This winter, the legal battle against California’s ban on same-sex marriage heads to federal court and may ultimately end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. The court may declare government-supported traditional marriage unconstitutional, setting the stage for civil upheaval and an inevitable battle over a federal amendment. The most radical of social experiments is closing in upon us. What do America’s soccer moms think? After all, they live in a world sustained by marriage.

The sad fact is, many support it. In fact, many grow teary when talking about it, especially at the mention of the homosexuals they know. Though their homosexual friends may live with little social disapproval, deed property to one another, and even raise children, they cannot have a wedding. Weddings are beautiful and everyone deserves one. Human identity is meaningless without marriage to whomever one pleases.  

The truth is if soccer moms could peer into the future, they would be very unhappy with the results of homosexual marriage. If they could see the boys raised by pederasts; the children conceived by anonymous sperm donors who care nothing about their existence; the lesbians who look wistfully on a life spent only with women; the increased suicide rate and health problems that are associated with widespread homosexuality even in societies that endorse it; and the greater disinclination by men to enter into an institution that joins together two guys, their feelings would be affronted. They would see that feeling and compassion are on the side of traditional marriage.

So soccer moms are not really guided by emotion after all. They are guided by ideas. The ideas are not of their own making. They are in the very air around them and the soccer mom lacks the time and inclination to see them for what they are. She is a traditionalist at heart. She is a traditionalist and yet does not want to seem too backward. Perhaps she can hide her devotion to stability and normalcy. Perhaps she can hide her devotion to these by supporting innovation in the lives of others. If she can sit in a television studio and calmly watch as a prostitute gives a tour of her work place, is there any level of social experimentation that the soccer mom won’t tolerate? Is there any limit to her radical compassion?

Soccer Mom, Know thyself.  This world you approve of does not approve of you.

Rose, who describes herself as a lesbian, writes:

The 1960 Broadway musical Greenwillow featured the song “Never Will I Marry.” It became a popular anthem in the gay community (a fact which upset its singer Anthony Perkins who was trying to remain in the closet). “No burden to bear. No conscience, no care…wide my world, narrow my bed.”

James Bowman writes in a review of an old John Waters movie:

“…baby-selling in 1972, designed to supply babies to lesbians, seems to have been thought of as in a class with pornography shops and heroin pushing at elementary schools. Now that lesbians are on prime-time TV, such a practice aspires to middle-class respectability. But doesn’t this sort of miss the point about lesbianism, or, indeed, any homosexuality? Isn’t the whole idea of it bound up with its being a perversion? If it is not forbidden passion, what’s the point of it?…

I wonder if homosexuals look at a film like Pink Flamingos with a certain nostalgia, a longing for the old days when, instead of trying to marry each other, they saw themselves as entering into a Faustian pact with the devil and breathing a Satanic defiance of their own to the tyrant of the universe. Who needs just another legitimate expression of one’s sexuality?”

To quote my personal hero, Archie Bunker: “those were the days.” It’s hard to be considered an eccentric in the modern world. Well, I could always become a housewife…

Laura writes:

Ha ha! Maybe more people will get a counter-cultural thrill by becoming housewives. I highly recommend it if you crave the life of a social dissident. 

If you read the latest issue of Gender and Society, the magazine of the Sociologists for Women in Society, you’ll find the Lady Sociologists make a similar point. It’s not just heteronormativity  that’s a problem, but homonormativity too. What’s a person who wants no normativity at all to do?  Even prostitution has a veneer of bourgeois respectability. 

.

Please follow and like us: