The Misogyny of Prop 8

From Care2
By Robin Marty

Care2’s Steve Williams has done a fantastic job covering the Proposition 8 decision, especially the judge’s ruling that the amendment denied equal protection rights for homosexuals and was rooted in “anti-gay animus.”

But what has gotten less attention is the obvious misogyny inherent in the gay marriage ban in the first place: the assumption that men and women both have different and distinct roles in a relationship and that those roles can only be played out by the members of that sex.

Katherine Kersten, a conservative columnist who styles herself as a Minnesota version of Phyllis Schlafly, recently wrote in regards to the Prop 8 decision:

The two sexes also bring different and complementary strengths to parenting. Mothers, for example, are more attuned than fathers to the cries, gestures and language of babies, toddlers and teens — and so are better at nurturing children physically and emotionally. (The hormone oxytocin may play an important role here.) Fathers, on the other hand, are particularly good at ensuring safety and encouraging children to shoulder challenging tasks. Men’s size and strength provide an advantage in discipline, particularly with boys.

Biologically (and hormonally, apparently), according to Kersten, you simply have to have two opposite-sex partners in a marriage in order to have a “protector” and a “nurturer.”   Oh, and I guess so there is a father to punish the children and keep them in line.

This sort of thinking isn’t exclusive to Kersten, of course, and is taken even further by writer Sam Schulman, who believes you need to have a man and a woman in a marriage so that a woman can be protected.  Yes, because without a man, the vulnerable female will be taken advantage of in some myriad of ways that no longer really exist culturally.

Marriage is about defending women. Among the many different versions of marriage in human history, very few of them have supplied the high-minded qualities that the plaintiffs feel is their right. The vast majority of marriages in the past, perhaps a majority even now, were dictated by families, clans, holy men or magicians, and enforced on the bride and groom by social pressure, enforced if necessary with brutality and violence.

True, many marriages promote loving intimacy and enduring fidelity, but that’s an outcome of the relationship itself – not the raison d’etre for the institution. In primordial terms, marriage only exists at all – in all of its permutations, pleasant or barbaric – because of the nature of human heterosexuality. As a species, we need to protect female sexuality in order to assure ourselves of a future.

Marriage is a necessary defense of a woman’s sexuality and her human liberty from determined assault by men who would turn her into a slave, a concubine – something less than fully human. Human communities need to give women some additional degree of protection – through law, custom, religious decree, or sacrament – generally some combination of all three, neatly summarized by the plaintiffs, who demanded the sacred and the eternal from the state of California.

Of course, marriage’s power to protect women is far from perfect, but no human institution is.

So there you go, women, “perhaps a majority [of marriages] even now are dictated by “magicians” and enforced with violence to protect you from other men who would likely turn you into a sex slave.

With such rampant misogyny in the belief system of those who were supporting Prop 8, especially this belief that marriage exists for a man to have a private exclusive sexual relationship with a woman to keep other men from trying to consummate public sexual conquests on her, is it any wonder that conservatives find same sex couples to be the greatest threat on America in this day and age?