Anne Russell is a personal friend of mine. She has recently published an opinion piece where she has admitted being confused and maddened by how stridently LBGT people argue for equal recognition of gay marriage, an institution she believes everybody would be better off without. I found her case to be deeply unconvincing, and here is my piece in response.
Anne Russell has recently argued that gay people, and others who don’t fall in the mainstream of
heterosexual monogamy, shouldn’t feel compelled to campaign for gay
marriage, and that we are all better off without the institution,
gay, straight or otherwise. There are serious problems with the case
she makes: a number of simple matters of fact on which she is
mistaken which undermines many of the points she is trying to make,
and, more importantly, it is very unclear how the various things she
says are supposed to come together. It is unclear in the extreme why
anything about the sexual orientation of Russell or her intended
audience is supposed to matter if the point is that marriage in its
own right is undesirable. That whole issue is simply a monstrous red
herring, one with very serious consequences discussed later in the
piece.
First-off, there
are a number of claims Russell makes with great confidence but that nobody should believe. She claims that most New Zealanders have come
to acknowledge that life-long monogamy is neither practical nor
desirable. For Russell’s point to go through, she needs the
latter, more striking claim. And there is simply no evidence
for that. While the marriage rate is steadily decreasing (and about a
third of marriages end before the 25th anniversary, more
than half of those before 13 years), that doesn’t mean people are
giving up on long-term monogamy. It is estimated that around two in
five people in long-term partnerships are so de facto, without
legally formalising their relationship. Pointedly, about a third of
all marriages being entered into today have at least one of the
couple be a divorcee. If anybody would be clear on why long-term
monogamy might be a bad idea, it would be these people, yet there is
one divorcee willing to give the institution another go for every
two wide-eyed newcomers to the altar (all of these figures are from
Statistics NZ). This is not a decisive case against Russell’s point, but it is
far stronger than the case she can make for it. We must conclude that
her claim that marriage is now largely seen as undesirable is pure
obiter dictum on her part, and she doesn’t have the standing
to make it.
She goes on to say
that marriage is soiled by its history as a capitalist institution
which began in order to trade women as property, and should be
abandoned accordingly. This is false in every detail. Marriage and
its analogues (long-term monogamous relationships which are the
foundations of households) exist throughout all of human history,
whereas capitalism began at the earliest in late 18th
century Britain. Nor does marriage depend on private property.
Russell needn’t have looked far for an example, since traditional
Māori society held property in common but had, for the most part,
marriages like described above. Marriage doesn’t treat spouses as
property in any strict sense, and never has: marriage partners have
never been bought on the open market, nor does one resell them, nor
are they a fungible commodity – that is, one spouse cannot be
replaced by another the way you would pints of milk. (There have been societies where you
buy concubines, but in I don't know of nor have succeeded in finding
any where this trade in domestic sex slaves was done to the exclusion
of marriage between people of the same social status, which is what
is at issue).
What
happens instead is that a marriage changes a person from belonging to
one household to belonging to another (or, in more recent times where
people don’t live with their family till they marry, officially
recognises such a move). This has often historically lead to some
fiercely restrictive circumstances for women given that men were the
lords of the household and had considerable power in that role, often
to the great harm of the women. But that relationship isn’t an
ownership
relationship. Russell has made the mistake of thinking that all such
transactions are property transactions, and has accordingly missed
the most deep-seated and important aspects of the culture she is
critiquing. Reasons of space stop me from giving similar
attention to other claims Russell makes, but the errors discussed
here critically undermines her case as a whole. In conclusion, there
might be serious reasons to question the institution, but not the
ones she gives.
The purpose of Russell’s piece seems to me muddled in the extreme,
something exacerbated by her later acknowledgement that if she were
to vote on the issue she would do so in support of gay marriage. If
the point was to have us reconsider the institution, she has failed –
her case is misinformed and ill-conceived, and she doesn’t seem to herself understand marriage or its place in wider society. And we
need to carefully consider the role marriage plays to do justice to
the issue. Russell points out that many of the benefits attached to
marriage –commitment, children, family ties – are not its
exclusive province. But that goes both ways: when she complains that
marriage also engenders jealousy, dissatisfaction, and prompts
infidelity, we shouldn't confusedly identify them with marriage
either. In both cases what Russell is talking about is simply the
consequence of long-term intimate relations people have – whatever
their sexuality, whatever the institutions in the background.
What is at stake
is LBGT people's ability to at all participate in our way of life
(one, thankfully, which New Zealand secures through its legislation
on same-sex civil unions and de facto relationships). That is
why Russell's endorsement of the pernicious nonsense that gay people
shouldn't try to be too much like straight couples is misguided and
can only be harmful. LBGT people also have commitments, family ties,
and the prosaic concerns of hearth and home. The fight for gay
marriage is a fight in order to not close to these people the avenues
our culture allows for the maintenance of their home affairs – if
you're LBGT, not allowing gay marriage is to undermine your ability
to look after you and yours. For that reason Russell's comments show
a remarkable lack of sensitivity for other people's struggles, and
can only make mischief. Accordingly, she should instead be content to
live and let live.
