Rachel’s Musings

Here is a copy of the letter I sent to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Dianne Feinstein in response to their laudable but short-sighted support of same-sex marriage. (I added the link to this post…)

Thank you for supporting the right of everybody to get married. While I agree that everybody – including people in the LGBT community – should have this right, I strongly object to the claim that this creates equality for all since the government uses marital status as a way to distribute rights and privileges. This creates a bright red dividing line between the married and the unmarried. In today’s society, this leaves out a large amount of people; people who either by choice or circumstance are living in family arrangements other than marriage, including many singles. Due to the demographic changes over the last few decades, marriage is no longer an appropriate way of deciding who gets governmental support. For example, why should a low income mother be forced to pay for the birth of her daughter if she is unmarried, but the state of Michigan waves this fee if she gets married? She and the father are in a committed relationship whether they are married or not. She needs financial assistance whether she is married or not. Using marital status in instances like this – and there are lots of other examples that the Alternatives to Marriage Project (AtMP) has documented – creates unfairness and unequal treatment. I would be very surprised if you would want to support policies like this. Yet, your support of expanding the 1138 rights & privileges that married folks get to the LGBT community does just that: It continues the unequal treatment of married and unmarried. As your constituent and a member of AtMP’s board, I urge you to support policies that value all families, not just married families.

If I hear anything back, I’ll post it though I expect only to put a bug in some staffer’s head that maybe, maybe we can build on eventually.

As I’ve mentioned before, I came out as a single by choice in my new years newsletter to friends and family. I am getting mostly positive reactions, including from my parents. Still, it is interesting that the blatant singlism is coming from Germany. And there I had thought that Europeans are more progressive (I am still hoping this is a result of the unrepresentative sample, though…). Although I never wrote that I’d be shunning men, period, that seems to be the message that gets across. I have several male friends, so how they’d fit into this black-and-white picture I never painted is beyond me but apparently the only legitimate way of relating to a man for a woman is to be sexually involved, what is commonly called a “relationship.” And why would I want to commit myself to being eternally single (read always alone), especially since I am so successful professionally? Uhm, I am simply not choosing one more man than a married woman. Would this person freak out the same way if I had written that I was getting married? After all, I’d be committing myself to not be in a “relationship” with a gazillion minus one guys. Now I am simply including this one guy in the gazillion… (I am eternally grateful to whoever came up with the definition of atheists as rejecting just one more god than theists. It is coming so handy in clarifying my thinking on choosing to be single). Apparently, making that point in my original newsletter didn’t get across… Yet another reminder how much consciousness raising there remains to be done.

Cheryl Wetzstein wrote a passionate piece over at the Washington Post arguing that the Obama administration better keep funding marriage programs. This would be a great article to take apart in a philosophy class! I think Wetzstein hits just about every logical fallacy there is…

“I’m a Democrat,” [Patty Howell, vice president of media relations for the California Healthy Marriages Coalition (CHMC)] began, “so I know that marriage education and relationship-skills training totally aligns with Democrats’ values and Democrats’ social agenda.”

Okay… Just because you are a Democrat, your positions don’t necessarily represent the Democratic party. Plus, simply claiming that something is true doesn’t make it so. Where’s the evidence?

Howell isn’t exactly objective about assessing this either. Her organization gets the largest grant under the program…

Substance abuse, poverty, poor school performance, crime and unwed pregnancy – “all of these are costly problems to fix when they’ve happened,” said Ms. Howell. “But if we can empower couples through marriage education and relationship-skills training, we give them the capacity to prevent these problems.”

Great! That’s a testable hypothesis: Empowered, married couples have no substance abuse, poverty, poor school performance, crime and unwed pregnancy problems. Well, the unwed pregnancy prevention is a no-brainer: By definition a married woman cannot be an unwed mother… What about the other stuff? Fortunately, CHMC has done some research and the results are promising:

“Couples have more satisfaction in their relationships, more confidence in the stability of their relationships, and much better feelings about their partners,” said Ms. Howell. Moreover, those results are even stronger six months later.

That’s nice! But what about the poverty prevention and all these other problems that marriage are supposed to solve? They’re studying the wrong dependent variable: If you’re trying to prevent poverty, for example, measuring the level of happiness isn’t going to tell you diddly squat about poverty prevention. Even people in poverty can be happy.

The marriage promoters don’t tell us, though, that there is already plenty of research that shows that marriage promotion does not address any of these problems. There are much better, more effective solutions out there and the Obama administration is right to reassess where they are spending our money. The Alternatives to Marriage Project’s aptly named report “Let Them Eat Wedding Rings” summarizes the research.

Amongst many studies is a 2006 study from

the National Center for Children in Poverty reviewed Census data on low-income families, defined as those earning up to twice the federal poverty level (for example, earning up to $40,000/year for a family of four). They found that 51% of low-income children live with an unmarried parent, while 49% live with married parents. Having married parents appears to have almost no impact on whether a child grows up in a household that can make ends meet.

In an international comparison AtMP finds that

the four countries with some of the lowest child poverty rates in Europe (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and France) all have unmarried birth rates far higher than the United States’. Yet Sweden’s child poverty rate is seven times lower than the rate in the U.S., despite the fact that the majority of babies there are born to unmarried parents.

AtMP is not the only organization that has looked at the research and concluded that marriage promotion is not an effective way to address the problems of poverty and substance abuse. If we stop using marriage as a panacea, we can develop programs that actually do address these issues.

A 4-year old gem, an article in Conscience magazine, provides central arguments against marriage – same-sex or different sex. Mary E. Hunt, a Catholic feminist theologian, eloquently argues in “A Marriage Proposal” for moving beyond the focus on marriage to focusing on building a just society.

Some of her points that especially resonated with me:

In fact, what seems to be a huge step forward for lesbian and gay people, will, when achieved, extend the reach of state control over relationships. It will privilege those who are coupled over those who are single or otherwise connected. It will shore up the nuclear family model despite the fact that people live in many other relational constellations. However, if same-sex marriage is prohibited, as the 11 state referenda lost in the last election year would have it, a significant percentage of the population will continue to lose out on the 1,138 federal rights that marriage conveys. This is a classic “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
[...]
Progressive people, and especially progressive religious people, must do better if relational justice for all—and not just more rights for a few—is to result. [...] By my lights, [my partner, my daughter, and I] are simply three people who deserve all of the rights of citizenship, but no more than my single cousin, my widowed neighbor or my friends who belong to religious congregations. Connecting rights to marriage is, in my view, an outmoded approach to the common good.
[...]
It is simply ethically intuitive to extend such privileges to same-sex couples who, by marrying, take on the various responsibilities that heterosexual couples claim justify their privilege. But what remains to be explained is why being coupled, especially without children, should result in any economic advantage. Rather, it seems fair that everyone should be able to designate survivors for purposes of inheritance, or no one should; everyone ought to be able to choose with whom they will jointly file taxes, or no one should.

Hunt argues that there are three problems with marriage that show the obvious that “the laws are written to favor a certain two-by-two lifestyle that is simply a fiction” and make marriage an undesirable long-term justice goal:

1. “[M]arriage is at best a temporary state of affairs.”
2. Marriage perpetuates “the fiction that happiness and relational goodness only come in matched pairs,” a model that does not suit everybody.
3. Marriage has created a strange alliance between religion and state where religious institutions officiate on state business.

Hunt stresses that she supports same-sex marriage – at one point, arguing that everybody should have the right to be wrong. However, she ends her article with a call to the current leaders of religious traditions “to put a wholesale reexamination of marriage on the agenda, leaving aside the same-sex distraction in order to think anew about how we envision a just society.”

Obama’s campaign was all about change. Presumably his presidency will be about this as well, if his first few days in office are an indication, there certainly will be quite a few things changing, for the better. But is this change fundamental enough? I suspect not. The financial crisis and the specter of climate change are clear reminders that our way of life is not sustainable. There is a limit to growth no matter what economists are trying to make us believe. We need to rethink our fundamental assumptions instead of calling on each other to defend our way of life. We cannot defend our way of life – against what would we defend it anyway? Reality?

Here are some changes we need to reverse our march toward doomsday:

• Build an economy on the notion of enough, rather than more: We need to abandon the idea that more is better because we’re suffocating in the trash.
• Replace the focus on coupling with rebuilding community ties: The nuclear family has choked out other ties that are important for a fulfilling and meaningful life. Instead of putting all of our eggs into the basket of one other person, we need to (re)learn to connect deeply and intimately with many people.
• Create jobs that are life-affirming rather than mind-numbing: Most jobs address small, often rather irrelevant, parts of the big corporate machine. We could harness the intelligence wasted on these jobs to address the problems we need to confront.
• Face the reality that capitalism is undermining democracy: If the most powerful institutions in our society are run as kingdoms, we cannot expect democracy to flourish.
• Stop ignoring the problem of overpopulation: There are too many people on this planet to live comfortably. The current population size is not sustainable – another example where more is not better. Addressing this issue will be painful and extremely difficult ethically. The longer we wait, though, the worse it is going to get.

I am sure there’s much, much more that needs fundamental change. Obama will not bring this about. He can’t really. He is a politician after all. But we can. All of us can start looking – really looking – at our lives and decide what works and what doesn’t, what is sustainable and what isn’t. And then we can start to make changes, slowly but surely. Will it matter? Maybe. However, rather than pondering our impact (or lack thereof), we could simply decide to act as if our actions matter. If enough of us make that decision, things will change.

Obama and his administration can make these changes easier by enacting things like universal health care, mandatory sick leave, and even by targeting the economic stimulus toward project that build sustainability. These are important foundational blocks onto which we can build real change.

Sustainability must be in the air. Here’s a great post from the Regressive Antidote that touches on similar themes that I covered here.

Did you hear that President Barack Hussein Obama mentioned the unbelievers in his inauguration speech? He said:

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

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