For the Right of Gay Marriage...and Divorce!
Marriage and the Capitalist State
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 824, 16 April 2004.
"Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare
up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. Until the welcome day capitalism does vanish, the monogamous family
remains the legally enforced social model, at least in Western societies, for
the organization of private life in its most intimate aspects: love, sex, bearing
and raising children. It is the central social institution oppressing women;
anti-gay bigotry flows from the need to punish any "deviations" from this patriarchal
structure. Why anyone not under social pressure or economic duress would voluntarily
enter the bonds of matrimony is, of course, one of life's mysteries. Nonetheless,
it appears that these days the only people who actually want to get married
are the only ones President Bush wants to stop: gays and lesbians.
Absolutely, they ought to have the right to marry. And just as absolutely,
we socialists fight for a society in which no one needs to be forced into a
legal straitjacket in order to get medical benefits, visitation rights, custody
of children, immigration rights, or any of the many privileges this capitalist
society grants to those, and only those, who are embedded in the traditional
"one man on one woman for life" legal mold.
Controversy over "gay marriage" has roiled the U.S. since last November, when
the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that permitting only "civil unions"
for gay couples was unconstitutional, thus establishing the right to gay marriage
in Massachusetts. In February the San Francisco mayor ordered same-sex marriage
licenses issued, and 4,037 gay and lesbian couples from 46 states and eight
countries got hitched before ceremonies were ordered halted on March 11. The
Green Party mayor of New Paltz, New York, jumped into the fray, officiating
at 25 same-sex marriages. When he was barred by court order from continuing,
two local Unitarian ministers took over, only to have criminal charges filed
against them by the Ulster County D.A. for solemnizing "unlicensed marriages"
in March.
In 1996, Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act which pronounced, "the
word ‘marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband
and wife." With unholy glee, Christian fundamentalists of all sorts are now
pushing an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning states from recognizing
gay marriage (39 states already refuse to countenance it). Others warn direly
that the floodgates of unspeakable immorality are now open. Polygamy is the
least of it; Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting from last year's
Supreme Court decision overturning Texas sodomy laws, claimed that decision
could abolish bans not only on same-sex marriage, but also "adult incest, prostitution,
masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity."
President Bush, supporting the anti-gay constitutional amendment, intoned:
"The union of a man and a woman is the most enduring human institution, honored
and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith," complaining that
"After...millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are
presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization." Meanwhile,
the Wall Street Journal, beady profit-making eye on the bottom line,
featured a piece on "Cashing In on Gay Marriage" (March 11), while vendors presented
"Loveland," a "Same-Sex Wedding Expo" at New York's Jacob Javits convention
center.
All this sudden churning of the crazed, hypocritical witches' brew that passes
for American political discourse these days, especially on questions involving
sex, certainly has its darkly humorous and bizarre side. Partly that's because
the messy reality most people actually live in bears little resemblance to the
rigid official portraits of Christian moral rectitude this government claims
as models of social behavior. But the deeper social issues involved are deadly
serious, ranging from the most intimate personal questions to broad areas of
responsibility for raising new generations, and how to care for others, whether
family, friends or lovers; in short, how "private life" in its entirety is defined
and organized.
Workers Must Fight for Democratic Rights for Gays!
Apocalyptic predictions of the end of civilization if gays are allowed
to marry are obviously hysterical fantasies; at the same time, gay marriage
in itself will not end the often deadly prejudice and pain gay, lesbian, bisexual
and transgendered people encounter every day in this homophobic, anti-sex society.
But that pain makes it even more important to fight for every possible democratic
right, every form of social and political equality that can be wrested from
this society.
It is a vital task of the workers revolutionary vanguard to fight for full
democratic rights for gays—including, today, marriage rights—and to fight to
win the working class to this cause. The Spartacist League has done this since
its inception. As Lenin pointed out in his 1902 work What Is To Be Done?:
"Working class consciousness cannot be genuinely political consciousness unless
the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression,
violence and abuse, no matter what class is affected....Why is it that
the Russian workers as yet display so little revolutionary activity in connection
with the brutal way in which the police maltreat the people, in connection with
the persecution of the religious sects, with the flogging of the peasantry,
with the outrageous censorship, with the torture of soldiers, with the persecution
of the most innocent cultural enterprises, etc.?... We must blame ourselves
for being unable as yet to organize a sufficiently wide, striking and rapid
exposure of these despicable outrages. When we do that (and we must and can
do it), the most backward worker will understand, or will feel, that
the students and religious sects, the muzhiks and the authors are being abused
and outraged by the very same dark forces that are oppressing and crushing him
at every step of his life."
Here in the United States, one of the most politically backward "advanced"
capitalist countries on earth, saddled with a huge burden of puritanism and
religious fundamentalism to boot, there is a lot of backwardness on the gay
question.
Even among black workers, historically among the most militant in the proletariat
and in general those with the fewest illusions in the "good nature" of this
rotten capitalist social order, there is a significant amount of anti-gay prejudice.
Much of it is pushed by conservative forces in the black church, although even
the black churches are deeply split on this question. As we wrote in our article,
"For the Right to Gay Marriage!": "In its extreme, one gets the phenomenon of
a black Baptist minister, the Rev. Gregory Daniels, who declared, ‘If the K.K.K.
opposes gay marriage, I would ride with them' (New York Times, 1 March).
He might saddle up, but it will be a short ride—the first target of this motley
collection of nativist, anti-labor fascists is black people" (WV No.
821, 5 March).
In contrast to this myopic anti-gay prejudice is the compassion so many black
people feel because they know firsthand the torment and danger of oppression
and discrimination. A Massachusetts State Senator from Roxbury put it well:
"I know the pain of being less than equal, and I cannot and will not impose
that status on anyone else. I was but one generation removed from an existence
in slavery. I could not in good conscience ever vote to send anyone to that
place from which my family fled." Others can't see that an injury to one is
an injury to all, and so in a backhanded way end up in the camp of the racist
anti-gay bigots. Black columnist Adrian Walker, writing in the Boston Globe
(12 February), quoted one clergyman: "Think about Emmett Till, the Scottsboro
Boys, and those police dogs in Birmingham—and then tell me they've faced what
we've faced. This has nothing to do with civil rights." This reflects in part
the pernicious influence of Democratic Party "constituency" politics, where
one sector of the oppressed is pitted against another in the scramble for aid
from a state which defends capitalist rule.
Of course there are many, and qualitative, differences between black oppression
and gay oppression in this society. Racism is the bedrock of American capitalism,
the great fault line in American politics since the founding of the nation on
the backs of black slaves. The ruling class consciously manipulates racism to
weaken the proletariat. The fight for black freedom will be central to the proletarian
revolution in the U.S. For that revolution to succeed, the working class, including
its strategic black component, must understand its historic task is to abolish
class society in order to open the road to human freedom for everyone.
And that most certainly includes gays—and everyone else who, however self-defined,
rebels against the straitjacket social roles imposed by the capitalist ruling
class.
Further, violence against gays, lesbians and, increasingly, transgendered
people is a deadly constant on America's mean streets and in the repressive
holding pens known as public schools. The grisly 1998 murder in Laramie of Matthew
Shepard, a 21-year-old gay Wyoming student who was kidnapped, beaten, burnt
and then left tied to a fence to die, shocked the nation. Though accurate statistics
are almost impossible to come by, given that many victims don't come forward
because they rightly fear more harassment from cops, school authorities or parents,
and because official statistics don't always accurately list "hate crimes,"
there are still well over 1,000 reported cases a year of violence, sometimes
fatal, against gays and lesbians and others deemed sexually "deviant."
A recent Internet search uncovered an article from the Arizona Tucson Citizen
(23 February) titled "Gays, Jews Top Targets of Hate Crimes Here," which described
the June 2002 beating to death of 24-year-old Philip Walsted, who was gay. It
was a hate crime, according to police. In January of this year another gay man
was found lying on the street, badly beaten, near a gay bar in Tucson, while
a gay University of Arizona student was stabbed in 2000. That's just a few stories
from one city. According to the Winter 2003 Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence
Report, there were 27 murders of transgendered people in a 21-month period (2002-2003)
in the United States. The point of these few examples is not to "prove" that
any social group is more or less hurt than any other, but to indicate that moral
regimentation is part of what keeps this unjust society running the way it does.
It was a good thing that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down sodomy statutes
in its 2003 Lawrence v. Texas ruling, because it explicitly overturned
the Court's infamously reactionary 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that
upheld states' anti-sodomy laws. That decision castigated gays with statements
like "proscriptions against sodomy have ancient roots." Chief Justice Warren
Burger practically called for a holy war against homosexuals, writing approvingly
in his concurrence that "Blackstone described ‘the infamous crime against nature'
as an offense of ‘deeper malignity' than rape, a heinous act ‘the very mention
of which is a disgrace to human nature,' and ‘a crime not fit to be named'."
This is the legal language that gives cover to gay-bashing.
Gays still don't have full civil rights: they aren't allowed to serve
openly in the U.S. military, for example. According to the Servicemembers Legal
Defense Network, a gay rights group, in the ten years since Democratic president
Bill Clinton adopted the infamous "don't ask, don't tell" policy, around 10,000
service members have been discharged for being openly gay. As we stated when
that policy was raised: "Open gays and lesbians have just as much right as anyone
else to participate in the armed forces," while raising the classic Marxist
slogan of "Not one man, not one penny" for the military ("Gays in the Military,"
WV No. 569, 12 February 1993). This is the tradition of militant Marxism
in opposition to imperialist war. At the same time, the military is a microcosm
of society as a whole, and so we fight against racist atrocities and discrimination
in the armed forces just as we do in the rest of society. The fight to integrate
black soldiers fully into the armed forces toward the end of World War II created
a potentially powerful base for struggles for black emancipation—and in fact
black civil rights activists also fought for homosexual rights in the armed
forces then.
Government and Social Control of Women
Many people still would argue, gays should have democratic rights,
but why marriage? The capitalist politicians running for president are all dancing
around the pretty meaningless "civil union" cop-out, basically catering to religious
reactionaries with votes. But isn't marriage in some sense "special," more private,
more "sacred" somehow? Not at all. Monogamous marriage is a creation of society,
not god (since there isn't one), and it has been used historically as a means
of reactionary social control by the ruling class.
We advocate effective consent in all sexual relations and think that what
any combination of individuals do in bed is nobody's business but the participants
themselves, as long as it's consensual. While defending the right to gay marriage,
we also argue that the "marriage mania" represents a fundamentally conservative
thrust by the well-to-do petty-bourgeois gay milieu. It's a far cry from "free
love" and the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 to today's marriage ceremonies, PTA
meetings and Democratic and Republican Party fund-raisers. In the quest for
bourgeois "respectability," gay pride day organizers have viciously banned NAMBLA
(North American Man-Boy Love Association) from their marches (thereby fueling
the "anti-pedophilia" hysteria which targets all gays) and welcomed contingents
of gay cops who spend a good part of their time busting "sex offenders."
Nonetheless, by analogy to our position on the armed forces, we oppose excluding
any category of people from access to the privileges and benefits such institutions
offer in this society. At the same time, in the course of fighting for these
rights, we seek to convince activists that to really resolve women's and gay
oppression it is necessary to create a socialist society, in which the current
functions of the bourgeois family are socialized: communal childcare; communal
kitchens; free, quality health care; and in all ways freeing women from the
burden of child rearing and household slavery.
A look at the history of monogamous marriage in the United States reveals
its use as a tool of governmental control. A valuable book on this subject,
Nancy F. Cott's Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Harvard
University Press, 2000), states: "The structure of marriage...facilitates the
government's grasp on the populace.... In the form of the law and state enforcement,
the public sets the terms of marriage, says who can and cannot marry, who can
officiate, what obligations and rights the agreement involves, whether it can
be ended and if so, why and how." The following history is largely drawn from
that book; quotations from other sources are noted.
One of the book's central themes is how entire categories of people, especially
those deemed "inferior," were denied the legal right to marry in many states.
This included, most notoriously, black slaves, who of course had no rights whatsoever.
And for decades after the Civil War, blacks and Asians were banned from marrying
whites. Additionally, as Cott writes, "Prohibiting divergent marriages has been
as important in public policy as sustaining the chosen model." Thus polygamous
Mormons and Native Americans were forbidden to practice their own forms of "marriage,"
while attempts at utopian communes made in the years before the Civil War came
under massive assault following the North's victory and the consolidation of
the American nation under the strengthening grip of industrial capitalism.
In America from the beginning, marriage, though infused with Christian doctrine,
was a matter of governmental control, not primarily a religious institution,
because the U.S. was established on the formal basis of separation of church
and state. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, marriage itself, based
on older common law, was seen as "a form of governance.... A man's headship
of a family, his taking the responsibility for dependent wife and children,
qualified him to be a participating member of a state.... Under the common law,
a woman was absorbed into her husband's legal and economic persona upon marrying,
and her husband gained the civic presence she lost." This concept in fact continued
right up through the 20th century, and was really only dealt a decisive blow,
in terms of public civil rights at least, with women getting the right to vote
nationally in 1920. However, Congress determined in 1922 that a wife would lose
her citizenship if she married a foreigner and stayed in his country for two
years; other grounds for female loss of citizenship included marriage to an
Asian, a polygamist—or an anarchist!
Within the strict confines of the marriage relationship, male supremacy remained
largely intact. Cott describes three U.S. Supreme Court cases, in 1904, 1908
and 1911, all of which essentially upheld the husband's right to control of
his wife's body. The 1904 case determined a husband's right to collect "damages"
from his wife's lover in a case of adultery, even asserting that the husband's
right to "exclusive" sexual intercourse was "a right of the highest kind, upon...which
the whole social order rests" (rhetorical excess, to be sure; were this literally
true, civilization would have collapsed long ago). The 1908 case justified Congress's
ban on bringing women to the U.S. for an "immoral purpose," thus keeping out
a man and his mistress and upholding the government's authority to legislate
monogamy and punish women who transgressed. The 1911 case involved a woman's
attempt to sue her husband for assault and battery. The Supreme Court refused
to interfere between man and wife, rejecting the "radical and far-reaching"
belief that a wife could sue her husband for injuries "as though they were strangers,"
and that it was "better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze," as an
earlier North Carolina court decision put it, on the prerogatives of male brutality
within the family circle. It took massive social upheaval and a wave of New
Left-derived feminist activism in the 1970s to finally breach what was in fact
the husband's right to rape his wife; only in 1984 did a New York court finally
overturn that state's marital rape exemption, then followed by others.
Native Americans, Blacks, Asians, Immigrants: Forced or Banned Marriages
The creation of the American nation rested on the backs of black slaves—
and on the virtual obliteration of the native Indian population of tribal hunter-gatherers
and agriculturalists—resulting in the creation of a bourgeois democracy for
white, male property owners. How much more we could have learned about the early
history of our species from these indigenous peoples, relentlessly slaughtered
and driven onto "reservations," is a question American Marxists must feel keenly.
Friedrich Engels' work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the
State (1884), was after all inspired by American anthropologist Lewis H.
Morgan's pioneering research into the family patterns of North American tribes.
It was this research, in good part, that led to the Marxist understanding that
in fact human beings have lived "for millennia" in non-patriarchal relationships,
in tribal, matrilineal societies in which women were not enslaved within the
straitjacket of monogamous marriage, in which children were the responsibility
of both men and women. Monogamous marriage is a social invention brought to
North America by the colonizers, along with their diseases, their "sacred family"
and their slaves.
So the Native American population, when not simply killed, was offered an
"enlightened" choice by their overseers: rot on the reservation or give up your
"heathen" ways. As Cott puts it, "Most groups—notably the Iroquois, who dominated
the eastern part of North America—did not make the nuclear family so fundamental
an economic and psychological unit as Protestants did, nor did they generally
recognize private property as such.... The federal government consistently encouraged
or forced Indians to adopt Christian-model monogamy as the sine qua non
of civilization and morality." In some cases it was considered that Indians
could be "civilized" by converting to Christianity, and marriage of an Indian
woman to a white male was tolerated, though in some dozen states marriages between
Indians and whites were declared non-valid. The 1887 Dawes Act stole Indians'
communal land and undermined their tribal way of life, assigning male family
"last names" to Indians (against native cultural tradition), and establishing
"individual property-ownership, and further subverted native American women's
roles as agriculturists by presuming the Indian male should be the landowner
and farmer." Cott writes: "Like ex-slaves and ex-polygamists, Indians were required
by the federal government to adopt monogamy as ‘the law of social life' to become
citizens."
On the other hand, for black slaves in America, legal marriage was out of
the question, though slaveholders did encourage childbearing to reproduce and
expand the slave population, especially after 1808 when importation of slaves
was banned. "Concubinage, which is voluntary on the part of the slaves, and
permissive on that of the master…in reality, is the relation, to which these
people have ever been practically restricted," wrote the Chief Justice of the
North Carolina Supreme Court in 1838. Thus the fight for the right to marriage,
as an assertion of the right to control one's own body and make a free contract
with another human being, was seen as an important aspect of the fight for black
freedom.
As it is with just about everything else in America, racism is deeply intertwined
with marriage law. Attempts to keep the "white race" "unmixed" were a unique
feature of the American colonies since their inception (with the peculiar result
that people of all different skin tones and ancestral background are automatically
considered "black" if there is even a hint of a black ancestor somewhere). Ever
since the inception of monogamous marriage and the family, from ancient times
on, laws against intermarriage between different classes aimed to preserve ruling-class
privileges. Spain in 1776 had such laws, as did the British imperialists in
Ireland in the 14th century, for example. But America uniquely developed the
illogic of racism, due to its slaveholding history, to such an extent that even
after the victorious Civil War that freed the slaves, many states still banned
black-white marriage; in Mississippi the penalty was life imprisonment. The
miscegenation law was not repealed in Alabama until 2000!
The relationship between slavery and women's subordinate position in marriage
was widely noted and utilized by those on both sides of the issues. Southern
evangelical Protestant ministers, who published more than half of pre-Civil
War pro-slavery tracts, regularly quoted the Bible; a typical claim was that
god "included slavery as an organizing element in that family order which lies
at the very foundation of Church and State." On the other side, those among
the anti- slavery abolitionists and early women's rights advocates who shared
the liberal ideals of individual freedom and the view that "self-ownership"
was a natural right, saw that both slaves and married women lacked this basic
right. As Lucy Stone put it, "Marriage is to woman a state of slavery. It takes
from her the right to her own property, and makes her submissive in all things
to her husband."
Following the Civil War, successive stages of immigration fed the fires of
growing industrialization in the U.S. Here too the government's marriage policies
were aimed at social control. Chinese immigrants on the West Coast, who first
came in the gold rush, were in demand for mining and railroad-building, but
when the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, an explosion of anti-Chinese
racism was unleashed. The first federal step to restrict immigration, the Page
Act of 1875, was aimed at Asian women, who were supposedly all prostitutes,
and required "the U.S. consul to make sure that any immigrant debarking from
an Asian country was not under contract for ‘lewd and immoral purposes'." By
1913 eight states had laws against whites marrying Japanese or Chinese people.
"Free Love" Utopias and Polygamy
In the stormy years leading up to the great social explosion that was
the American Civil War, the last progressive gasp of the bourgeoisie (like the
1848 Revolutions in Europe) in North America, many experimental utopian socialist
alternatives to monogamous marriage flowered. There were many "free love" communities
established in the U.S., inspired by such utopian visionaries as Robert Owen,
Claude Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, whose profound insight that the status
of women is the decisive indicator of social progress inspired further Marxist
theory on the subject. The New York Oneida community, founded in 1849 with a
pamphlet called Slavery and Marriage: A Dialogue, did away with the exclusive
pairing of couples, though within a rather formal structure. These groups, though
ridiculed and condemned, were not by and large prosecuted before the Civil War,
but afterward, when in the name of "consolidating" the nation, a crackdown on
most forms of "social deviation" began.
One interesting—and still contemporary—group stands out in all this: the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, one of whose founding tenets
is the right of men to polygamy, or multiple marriage to many women at once.
Right-wingers today throw up their hands in horror at gay marriage, breathlessly
bemoaning that polygamy will be next. Well, guess what, it's already here, and
has been for over a hundred years, out in Utah and other Western states, where
an estimated 30,000 old-style Mormons still practice the sect's early preaching,
though the "official" church formally renounced it a long time ago. We believe
the Mormons have the right to be left alone, to practice their religion and
live their private lives however they see fit. Our position for the right of
gay marriage, like the right of Mormons to practice polygamy, stems from our
opposition to government interference with the rights of individuals to effect
whatever consensual arrangements they wish. We pointed out that American Mormons,
including the women, essentially freely choose their practice, unlike in countries
without bourgeois revolutions, where women are still little more than property
of their patriarchal masters and where polygamous social systems must be relentlessly
opposed. As we wrote in "Free Tom Green! Mormon Polygamists: Leave Them Alone!"
(WV No. 764, 14 September 2001), defending a man convicted of felony
bigamy charges:
"The family structure—whether monogamous or polygamous—necessarily oppresses
women. However, not everybody understands the source of their oppression, and
people do all sorts of things that are undoubtedly bad for them that the state
still has no business throwing them in prison for. As Marxists we understand
that the family serves a real social purpose and cannot simply be ‘abolished,'
even in a workers state, but must be replaced with alternate social institutions."
Women's Liberation, Individual Freedoms and the Fight for Socialism
So, as radical columnist Alexander Cockburn put it, "Why rejoice when
state and church extend their grip, which is what marriage is all about" ("Sidestep
on Freedom's Path," CounterPunch, 20/21 March). Cockburn quotes early
ACT UP activist Jim Eigo on the question: "Why are current mainstream gay organizations
working to strike a bargain with straight society that will make some queers
less equal than others?... Marriage has no more place in efforts to achieve
equality than slavery or the divine right of kings. At this juncture in history,
wouldn't it make more sense for us to try to figure out how to relieve heterosexuals
of the outdated shackles of matrimony?"
It certainly would. And it is the modern Marxist movement which has figured
out how to break those shackles, through abolishing the system of private property
in the means of production, thus abolishing the need for the bourgeois family
structure to pass on such private wealth. As Leon Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin
of the 1917 Russian Revolution, wrote in response to the magazine Liberty
(14 January 1933) which asked, "Is Bolshevism deliberately destroying the family?":
"If one understands by ‘family' a compulsory union based on the marriage contract,
the blessing of the church, property rights, and the single passport, then Bolshevism
has destroyed this policed family from the roots up.
"If one understands by ‘family' the unbounded domination of parents over children,
and absence of legal rights for the wife, then Bolshevism has, unfortunately,
not yet completely destroyed this carryover of society's old barbarism.
"If one understands by ‘family' ideal monogamy—not in the legal but in the
actual sense—then the Bolsheviks could not destroy what never was nor is on
earth, barring fortunate exceptions."
"On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital,
on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among
the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical
absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
"The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement
vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital."
—Communist Manifesto (1848)