Posted on 03/31/2003 8:41:45 AM PST by longtermmemmory
WEIGHING THE PROS & CONS OF MARRIAGE: CON: Shift focus to caretakers, dependents Gayle White - Staff Saturday, March 29, 2003
Q: Does marriage have a future?
A: We have to get to the definition of marriage before I can answer that question. Certainly love relationships between adults and reproductive units have a future. Whether marriage as a privileged legal connection has a future, that's a different question.
Q: Please expound on what you mean about love relationships and reproductive units.
A: People need intimacy and connection. Children need to be cared for. Dependency is a reality, whether it's dependency of the young, the elderly or the ill. That is addressed in the context of families. I argue strongly that we need families and we should subsidize families.
Q: How would you go about shifting the focus away from traditional heterosexual marriages?
A: One approach is to broaden the category of marriage itself to include more units. A second way --- the way I would proceed --- is to just not privilege marriage per se, but rather to focus on another social unit, which I think is more deserving of social support --- the caretaker-dependent unit. I would take all the benefits we now attach to marriage and attach them to the caretaker-dependent unit.
Q: This would mean a person could be involved in multiple relationships, right?
A: Certainly you could have multiple caretakers. These relationships would be independent of what we now think of as family connections. A network of people taking care of someone with AIDS could be considered a caretaker-dependent unit. It would also encompass what we now look at in traditional families as the mother-child relationship, or if we have an adult child who is taking care of an elderly parent, that's a caretaker-dependent relationship. It would be the function of caretaking that is worthy of subsidy, not the formal relationship of marriage.
Q: In emphasizing the relationship between mother and child, isn't there a danger of diminishing the importance of fathers?
A: I think one of the problems with the way we structure our whole discussion about dependency and families is that fathers are sort of frozen in the role of economic provider. When we think about fathers, we think about economic support. It's difficult for men to act as caretakers and nurturers because of what society expects of them and the way our institutions are structured. One of the things an emphasis on caretaking would do, I think, is to free men to do more of the caretaking work.
Q: You said you see difficulties in the focus on the legal relationship between husband and wife. What are those?
A: In the United States, our social goods are delivered through the institution of marriage or the institution of the workplace --- our financial support in old age, our health insurance. We have these mediating institutions that mean you have to participate in marriage or the workplace to receive benefits that are considered to be the obligation of the state in other Western democracies.
Marriage becomes our way of addressing child poverty, illness, old age and these dependency issues. When you compare the situation in the United States with other countries such as Germany, Australia, Canada and Great Britain, you see we have much higher rates of child poverty and we have many people not covered by medical insurance. There are failures in the ways we have organized to bring these social goods to people.
Q: What about sex? Isn't one purpose of state-recognized marriage to have some standards of sexual practice?
A: Quite often an argument you hear for marriage is that it civilizes male sexuality. . . . I happen to believe men need intimate connections and men care about children. . . .
The other thing about sex is that as long as we do have this institution of marriage in the United States which is supposed to do all the work we assign to marriage, then the state is going to be very interested in who's having sex with whom and under what circumstances. If marriage isn't our focus, it takes away the state's interest in regulating sexual relations between consenting adults.
Q: But wouldn't that open the door to promiscuity and polygamy? Or does that matter?
A: Those things are things that happen in spite of all the rules. It seems to me that the appropriate role of law is not to prevent the things that are going to happen anyway, but to figure out the things we want our families to be doing and support that.
Q: You've written that the institution of marriage diminishes women's ability to market two natural commodities --- sex and reproduction --- through prostitution and surrogate motherhood, for example.
A: The way we view it now, sexuality and reproduction are not supposed to be part of the marketplace. They're supposed to be things that happen in privacy out of love. Why is it that things women have historically had more in their control are things we don't commodify when we commodify everything else?
Q: Is there a way to prevent exploitation of women while also allowing them to market their sexuality and reproductive capability?
A: I think women are perfectly capable of bargaining and negotiating and protecting themselves. We do it all the time. We now recognize there can be premarital agreements, where economic consequences of marriage can be altered through premarital agreement. We now have no-fault divorce. It means we rely on women, appropriately, to be able to protect their own interests, at least in the context of marriage. If they can do it there, they can do it elsewhere outside the context of marriage. We expect women to be adult, capable people, just like men.
Q: One of the issues that keeps coming up around marriage these days is homosexual relationships. Should same-sex couples be excluded from marriage?
A: I think the law should stop at the doors of the church. I think the church should stop at the doors of the statehouse. . . . I do not think any church or denomination should be compelled to recognize any relationship they deem inappropriate. But when we're talking about the state, that's a very different thing. We have, at least ideally, a secular state that does not privilege any views over others. . . . It seems to me the state has to have good reason for treating some sexual affiliates differently from other sexual affiliates. I haven't seen yet a good argument for making a distinction between heterosexual and homosexual persons.
Q: What television shows did you watch when you were growing up?
A: Donna Reed, I saw. I saw "Father Knows Best."
Q: What did you think of them?
A: Just like everyone else, I thought they represented a realizable ideal. I think one of the things that happens when you get older and more experienced is that you realize the ideal may not be realizable and may not be preferable.
Q: Are you married?
A: No.
Q: Have you ever been?
A: Yes, and I have four children and two grandchildren.
Q: Were you divorced or widowed, and how long were you married?
A: I think that's an inappropriate question. My opinion has nothing to do with my personal situation.
Q: What do you want for your children and grandchildren in their relationships?
A: I would expect my children would be loving and caring people, that they would be generous and they would consider their responsibility not only to individuals with whom they're intimately connected but also to the larger society, that they would get a great deal of satisfaction out of living a life that's built around love and care for others.
I would hope they would all have lots of children and make me a grandmother many times over. . . . Caring for the next generation is one of the noblest things people can do.
Martha Albertson Fineman is professor of feminist jurisprudence at Cornell University and an authority on family law. She describes her focus as "the legal regulation of intimacy."
Our tax dollars are paying for these nutcases to damage our families and hurt our children's futures. The really scarry thing is this is common thinking in the leftist circles. Female studies departmens reek of this idiocy and its spreading.
Awww, how romantic....
Words fail me. Would somebody please commodify this person and drop her off a bridge or something?
A: I think that's an inappropriate question. My opinion has nothing to do with my personal situation.
I just love blanket statements like this. I guess this person just happened to miss all those studies on cognitive development.
I'll bet.
There is a natural tendency for people to want to normalize society, or at least their own little corner of it, to support and validate people like themselves. Birds of a feather, etc. That's why the bohemians have always tended to hang with other bohemians, drinkers with drinkers, druggies with other druggies, libertarians with ... but I repeat myself.:)
Western culture has assumed the centrality of the family and has normalized institutions around that structure. Within that broad context, we have also been astonishingly tolerant (at least in recent generations, and very often in earlier periods as well) of other subcultures as long as they don't violate the canons of modesty. What is happening now is that the cultural left values individual autonomy, and especially female autonomy, above all. Families require compromise and sacrifice, which is why the family is resented and opposed by the cultural left. The children, of course, are the ones most damaged by this, because intact families are still the best way to raise kids.
It is stunning that someone who deals with the law should make this statment. There are any number of ways that a "caretaking" relationship can be subsidized by the government, regardless of the familial relationship. What she proposes is some sort of anarchic money-fest, with people claiming exemptions, credits, or (heaven help me) refunds if they bring their neighbor a bowl of chicken soup when they are ill.
Indeed, most of her opinions here seem to be over-the-top. She would like to codify her personal beliefs in order to validate them. With respect to subsidizing relationships, I'd be more likely to support their elimination than their expansion.
An authority? Ho boy! She ain't got no common sense about it. This reminds my of deconstrutionist art that had been big for a few recent decades -- a room fill of trash in one famous exhibit. That wasn't art and this ain't LAW!
Her situation has everything to do with her opinion as it does with everyone else.
There are some people so behighted as to forget the universe is not "idiot-centric."
I guess you would have to read the AJC to find out.
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