Gay Marriage: A Basic Right! A Just Demand!The struggle for gay rights should be supported by anyone opposed to oppression and discrimination. But these changes are seen by the powers-that-be as challenges to the social fabric that keeps traditional, oppressive social relations in place.
It is in the context of these, and other great stresses and strains on the social fabric of U.S. society, that Christian fascists, over a long period of time and with the support and backing of powerful forces in the ruling class, have become embedded in the highest levels of government and the command structure of the military. They have built up a social base of people who are literally afraid to think, and who are being trained not to think. And these forces are not going to disappear or turn less aggressive. These Christian fascists have emerged as a “legitimate” and powerful stream in society, and seek to impose traditional, Biblical morality and values on the whole of society—and to cohere it on that basis. Within that, the buttressing of the patriarchy—of women’s subordination to men—is foundational. It is a way of strictly ordering society, keeping women degraded and oppressed in a thousand ways. It is a way of keeping women and the family under the control of men. It enlists men in enforcing this oppression and inculcates into their thinking that their “rightful role” is the “head of the family,” so that they act as the “bourgeois” within the home. And these Christian fascists preach that this is all literally the word of god.
In this context, allowing gays and lesbians to marry is viewed by these reactionary forces as intolerable. It opens the door for people to step outside these narrow absolutist bounds. And when they refuse to remain in that narrow and rigid framework, when people question the way things are, when they begin to see marriage as a man-made institution and not a mandate from god—then this undermines and threatens the patriarchy—and the whole set-up.
And, while it is not fundamentally driving their aggressive attacks on the gay marriage laws, these Christian fascist forces also see the backwardness and confusion about homosexuality among significant sections of the population—like Blacks and Latinos—as something they can seize upon and manipulate to draw these sections of the people, people who are themselves oppressed, into the persecution and demonization of gays, and more generally into conservative and reactionary politics.
The fact that Prop 8 was even allowed on the ballot, and that the Obama campaign maintained essentially a shameful silence on it, is an indication of how much space even “mainstream” ruling class forces are giving to these Christian fascists. While they oppose elements of the agenda of the Christian fascists, these other ruling class forces also have a lot in common with them (see the sidebar, Obama, the System, and Proposition 8). They too fear society coming apart—and fear that disrupting the male dominated social order will open the door for a more fundamental disruption to their whole set up. They too see religion—and the strengthening of the traditional family and male right—as an important glue in cohering society.
• • •
As long as human society has been divided into exploiting and exploited classes, the male-dominated family has been a political, social, and economic unit of exploitive systems. Patriarchy—male domination—and the thinking that goes along with it, keeps the female half of humanity subjugated, and all of humanity chained to backward thinking and relationships. And while same-sex relationships, and their legitimization through marriage do not fundamentally challenge or overthrow this setup, this has been viewed by the ruling classes as an unacceptable “challenge” to the traditional, time-tested patriarchal family.
http://revcom.us/a/148/gay_marriage-en.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
