Fear of Gay Marriage

[IndianaGreen]

An article by Peter Gabel from February 2005 - quite timely today.

Fear of Gay Marriage

by Peter Gabel

It’s not who ya love
It’s do ya love.
—Michael Franti, Spearhead

“Every minute they continue, those ceremonies are destroying my relationship with my wife.” These words, spoken by one of the men who filed suit to stop San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom from issuing marriage licenses to gays and lesbians earlier this year, provide great insight into the psychodynamics underlying the 2004 presidential election. For moral values like the belief in the sanctity of traditional marriage “between one man and one woman” are not abstract beliefs that rattle around in one’s head; they are rather powerfully rooted in the desire for human connection, and in the sense-memories that we all have of how we have previously lived out this connection in our sensual lives. When a plaintiff watching gays and lesbians get married on television claims that they are destroying his relationship with his wife, he is telling a truth about his experience—namely, that what he is watching makes him feel he is losing a sense of being connected to another person, that he is hemorrhaging, that he believes that the integrity of his own social existence is somehow being threatened and compromised.

Let me put my own moral values on the table: I think he’s crazy. He is living in fear that the blessing of erotic love between two persons other than himself can destroy the sense-memory that he has of the possibility of this erotic love for himself. But seen in a wider social context, his craziness may be eminently sane. For if the world around him is profoundly alienated; if he is living in a social environment characterized by mutual distance, detachment, and disconnection; if he is enveloped by deadening routines at work and media images at home that seem to be artificial (commercials), or relentlessly self-mocking (sitcoms), or hostile (MTV), or devoid of meaning (the interchangeable void of “the news”), then he rightly clings to what sense-memories he does have of actually being with someone, of not being alone.

This is not to say he actually has this experience in a complete way with his actual wife. If he did, it is very unlikely, and perhaps inconceivable, that he would want to deny this experience to someone else. It is rather that erotic expression as the realization of his longing for social connection is encoded in his memory from early infancy as the sensual holding that he experienced with a mothering one, and that this memory has been elaborated in later years through the whole of his relationship with women, including his wife. The later experience, perhaps supported by the fellow-feeling of the church group and by the positive erotic charge emitted by the evangelical preacher, sustains and is fused with the earlier enfolding experience, the initial laying down of heterosexual safety. In an alienated world in which people feel mainly alone and constantly threatened with an even more devastating isolation, they understandably cling to whatever sense-memories of erotic connection they have, and they guard these memories themselves against the threat of loss that surrounds them.

Indeed one of the problems with heterosexual marriage as an institution is precisely that it sacralizes the separation of the erotic couple from the wider community—it channels the flow of deeply bonding social energy into one single path and thus may contribute to blocking that flow outward toward those whom we encounter everywhere else around us. This isn’t to say that people should not hold public ceremonies to affirm their love for one another before and within the whole community. It’s rather to say that the embrace of church/state-sponsored marriage to do so is embracing a social institution whose ceremony of vows, sealed with a kiss, does in fact carry with it an erotic history that has separated the couple from the wider community. In Christopher Lasch’s famous phrase, the family becomes a “haven in a heartless world,” but the world is heartless in part because of the separation of loving energy from it and the pooling up of that energy within the haven itself. In such circumstances, the haven cannot really be a haven any more than one can really chew on an impacted tooth. The erotic isolation of the family may be a cause of domestic violence, but it remains rational for people to cling to it for dear life if the alternative is the panic of a more devastating isolation.

http://files.tikkun.org/current/article.php/20081106182532821

[Withywindle]

1. That's a really interesting and insightful essay. Thanks for posting it.

I admit, I DO NOT UNDERSTAND homophobia at all on an emotional level. I do not understand people who have an actual fear or revulsion of the loving relationships of other people. It makes no sense to me on a gut level as well as on an intellectual one, and it scares me that some people are so vehemently driven by an impulse I feel no kinship with whatsoever.

But I like what this essay has to say about how erotic energy is really about a lot more than sex. It has something to do with Obama's success, I think - he's able to make love of community into a passionate, real thing for many people, not a vague platitude.

Can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it's somehow connected to Lakoff's "nurturing" vs "authoritarian" parenting models, and Wilhelm Reich's writings on how denigration and sublimation and very strict control of erotic impulses is vital to the promulgation of fascism.

I'm not a good, generous New Age Buddhist like Tikkun's readership, though - I really only care about understanding homophobes to figure out how to better defeat them for good. :)

[grantcart]

2. When the supreme court gave equal rights to all Californians my wife

contacted a divorce attorney the next day. I responded and the litigation continued.

We were scheduled for court on November 6th but as the results became clear we reconciled and our marriage was saved.

[bluedawg12]

3. This is a whole new line of thought for me

I haven't quite seen it this way before. Cool.

The only thing that popped in my mind was the idea that when he speaks of erotic love, in that context, I heard it, or thought of it, more as nurturing love.

Thanks for posting this.

[xchrom]

4. this is not far off -- but still distinct --

from the eighteenth century view of gay thinkers that same sex love was superior to heterosexual relationships.

[bluedawg12]

5. This is his punch line - that we are to heal the fear of love.

It seems like he is not saying it's superior, he's just explaining the fear of marriage equality.


>>And it is the radiation of this energy outward from its own center, from our own center, that will influence candidates, legislators, judges, the political parties. For these public actors, as for the evangelicals who think that their own social well-being requires the banning of others’ social well-being, it is the radiance of confident love turned outward that will eventually heal the fear of love.<<

I'm not sure how to radiate energy out from my center, though.

[RetiredTrotskyite]

6. Beautiful Essay

I think these people with fear of, and revulsion towards, same-sex marriages are mentally ill. Seriously.

However the comments on the sacralisation of the erotic is beautiful. This is the way it is with my spouse and me: it is far, far, more than just sex. And yes, if the man in San Francisco had had a full, equal sharing with his wife of the erotic/emotional bond, he might well not wish to deny the chance for that bonding to anyone.

Homophobes are just sad, sad people.

[bluedawg12]

7. About their mental outlook, seems like many fundy's have a siege mentality

It is them against the world.

They see their Chruch and family as the fortress that protects them from the world they find threatening, so they have their Church group, their families and many await the "end of the world" with real joy, as if finally they will be rid of the "secular non-believers" that have ruined this real world and they hope for a utopian escape to some imagined world.

Then, along comes gay marriage equality rights and they somehow extrapolate backwards and see it as a symbolic threat to their own homes. This idea is of course fed and magnified by wedge politics and some go a step further,rather than seeing it as a symbolic threat they even being to imagine it as a real threat and get militant.

Nothing about the anti-gay rights movement is inviting of difference, it seems to be coercive and intolerant of diversity and seeks uniformity, those who don't conform are less tha human. It's a vicious circle of fear of social change and fueling those fears by those who have no spiritual message but rather myth, threats and judgementalism.

[Phredicles]

8. This is the about the only real attempt I've seen at explaining why the

religious right claims a need to "defend" marriage against some of the population who wish only to partake of it. And it's a very serious, thoughtful effort. But I still found much of it bordering on gibberish.

Mrs. Phredicles & I have been married for 20 years, and in all that time I've never seen the tiniest reason why our marriage needed to be "protected" against other people who want to be married to each other. I think it's time for the people who've been resisting the legality of gay marriage to grow the hell up. If they really don't like the idea of same sex marriage, they can always refrain from doing it.