American slavery.  Reparations are once again in the headlines.  Reparations have even been, or are now in the process of being, paid, to the victims of all but the last-listed category of injustice.  Randall Robinson has been trying to rouse public awareness of and interest in reparations to the descendants of African-American slaves for years, and he is once again gaining notice.

All of these campaigns that have resulted in payment plans have ultimately been worked out by lawyers, for better and for worse.  What lawyers typically worry about in such cases are two problems: calculating the damages, and identifying and locating the persons to be compensated.  The smaller the number of original victims, and the shorter and more recent the period over which damages were incurred, the easier the solutions.  So the consequences of the race riots in Rosewood, Florida, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, have been highly manageable.  The Japanese-American internees were not only a small group, but easily identified from records still available to the federal government.  The German slave labor camp inmates and their families have been a lot harder both to identify and to locate, and the calculation of damages has likewise been difficult, but a settlement has nevertheless been worked out.

That leaves the really hard cases.  Reparations for four hundred years of slavery, for instance.  How would the damages be calculated?  The easy way–the current value of forty acres and a mule, times the number of persons to be compensated? Or the hard way–the surplus value of 400 years of agricultural labor in an economy almost unimaginably different from our own, which has left only incomplete records, times some arbitrary rate of compound interest?  And to whom should these funds be paid?  All provable descendants of African slaves in North America, regardless of their current racial identification?  Most of the known descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s slave and alleged mistress Sally Hemmings today consider themselves “white.”  In all likelihood, that is also true of a significant proportion of the descendants of other slaves.  Are they still entitled to be compensated for the suffering of their ancestors in the generations before their family succeeded in “passing” as white?  Perhaps on a pro-rated basis in comparison to descendants of slaves who are still classified as “African-American”?  For that matter, what about the large proportion of today’s African-American community who have significant white ancestry?  Would this too require some pro-rating formula?  Or should compensation be paid only to those who are currently living as African-Americans, since they are the ones who bear the burdens created by slavery in the first place?  That depends on exactly what is being compensated in the first place–the labor stolen from generations of slaves, or the damage done by the residuals of slavery to the African-Americans now living.  Obviously, this is the kind of problem the lawyers will have to tackle after agreement is reached on the principal of paying any kind of compensation at all, to anyone.

Assuming we ever reach that point, that brings us to what may be the hardest case of all, one which has never been discussed anywhere by anyone, so far as I know–reparations for the stolen labor and lives of women.  Think about it–not a week of race rioting, not eight years of internment, not four hundred years of slavery, but at least the ten thousand years of known human history.  Not isolated ethnic or racial minorities, but 53% of all the human beings who have ever lived on this planet.

From the lawyer’s point of view, of course, that is precisely the problem.  The larger the projected sum of reparations, or the number of people eligible to receive it, the less likely it is that it will ever be paid, or even recognized as a moral obligation.  Reparations for ten thousand years of unpaid women’s labor could only take the form of a drastic transfer of wealth from men to women.

And, unless some very careful planning and preparation were done beforehand, much of that wealth would be transferred back to fathers, husbands, and pimps within the year (much the way many Native Americans who were paid for the transfer of treaty lands away from their tribe found themselves back in poverty again within a few months or years after the payment was made.)  The use of debt peonage, sharp dealing, and just plain intimidation would play the same role between men and women as they did between ex-slaveowners and ex-slaves in the post-bellum South.   Poverty often involves not only lack of resources, but lack of the power necessary to hold onto the resources one acquires.

The problem of designating recipients would be the easiest part of the settlement, for a change.  Everybody with the double-X chromosome.  Since everybody’s ancestry is 50% female, ancestry becomes useless as a criterion.  What about transsexuals? some would ask. On one hand, they have chosen their status, but on the other hand, once having chosen it, they are now subject to the same disadvantages as their double-X sisters.  Last week, an Iranian who had undergone gender reassignment from male to female some years before proclaimed that she wanted to change back, because of the social, political, and legal disabilities imposed on Iranian women by the religious establishment.  Clearly, she would be eligible for reparations.  Transgendered women are a small enough proportion of the population that their inclusion in the settlement would have little or no impact on anyone else’s benefits.

As a socioeconomic “thought experiment”, the idea is useful. It could certainly be used to impress upon the human race generally the magnitude of its debt to women.  It might also be useful as a way to figure out the point at which the effort to redress past injustices becomes the futile task of unscrambling eggs or putting the toothpaste back into the tube.   That point probably lies just beyond calculating and paying reparations for  four hundred years of African-American slavery.

Am I saying this is a futile enterprise?  On the contrary, I would love to see some serious number-crunching.  The short way?  That would be based on the biblical statement that a valiant woman’s worth is above rubies.  That means at least two rubies, plus.  Hence the title of this essay–the current value of two rubies plus an arbitrarily-chosen ten per cent, for each woman on the planet today.  The long way would involve something like the following:  figure out the total value in modern dollars for a thirty-hour week of domestic labor and child-care.  Multiply that by the average lifespan of human beings over the last ten thousand years, minus 6 years (the average length of unproductive childhood), times 53% of the number of human beings who have ever lived on the planet.  That takes care of housework and child care.  Then calculate an average figure for the uncompensated labor of women in agriculture, pastoral work, and other “family businesses,” and perform the same set of calculations with it.  Maybe figure in an additional 25% for “pain and suffering” resulting from domestic abuse (something, by the way, that could also reasonably be done in calculating reparations for the descendants of African-American slaves as well.)  Then divide the resulting total by the number of women currently alive.  The final figure could be used for all kinds of things, beginning with calculating alimony and personal injury awards for the incapacitation or wrongful death of women in Western countries, and calculating bride prices elsewhere.  Forget the “price above rubies”–let’s crunch some real numbers!

CynThesis

Marriage–A Mother & Father for Every Child

Last Monday, 200 same-sex marriage opponents showed up on the law of the Vermont State House with buttons proclaiming, “Marriage—A Mother and Father for Every Child.” This perturbs me a bit. The main cause of children not having both a mother and a father in the home isn’t gay marriage, it’s runaway men. Occasionally it’s runaway women. But what is the Religious Right doing, or even saying, about the all-too-frequently exercised right of fathers to walk away from their children? Not a whole lot. In most states, the statutes criminalizing desertion and nonsupport of home and family are either unenforced or have long since been repealed. I don’t know of anybody trying to get them back on the books.

And so far, medical science has not devised a way to prove a particular man is the father of a particular child without a DNA sample from both. I would support a Nobel Prize in medicine for any solution to this problem, or perhaps even a Peace Prize, given the social significance involved. Actually, in the interests of gender equity, what I’d really like to see is something that would cause every man who impregnates a woman to develop a facial rash and some other highly visible, bothersome but not dangerous symptoms that would last at least 9 months.

But obviously, if we can’t find runaway fathers, we can’t persecute them. As long as homosexuals were closeted, they had the same protection. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is a basic moral principle in our culture. Which suggests very strongly that what most anti-same-sex-marriage advocates really object to isn’t what gay people do in the bedroom, but the fact that they have the nerve to talk about it in the public forum. Marriage is only the most public way to make homosexuality public. If they’d stop holding parades, and publishing books and periodicals and blogs, and forming organizations and support groups, they could **** and *********** to their hearts’ content.

Which is a constitutional issue. We don’t object to gay sex. We object to gay speech. Speech is protected by the First Amendment. Maybe that’s because the Framers knew how much people want to limit public speech, given half a chance. Sex—well, it depends which Supreme Court opinion you read and when and by whom it was written. A lot of the folks on the Warren Court seemed to consider sex protected by the First Amendment, but these days that argument doesn’t fly, even with the current court “liberals.” But it wouldn’t really have to fly, if people would just shut up about it. Even the most restrictive of conservative judges has never advocated setting up an entire corps of jackbooted thugs to randomly police bedrooms, because we would really rather not know what goes on in them.

Which, I suspect, is only a special case of a much larger issue. We Americans don’t want to hear about people who are different from ourselves. We particularly don’t want to hear about how oppressed they are, or how badly we behave toward them. We will allow each oppressed group, as part of the “liberal bargain,” a few days a year to air their grievances all over the mainstream media, coast to coast, in glorious Technicolor and stereophonic sound, while we tune out, turn off, and watch football. Our willingness to grant them that much proves what nice people we are. After the few properly licensed days of exposure, the issue, whatever it may be and regardless of what, if anything, has actually been done about it, becomes “dead,”. As in dead horse, comma, beating.

Indeed, the Religious Right seems to value most the right of its members not to be thought of as bigots for being mean to various oppressed minorities. Being called a bigot is apparently an existential threat to many conservatives. It is often the reason given for opposing not only same-sex marriage, but even public advocacy of same-sex marriage. “If we let you talk about it, you’ll call us bigots for not letting you do it.”

Enough already. I favor same-sex marriage because, as a divorce lawyer, I see so little of fidelity and mutuality and sharing in this world that I refuse to be picky about who practices them. I also favor it because any excuse for a good party is a significant contribution to the quality of life. Also, it’s good for the economy. Caterers, wedding planners, dressmakers and haberdashers, and the manufacturers of small appliances all need all the help they can get. If you don’t like same-sex weddings, don’t have one.

Red Emma

Some Advice on Divorce, or

When You’ve Given the Same Advice Three Times, It’s Time to Write It Down

I’ve been practicing family law in Chicago for thirty years now.  I find myself telling my new clients pretty much the same thing every time, and it occurs to me that it’s probably worth putting out in the public realm.  So:

1. You’re Going to Be Crazy for Two Years More or Less:  So will the rest of your family—your soon-to-be-ex, your kids, your in-laws, your close friends, and even your pets.  I had one client whose goldfish started acting like a piranha.  You will find yourself doing and saying things you could never have imagined before.  You will start checking out the Yellow Pages for convenient padded cells to book into.

But in fact, there is nothing permanently wrong with you.  In a couple of years, you and those around you will once again be normal people.  Not the same people you were before, probably, but normal.  In the meantime, you might want to get some kind of counseling or join a support group or talk to your pastor for help just getting through. If either you or your spouse has problems with alcohol or drugs, you might want to get everybody into various Twelve-Step programs.  Ala-Teen has gotten great reviews from kids I know.  Talk to your kids’ teachers and counselors in school, so they’ll know to watch out for problems.  There is help out there, and most of it is inexpensive or free: use it.

2. A Divorce Will Not Make Your Spouse Disappear: Not if you have kids under 21, anyway.  This process does not end by giving you a magic button that you can press and quietly, nonviolently make your ex vanish from the world, or even from your world.  It will not abolish your relationship with your ex.  It will just change that relationship.  Aside from all the legal and financial work you will be doing over the next couple of years, you will have to work on making that relationship with your kids’ other parent workable.  Above all, don’t ever force your kids to choose between you and their other parent.  Just keep your own door open to them.  There are therapists and mediators out there who may be able to help, although they’re usually expensive.

3. Cook County Illinois is the Largest Divorce Court Jurisdiction in the Country: It may even be the largest in the world—we don’t really have much data from China.  So everything takes longer.  Sometimes time is on your side; sometimes it works against you.  Either way, there will be a lot of it involved in this case.  Generally speaking, you can get the case over fast, or you can get what you want—not both. Try to be patient.  Sometimes your best advantage is the ability to outwait your spouse.

CynThesis

Marriage From the Other Side

I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the analysis we’re seeing here.  Back in the days when marriage was about children, it was mainly about insuring that the children born to a man’s wife would be his children and not some other guy’s.  And, back before DNA was invented, the cheapest and most effective way to do that was to control the wife in question.  No doubt that was good for the family and good for the community.  But it wasn’t good for women.  It led to purdah, honor killings, and a lot of other bad stuff. As well as a bonanza for the textile industry, given how much more fabric it takes to veil a woman than to blindfold a man.

 

If, OTOH, marriage is just about sex, well, shoot, all that matters is that your partner has sex with you more or less when you’re in the mood. What s/he does the rest of the time is no big deal. 

 

Which is not how Mr. Wired and I live our lives, of course.  For 44 years, we have done the monogamy thing.  Which has been good for our families and our community, no doubt.  We have maintained a household which has provided care for a child and help for several other children, as well as for each other in illness and injury. 

 

But we made the choice to do so. It was about each of us as an individual. 

 

I’m of two minds (at least) about this.  Or maybe each of the Wired Sisters should speak in turn:

 

Red Emma—The communitarian nostalgiacs tell us that the family does, efficiently and at no cost, things for its members that the market economy and the state do only badly and at huge expense.  The family maximizes the range of choices for its members in ways that the market and the state cannot possibly do.  But, in the process, it discounts completely the value of female labor and loss of choices.  Yes, the result may well be a better society than what we have now, for men and male children.  Similarly, classical Athens was a wonderful place to live, if you were free and male.  Probably the ante-bellum Southern US was pretty good too, if you happened to own a plantation and the people who kept it running.  But any society which can maintain its advantages for some of its members only at the cost of some other members’ freedom does not deserve to survive. Whether we like it or not, if we cannot devise a good society, based on good families, without returning women to servitude, all we have a right to do is muddle along until we figure out how to.  Remember those family comedies in the ‘50s, in which Mama was called out of town for some emergency and the family suddenly had to survive without her and discover just how crucial her work really was, now that they didn’t have it?  Well, folks, that’s where we are right now. And just demanding that Mama come home won’t cut it any more.  She may not want to, and she may not even be able to.

 

Jane Grey—The family maximizes choices for its members in ways the market economy and the state cannot possibly match.  Barbara Ehrenreich refers to the family as a “socialism of two” (or, presumably, three or four or more.)  Within and because of the family, individuals can choose to take part in the market economy or not; to work for a corporation or run a small business or be an independent artisan.  The family can choose to support one or more of its members in the arts, countercultural politics, or community service.  Nobody else is going to pay people to do that.  If we allow the family to shrink and disappear, we will have nothing left to support individual choices except the market and the state, which have both, over the millennia, done a really poor job of it.

 

CynThesis—We may not even be able to make this discussion fruitful any more.  Whether we like it or not, the market has already come pretty close to destroying the family.  An increasing number of our families are formed when young people go away to college or the military, marry other young people they meet there, and then settle down in the first place they find jobs afterwards.  In the meantime, their respective parents move someplace else for their jobs, and then, ultimately, some other place for their respective retirements, until the families in question have one end in Florida, one end in Boston, and one end in Chicago, and, if they’re lucky, can make enough money between them all to see each other once a year at most.  If we can’t find a way to create families where people actually live, there just plain won’t be any.  It doesn’t matter whether a couple moves for her job or his job (or, for that matter, for her job or her job.)  The market will determine where and for how long they will sink roots, and who their neighbors will be.  If they cannot form a community with those neighbors, there will be no communities.

 

Sorry to be so gloomy. Happy New Year, and peace and light to you all.

 

The Wired Sisters

 

 

The Bible and Same-Sex Marriage

What does it say about this week’s news from my home state that I would rather write about same-sex marriage than Illinois politics? Okay, here we go, on this week’s favorite topic other than the soon-to-be-former Governor of Illinois: the Newsweek article on biblical endorsement of gay marriage. As a divorce lawyer, I figure there is little enough love and commitment in this world that we should enthusiastically welcome it wherever it turns up. And I say this even though same-sex marriage would probably be bad for my practice, which currently includes all kinds of devices for making nonstandard same-sex families look like standard-issue straight families, including cohabitation agreements, custody agreements, and separation agreements.

The first thing any serious student of the Bible should notice, upon reading what it says about homosexuality, is that, in almost any paragraph where homosexuality is mentioned, adultery is also mentioned, and subjected to precisely the same penalties. So any biblical literalist who is not willing to see adulterers stoned to death should probably rethink the whole thing.

`The next, admittedly more subtle, thing for a Bible-reader to notice, is that almost everything the Jewish Scriptures (that’s the Old Testament, to you gentiles) says in the abstract about sex has to do with proper relationships of power and property. All of the “forbidden relationships” enumerated in Leviticus 18 and 20, for instance. Almost all of these strictures are addressed only to men (grammatically this is unmistakable in the Hebrew), except for intercourse with animals. No, that’s not the result of any sexist presumption. It’s the result of the political reality of biblical times, that only men could take the sexual initiative.

Sex with women “belonging” to other men was an infringement of property rights. Sex with women “belonging” to one’s father were an infringement of his dominance in the family. Sex with women “belonging” to one’s sons or brothers—that is, lower-ranking males–was an abuse of dominance. In this context, “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination” suggests strongly that power is an issue here, too, and that what the Author is really talking about is male-on-male rape, of the sort that happens in prisons. Which I think is an abomination, too. (Although I do like the interpretation of a rabbinical friend of mine, that lying with a man as one lies with a woman means grabbing all the covers and snoring.)

The fact is, most of the abstract things the Jewish scriptures says about sex have absolutely nothing to do with love and companionship (as opposed to several narratives about particular people falling in love and getting married.) The only exception is directed at polygynists—if a man has two wives, and loves one and hates the other, he is not allowed to let that disparity influence his treatment of their children. Which, as a divorce lawyer, I still think is a good rule, but these days, of course, we apply it only to serial polygamy.

What about the New Testament and sex? Well, Jesus had absolutely nothing to say about homosexuality, not a single word. On the other hand, he objected pretty strongly to divorce, either forbidding it altogether or permitting it only where adultery was involved. This was consistent with one of the major schools of rabbinical thought of that era, the School of Shammai. Which is interesting, given that Jesus mostly followed the teachings of the other school, the School of Hillel. But I digress.

Paul wasn’t keen on sex of any kind, gay, straight, married or unmarried. But, as with his Jewish predecessors, where he talks about homosexuality at all, it is almost always in the same paragraph and under the same strictures as adultery.

I’m not willing to go as far as Lisa Miller in her Newsweek analysis; I don’t believe the Bible necessarily endorses same-sex marriage. But I do believe that it provides for regulating it, as it regulates heterosexual marriage, along with eating, drinking, earning and spending money, and all of the other activities of daily life. Thus, another rabbinical friend of mine who will bless same-sex marriages the same as straight marriages, but will not do interfaith marriages of either kind, is, I think, being perfectly consistent by her own lights and the Jewish Tradition. Similarly, I believe that the Illinois Domestic Violence Act, which forbids assault and battery between husband and wife, cohabitating man and woman, and domestic partners (along with a whole bunch of other people in current and former relationships), is on the right track.

I also strongly endorse the distinction, utterly unknown to the Bible, between civil and religious marriage. Some of my clients have entered into religious marriages and never registered them with the state, either because state recognition violated their anarchist principles, or because it penalizes them in receiving Social Security or other benefits. A lot of my clients have married civilly but not religiously, because they just didn’t want to do the church thing, or felt they couldn’t afford it. When the religiously-but-not-civilly-married bunch shuffle off this mortal coil, they will undoubtedly make work for some lawyer, possibly me, regardless of their gender mix. The civilly-but-not-religiously-married bunch may make work for some Roman Catholic canon lawyer, or some rabbi, but thank heaven, that’s not my problem. I figure Jefferson’s sublime insight that the state and religion should stay out of each other business is especially sensible where marriage is concerned, and there is no reason not to apply it to same-sex unions too.

The Proposition 8 gang should read up on what happened (early in Gandhi’s career) when the British colonial government decided to stop recognizing all non-Christian marriages in South Africa. The results were a major setback for the colonial administration by people who, as Gandhi eloquently expressed, saw their wives branded as whores and their children as bastards. This hits people, quite literally, where they live.

Okay, enough for now. The heat has gone off in my office and I’m going home. Peace, light, and warmth to you all.

CynThesis

Strangers in Egypt, Prop. 8, and Reynolds vs. U.S.

Okay, this is going to be esoteric. Reynolds vs. US was a Supreme Court case, decided in 1878, in which the justices (including John Marshall Harlan, whom I generally admire because later on, he dissented from the majority in Plessy vs. Ferguson) held that the religiously promulgated duty of male members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints to marry multiple wives did not exempt them from compliance with anti-bigamy laws, despite the First Amendment’s guarantee of free exercise of religion. I personally believe this decision was wrongly decided, and ought to be revisited. It probably won’t be, because the beneficiaries of any such review would be some fringy cult with very few votes behind it.

The official hierarchy of the Latter-Day Saints accepted this decision and were divinely inspired to scrap plural marriage, and most Mormons followed this ruling. As a result, Utah was declared a state in 1890, and we all sort of lived happily ever after. Well, sort of. Mitt Romney’s grandfather was one of a group of schismatic polygamist Mormons who moved to Mexico to avoid the law. (As a result, Mitt’s father George was born in Mexico, but the constitutionality of his candidacy for president was never ruled on.) There are still a fair number of polygamist Mormon groups out there, in varying degrees of closetedness.

The reason the Mormons ended up in Utah in the first place was that they had already been forcibly dislocated from Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. They decided to try their luck in a territory where the locals might be less intolerant. This strategy worked well enough to establish them as the predominant social institution of Utah, but it delayed the admission of Utah as a state until the polygamy issue was resolved to the satisfaction of the federal government.

So it strikes me as ironic that, having endured so much harassment and persecution for the oddities of their family life, they now feel entitled, or even obliged, to subject other people to similar strictures.

I should, I suppose, not be surprised by this. After all, the ancestors of the white settlers in the Carolinas who encouraged Andrew Jackson to evict the Cherokees onto the Trail of Tears in the early 1800s had themselves been exiled from Scotland for participating in the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745. There are undoubtedly lots of other equally esoteric and equally ironic instances lurking in human history, of the victims of persecution becoming persecutors in their turn.

Amazingly, this is something the Bible actually does say something about. Yes, gentle reader, Biblical morality actually forbids the victims of persecution to victimize others. Exodus 22:21 says “you shall not wrong a stranger, nor oppress him, for you were strangers in Egypt.”

But we are all accustomed to hearing the Bible thumped more often than it is read. I just thought it was time for a history refresher.

Jane Grey

Replacement II: the Uses of Childlessness

In “Replacement I,” we pointed out that overpopulation leads to crowding, regimentation, and spoliation of the environment, while the most obvious countermeasure (China’s one-child family mandate) leads to a generation of badly spoiled “only” children.  Those of us who value communities of ponderable size (big enough for variety, but small enough for individuality) need to start thinking about paths between rocks and hard places.  Which means, among other things, that we need to rethink our presumption that everybody should become biological parents.  If fewer people have children, they can have more children per family.  And many people believe that large families (within reasonable limits) tend to produce better communities.

 

We might start by looking at various animal species.  Those that live in packs or communities often limit reproduction to the alpha female, or the alpha male, or the alpha pair.  Many pack members do not reproduce, but are nonetheless useful and sometimes essential to the life of the pack as a whole.  This is true of wolves and meerkats, for instance.  Whereas solitary mammals (like bears) all reproduce, absent rare pathologies.  I don’t know that anybody has researched the general issue of “childlessness” among mammals (or other critters, for that matter,) but it sounds like something that needs a close look.

 

In human history, many cultures have mandated celibacy and/or childlessness among certain members.  Certainly the Catholic culture of medieval Europe did so, as did Eastern Orthodox Christians to a somewhat lesser degree.  Buddhist monasticism mandated celibacy, but was often viewed as a temporary life stage for most monks, so probably had less demographic impact.  In other cultures, the military life was deemed to require celibacy/childlessness, as among the Ottoman Janissaries, and the Zulu troops of Chaka’s army. 

 

Victorian middle-class culture in England and the US created a stratum of “maiden aunts” and other “old maids.”  One strand of those cultures had a custom that the youngest daughter would be expected not to marry, but to stay home and care for her parents during their old age, in return for which she would ultimately inherit their house. (I mention this because one of my great-uncles married a woman who had done this.  She was his second wife; he already had children by his first wife, but Aunt May was of course past child-bearing when he married her.)  During the period between the beginnings of female emancipation (including access to higher education and the professions) and the widespread use of contraception, most women who went into the professions were also expected to remain unmarried and childless.

 

And in some cultures, for purely economic reasons, it was common to delay marriage until just a few years short of the end of child-bearing age for women—post-famine Ireland, for instance.  This obviously reduced the number of children born to such couples, and increased the likelihood of childlessness.

 

Essentially, in all of these arrangements, there is a recognition that, whether or not the species, or the pack, or the group, or the environment, can sustain universal reproduction, there are individuals who do not have a vocation for parenthood, or who have a vocation for something else difficult to combine with parenthood.

 

The upside of these various arrangements is twofold.  First, as we already pointed out, if fewer adults become parents, those who do can have more children per family.  But, in addition, as we have seen from the examples cited above, childless adults can perform valuable services to their families and their communities which people with children would have a lot more trouble doing, and can, in return, experience the benefits of extended family life. 

 

Obviously, this doesn’t always work out.  For instance, studies of birth order and family size seem to show that, beyond two or three children, large families are not necessarily good for the kids.  The more parental attention a child gets, the more academic and life success the child is likely to have.  And extended families sometimes extend the potential for child abuse and other pathologies. 

 

Our economic arrangements today militate against extended families, at least among people who expect their children to go to college, or into military service.  Sending a kid away from home in his/her late teens or early twenties pretty much guarantees that s/he will not marry the kid next door.  The result will likely be a family with one end in (for instance) Boston and the other in (for instance) Miami, mainly connected by the internet, the telephone, and cheap airfares.  When cheap airfares disappear, or when the older generation of such a family gets to retirement age, things will get even more difficult. Worse still, most of us don’t really grasp what geographical separation means, since we are so accustomed to thinking of it as insignificant.  In “Fiddler on the Roof,” Tevye tells his daughter, as she is about to get on a train to follow her husband into exile in Siberia, “God knows whether we shall ever see each other again.”  As travel gets more expensive, we may have to start seeing family separations that way too.  It can be an unpleasant surprise at an age when we are experiencing lots of other unpleasant surprises (like raising teenagers, losing our youthful good looks, and discovering that we will not end our professional career as head of the firm.)

 

But extended families can come into existence in more ways than one.  Most cultures have created various kinds of quasi-familial arrangements to fill in the gaps in biology. Cultural anthropologists call them “fictive kinship.”  Godparents, for instance, who may fill in for absent or deceased biological parents; “play brothers” and “play sisters” in some urban American subcultures.  And of course, the infinite variety of “step-“ and “half-“ relatives created by divorces and unmarried parenthood.  Most of these arrangements are purely voluntary, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage.  But they can and do provide love and even stability for people who might otherwise live alone, or worse still, grow up alone. 

 

One of the cultural by-products of the 1960s was increased exploration of various quasi-familial arrangements beyond and sometimes counter to the nuclear family.  Some of them worked, some of them failed dismally, and most of them worked for a while and then failed rather quietly.  Many of them failed for precisely the same reasons that marriages fail, except that the likelihood of failure is increased exponentially by the number of people involved in the relationship.  Today’s New Monastic movement seems to be trying out some of the same arrangements, under much more difficult economic circumstances (which may turn out to be an up side or a down side.)

 

But with less fanfare and more serendipity, many people beginning to form their families are trying to build in “reinforcements” in the form of friends, godparents, and kids who just happen to hang around.  We need to encourage this trend. We need, especially, to encourage skepticism about the nearly universal belief that everybody has a right to have their “own” biological children.  What makes us think our own DNA is any better than that of the world’s orphans and foundlings who need our care? 

 

None of this is “revolutionary” or “anti-family.”  On the contrary, it is a return to the way human beings lived before the nuclear family exploded into overpopulation.  Unless we prefer to limit our numbers through famine, plague, and war, we should be exploring other solutions that worked for those who came before us. 

 

CynThesis

 

Mommas, Don’t Let Your Daughters Grow Up To Be Housewives

Once again, the social critics are decrying the dire consequences of the movement of women (and especially mothers) into the paid labor force. Lack of maternal attention causes crime, illiteracy, and unemployability.  Children are growing up without adult supervision or role modeling. Or not growing up at all.

 

We don’t, of course, need the social critics to inform us that no parent can be in two places at the same time, that it is not physically possible for the same person to nurture and educate a child and earn the money to provide for  her.  Most of us can figure that out for ourselves. I share the critics’ concern for the welfare of children who are raised with a patchwork of care from relatives, sitters, schools, and day care centers for most of their waking hours.

 

But the fact is that most employed women work for the same reasons most employed men do–first and foremost they need the money to support the lifestyle they consider proper for their households, and secondarily, they get psychological benefits from the status, socialization, and variety of paid employment, and the independence derived from earning their own incomes.

 

How far should a family be willing to reduce its living standards to keep an adult at home during the children’s waking hours?  Obviously, a single parent has very little choice in the matter, except that provided by the welfare system.  But in a two-parent family, how little should the primary earner be earning before a second earner gets recruited?  Poverty level? Modest but adequate? Neither of these provides for home ownership, private schooling, or college education for the children.  Must we conclude that these are unrealistic dreams for the good family? That the presence of an adult at home can do more to improve the children’s prospects in later life than private schooling and college?  Should we write off the American dream and concentrate on hearth and home?

 

All of these questions are purely economic.  But real people make economic decisions based on a mixture of economic and non-economic motives.  Men work even if they can afford not to, because in our culture a job is as much a requisite of  being a male as pants that zip in the front.  They work because that’s the only way they can have regular contact with other adult males.  But above all, they work because being self-supporting is one of our culture’s most basic moral  values.  We firmly believe that people who are not self-supporting are parasites.  A person who is too young, too old, or too sick to work will be spared our scorn, but may have to endure our pity or patronization instead. Women work for the same sorts of reasons: to have regular contact with other adults, and to feel like responsible, respectable adults.

 

We are very specific in our definition of “self-supporting.”  It involves being paid money for providing services or making goods.  Usually, it involves going outside the home, acquiring a boss, and doing what the boss tells us. Any job that doesn’t include all these elements is at least suspect.  And any work, no matter how arduous, that doesn’t involve making money simply isn’t a job at all. 

 

As a divorce lawyer, ten years ago, I used to see a fair number of women clients whose husbands had forbidden them to seek employment outside the home.   When they got to my office, it was generally because life had now switched the rules on them.  Either their husbands had abandoned them, or they had left their husbands (often impelled by several years of physical abuse.)  With luck, their husbands would be affluent enough and the court generous enough to allow them a few years of “rehabilitative maintenance” (as if having been a homemaker were a crippling injury) during which they could acquire some job skills.  That was Transitional Stage One.

 

Now, apparently, we are in Transitional Stage Two.  It began with the fall of the Public Assistance system into disrepute.  When the system began in the 1930s, under the New Deal, it was a way to support mothers whose husbands had abandoned them or (more often) died, so that they could  stay at home and raise their children in dignity.  These deserving widows were not expected to enter the labor force, partly because their job at home was deemed more important and partly because, like Social Security retirees, they were less of a burden on a depressed economy if they could be kept out of the already overcrowded work force. 

 

But over the succeeding twenty years, a larger proportion of Public Assistance recipients was divorced or even never-married, rather than widowed.  A larger proportion was non-white.  And the labor force was no longer trying to keep people out; on the contrary, it was expanding wildly and eager to take new workers in. So the myth of the welfare mother was born.  Her work at home was not worth public subsidy, if only because (legend had it) she never did any.  Her housekeeping was slovenly, her children ran wild, and she spent her money on booze and fancy clothes and her time on conceiving more children so as to collect more benefits. She was being paid to do nothing and to raise another generation of do-nothings to absorb public money in their turn.

 

The myth of the Welfare Mother was supplemented by the Myth of the Alimony Drone (who collects enormous sums of her ex-husband’s hard-earned money for nothing other than a few years of marital bliss, and does nothing with her time but sit around at poolside and seduce the yard-man), and by the Myth of the Lazy Housewife, who sleeps until noon every day and then spends her afternoons eating chocolates and watching soap operas until the kids (if she has any) come home from school, or her husband comes home from work.  Her house, of course, is filthy, and her children totally undisciplined and unsupervised.

 

I don’t know any women who believe the Lazy Housewife myth (except, in a few cases, about their daughters-in-law.) I don’t know anybody on alimony who believes the Alimony Drone myth.  I don’t know any woman who has ever been on Public Aid who believes the Welfare Mother myth (except, sometimes, about welfare recipients of another race.) But I know very few men who don’t (at some level) believe all of them. They will make exceptions for the women they know and are not currently angry at, rather like Archie Bunker and his Black neighbors.  But even the most well-intentioned man will unthinkingly use expressions like “playing housewife” and “Susie Homemaker.” And I would  certainly never trust any man–even that rapidly decreasing number who have encouraged their wives to stay home with the children–not to invoke the ugly spectre of the Lazy Housewife when his marriage breaks up.

 

In fact, in the last five years of my practice of divorce law, I think I have seen a total of one wife of an American-born man who was forbidden to take a job outside the home during the marriage. (Immigrant men still operate by older standards.) I have long since lost count of the number of women I have represented whose husbands demanded that they take jobs, or who punished them really vindictively for quitting (for even the best possible cause) or being fired or laid off or having to quit for reasons of health or pregnancy. Often, the wife’s unemployment was one of the factors precipitating abuse or divorce.

 

Judges, even the most compassionate, now tend to assume that both parties in a divorce will be working full-time.  They award alimony only for short periods, in small amounts, except to women who are really physically incapable of working.  On one hand this means an employed wife is in no danger of losing custody of her children because of her vocational duties. But on the other hand, it means that the stay-at-home mother will get little or no credit from the court for her choice, and no compensation for its economic consequences.

 

Some full-time homemakers apparently blame Betty Friedan and the feminist movement for this state of affairs.  It is certainly true that one of the basic premises of Friedan’s ground-breaking book The Feminine Mystique is that most of the time,  most full-time middle class suburban homemakers do not actually have enough work to do to constitute a full-time job. The same could be said of a good many government and even corporate employees, of course. It is not, in and of itself, sufficient reason to persecute the underemployed. Friedan was  probably not  saying that it was. Certainly she was writing to an audience of middle-class women with commodious housing, lots of electrical housekeeping appliances and very few children. As a result,  she grossly underestimated how much time it takes a working-class woman to care for an under-equipped and under-sized home and a large brood of children. But the women’s movement in general has been sympathetic to the situation of the full-time homemaker.  There is even a small but vocal segment of the movement which advocates the payment of wages for the work women do in managing their own households and rearing their own children.

 

Most of us, of course, including most stay-at-home mothers, find that idea mind-boggling. At heart even the most pro-domestic-woman of us believes that, while the work involved in raising one’s own children and managing one’s own household may be crucially important and meaningful, it is still not the kind of work that should be paid for.  We have bought into the paradoxical fundamental American idea that certain kinds of work can be essential without being important. They should be done either by people who are not needed as primary wage-earners, or (if done by a primary wage-earner) around the edges and during the breaks in her “real” job. We even have trouble with the idea of providing decent wages and working conditions for those whose paid work consists of taking care of other people’s homes and children.

 

Even those feminists who support wages for housework probably feel pretty much the way most other feminists do, the way I do about full-time homemaking.  We honor the women who have chosen this way of life. We will defend to our last breath their  right  to make this choice.  But there is no way on earth we would advise our own daughters to do the same.   The woman who makes this choice is choosing dependency. Worse still, she is choosing to depend on something increasingly undependable–the willingness  and ability of a man to  support an entire household single-handedly. She cannot even be certain that the man who encourages her to make this choice will continue to be willing or able to pay for it.  She can be quite sure that, even if he does, she will find her self-respect severely undermined by the patronization or scorn of most of the other people she encounters.

 

Earlier, this essay referred to Transitional Stages One and Two.  What are we transiting to? I suspect the next stage will be the near-equalization of the average male and female wage (mainly through the elimination of highly-paid male-dominated jobs in heavy industry.) This will at least end the current double bind many women are in, which encourages a woman to be the family member most likely to take time out of the paid workforce if any member must do so, because her wages will be a smaller loss to the family economy–and then punishes her for doing so by further diminishing her earning capacity and increasing her burdens in the home.

 

It may be too utopian to envision, as the step after that, men becoming as likely as women to leave the labor force to care for their young children. It is certainly utopian, at this point, to hope that employers will be willing to provide sufficiently decent wages and benefits to part-time workers that both parents can spend some waking hours with their families and still support them decently.  At that point it will actually be possible for both parents to care for their children, while neither is wholly dependent on the other, nor on the state.  Surely that is the family we should be striving to form.

 

Red Emma