A letter sent to the editor of the local paper.

[brooksmoses]

We shall see if they publish it.

Dear Editor:

Prop. 8 is a serious threat to marriage. Not just to those families whose marriages it will annul, but to all marriages.

Proponents of Prop. 8 are right: Marriage is at risk. They are wrong about why. Marriage is at risk because people consider it optional for living together and starting a family. Denying marriage to tens of thousands of couples will make this worse. Same-sex couples will have to consider marriage optional, because they have no choice. And, if they don't need a marriage to form a family, why would anyone else need one?

This is what Prop. 8 really says: "Marriage is optional; you don't need to have one."

Defend marriage; vote NO on Prop 8!

Sincerely,
Brooks Moses

Comments

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Great letter. I hope it changes some minds and gives words to some people who want to talk about it.

[kiya]

Ah, a true conservative position. ;)

[brooksmoses]

Indeed. And one for which I should give most of the credit to you, I suspect. :)

I hope it resonates with some political conservatives more than the "equality for all" slogan that most of the lawn signs have. It's a nice sentiment for people who already would vote against it, but it really isn't much of a slogan for changing people's minds.

[cobalt-00.livejournal.com]

I agree and don't agree - I think it's well-written and can provide food for thought, but likely won't sway the die hard Yes-ers. However, there are bound to be undecideds out there. Hopefully it will knock about in their brains for a bit. Good show!

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

::squint::

You have a twisty little brain.

[night-princess.livejournal.com]

I actually didn't see yours before I wrote mine. I think it's interesting that we both converged on the conclusion that Prop 8 will destroy traditional marriage rather than protect it.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

Fantastic letter. Go you!

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

...but isn't marriage optional? While I could see this as a convincing argument for some people, it also seems to imply that if you're not legally married, you shouldn't be living together, and you certainly shouldn't be allowed to start a family. That argument may be compelling for some people but for reasons that kind of alarm me.

(Also, I expect that many people who oppose gay marriage *do* think that gay people shouldn't be living together and starting families.)

[brooksmoses]

If this weren't a persuasive argument aimed specifically at undecided people to whom the "save marriage; vote yes on 8" claim has a strong pull, and squeezed into a 125-word limit, I would have been a lot more nuanced about it!

I definitely agree that marriage is optional -- but, IMO, the fact that marriage is not attractive to a growing number of couples who are in permanent living-together relationships is in part a social and governmental failing.

In my opinion, the point of marriage is to be a standard way for society and the legal system to recognize that two people are in a long-term life-entangling relationship with each other. If it's not attractive to people in that sort of relationship, then it's failing at its purpose, and should be changed to meet their needs.

I am, honestly, not sure where I fall on the argument that if you're not legally married, you shouldn't be starting a family. I believe there is some merit to it, although I wouldn't want to make it mandatory. Starting a family -- obtaining housing together, commingling possessions and finances, raising children -- involves all sorts of contracts between the people involved, although they are typically very implicit. The civil justice system is appropriately involved in contracts between people; its purpose is to sort them out when they go bad or when people disagree about their meaning. And thus, fundamentally, the government has a valid interest in having those contracts be clear and explicit. As do the people involved; clear contracts are good for avoiding unpleasant surprises of miscommunication. It's very much like living in someone's house (but quite more so); in general, it's a bad idea to do that if you don't have some sort of lease agreement with them -- and, while sometimes it's fine to have a verbal "I'll pay a third of the rent" and implicit understandings about telling people before that changes, most of the time you want that lease to be something written down with dollar amounts and expectations for giving notice.

I don't think the present form of legal marriage does an especially good job of meeting that need, but I think that's a failing that ought to be fixed, not evidence that it should be irrelevant. And I should also note that I would certainly consider a swath of non-marriage legal agreements about medical power-of-attorney and shared finances and wills and legal guardianships of the children and so forth to be equivalent to marriage for purposes of starting a family.

On the parenthetical comment -- I realize that many people do think that way; I was hoping to get across the idea that same-sex couples will be living together and starting families, regardless of what happens with marriage and regardless of what they think.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

I definitely don't want marriage to be considered a requirement for starting a family. Why? Because one of my ex-coworkers is a single parent (by choice and by sperm donation; no other parent involved at any point). She loves her son and he was doing just fine last I heard.

Personally, I'm not willing to do that much work, but I'm not going to tell her she can't.

[brooksmoses]

Hmm. A very good point. This is why I'm not a lawyer -- I didn't consider all the contingencies when phrasing my argument, and thus what it said about a case I didn't consider is entirely not what I would have meant.

I would have no intention of telling her she couldn't do such a thing either. My intent was only to argue that, when more than one person is starting a family together, they should be married to each other (for some value of married that the state may or may not call a "marriage" per se). I didn't have any intention for that to imply anything about the number of people involved -- if there's only one person involved, then there's nobody for her to need to be married to, so it's simply the null case.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

My intent was only to argue that, when more than one person is starting a family together, they should be married to each other

I don't agree with that either, but for more complicated reasons.

Also, the distinction between "should" = "would be a good idea, in case something goes wrong" and "should" = "in my preferred arrangement, one would face social or legal sanctions if one didn't do this" would be a useful thing to identify at this time. (Well. Useful for determining how much I'm going to argue about it, anyway.)

The largest portion of my issue here is that stigmatizing unmarried parents is very, very hard on:
1. Unmarried parents (the target group, but note that it includes)
1a. Widows and widowers
1b. Mothers who were raped and chose to keep the resulting offspring
1c. Teenage parents, very poor people, and other folks whose lives are quite hard enough already
2. Bastards

[brooksmoses]

As got buried in my first reply: "I wouldn't want to make it mandatory." I think it would be a good idea; I don't think legal sanctions are in any way appropriate.

I also would like to clarify that I am not talking about parents, as a complete class -- I am talking about the class of people who are having/building a long-term family together that includes raising children as a joint enterprise. This excludes 1a and 1b and any other cases of absent parentage.

Case 1c is pretty much the crux of my argument, actually. If getting married is something that actually makes people's lives harder, for people in any of those categories who are trying to form a family together, then marriage is not serving those people well, and it should be fixed so it can. There are many ways in which not being married in a legal sense does make their lives harder, and that's a problem.

On the social side, I think in much of U.S. culture we're pretty much at the point of marriage equivalent to some past cultures, where the requirements to be married were simply "set up a house together and tell people you're married", at which point the community treated them as a married couple. I guess functionally from one perspective what I'm arguing is that legal marriage should recognize that situation; its function is to be the legal/contractual counterpart to that community recognition.

(Edit to add: Also, to clarify, I'm debating here -- this is a position that I believe in to some extent, but I am not certain of my opinion on how its merits compare to the merits of the opposing positions, so mostly what I'm doing is exploring the idea by defending it, rather than saying "this is absolutely what I'd do if I were king".)

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

I am talking about the class of people who are having/building a long-term family together that includes raising children as a joint enterprise.

Ah. So only people who are planning to have children, then? That's a small and select group there.

the requirements to be married were simply "set up a house together and tell people you're married", at which point the community treated them as a married couple

That certainly seems to be accurate among people I know, yep.

I don't want the contractual part to be that automatic. I think people ought to think about it first. (People talk sometimes about wanting divorces to be difficult so that people will think before they get married. This is silly. If you want people to think before they get married, getting married should be hard.)

[brooksmoses]

No, not just people who are planning to have children, but also people who currently have them. With the having being the more important case; plans by themselves are just plans and don't get hurt if things go awry.

I do agree that there's an important amount of balance there, with regards to requiring people to think before getting married. Though, in general, the legal system doesn't place barriers to people entering into contracts (other than annulling anything that's absurd, effectively); why should this one be different? ... A counterargument being that this isn't just a contractual part between the parties, but also something akin to creating a legal entity, and incorporating a company does require a certain amount of red tape and such. I guess here I'm not really at all sure what the appropriate balance is.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

No, not just people who are planning to have children, but also people who currently have them.

Single parents, grandparents, siblings raising their kids together. Poly families, communes, foster parents. There are so many ways to raise kids that don't involve a committed couple. (And so many committed couples who don't want kids.) I know you said you weren't talking about single parents, but if you're going to talk about kids, you're talking about single parents whether you want to or not.

Marriage supports committed couples, sure. But why would you want to encourage that particular sort of family? Taking care of existing kids isn't a good reason -- the overlap between the set of families that include existing kids and the set of families that include committed couples isn't anywhere near 100%.

[brooksmoses]

You're still not understanding what I'm saying.

All I'm saying is that, when a child is being parented by multiple parents in a cooperative arrangement, those parents should have some sort of marriage-like commitment to each other. (For a kid raised by a commune, that's going to be one of the places where "marriage-like" gets stretched to nigh-unrecognizability, but I think there should definitely be some sort of explicit agreement involved!)

I'm not saying anything about how many people should be involved, at all. I'm talking about what sorts of arrangements should be present between whoever is involved in the parenting.

The only reason I say that I'm not talking about single parents is that this condition is tautologically true (and false) for them, and thus what I am talking about is completely irrelevant to them.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

the point of marriage is to be a standard way for society and the legal system to recognize that two people are in a long-term life-entangling relationship with each other

I think this wandered.

[night-princess.livejournal.com]

> I guess functionally from one perspective what I'm arguing is that legal marriage should recognize that situation

That sounds like "common-law marriage", and other states already have that.

Scenario: two people move in together. One goes around telling all their friends that they're married. The other is a bit commitment-phobic because he is the heir to a wealthy estate (which is why they didn't get officially married) and makes a point of saying they're not married whenever the chance comes up. It's a good relationship for many years, so the community more-or-less acts as if the two are married. However, it doesn't last, the two break up, and greedy lawyers convince the less wealthy one (in his emotionally vulnerable state) to sue for divorce. What is each partner entitled to keep/get? I have no answer, but whatever the answer is, common-law marriage makes it even messier. (BTW, the couple is heterosexual, but I'm using the gender-neutral forms of "he", which is why both partners are referred to as "he". hehehe)

I think it's a good idea that marriages have to be explicitly declared and signed by both parties, and I'm happy to live in a state that does not have common-law marriage. Actually, I think "common-law marriage" is another thing the heterosexuals did that went a long way towards undermining marriage in general.