Re: [Marxism] Same Sex Marriage Gains Threatened in California

[Adam Richmond <adambrichmond@xxxxxxxxx>]

David,

This tiny, modest article, popular in style, does not address the broader 
issues you raise.

You must be pretty divorced from the psychology of the lgbt masses to assert 
that same-sex marriage rights are not positively viewed by the immense majority 
of homosexuals.  The issue on the table is a fight by the right against new 
marriage right we enjoy in California.  Do you advocate a yes or no on this 
ballot measure?  Is the victory of the far right irrelevant to gay resistance 
to oppression.  

The sad fact is there is no mass organization among the lgbt people.  But they 
are voting with their feet on this issue.  There was no mass organization to 
measure homosexual opposition to Prop 6 in 1978 or the LaRouche AIDS initiative 
in 1986, but the immense majority of lgbt knew a threat when they were faced 
with one.  Likewise no one polled the millions of undocumented workers before 
they shook the streets of this country to defeat the Sensenbrenner bill.  Your 
suggestion is a strawman.

As for your "anti-state" stance, this is more anarchist than Marxist.  Did the 
bolshevik revolution burn the records of marriages from Tsarist Russia?  They 
offered Red weddings, civil, nonreligious weddings. Had there been a gay rights 
movement in the Soviet Union, it would have been appropriate for them to demand 
inclusion.

As for the rights of the unmarried, where are these people clammering for these 
rights?  Are the unmarried heterosexuals struggling for legal recognition?  
Where is the legacy of struggle for this millieu for the end to a pariah like 
caste existence?  Have they been threatened with legal internment recently?  
Are they acting on their own behalf?  You are the one with a fantasy.

The lgbt community has lost the original vanguard.  It has also matured, 
settled down and a chunk of them want marriage rights.  What is your program 
for them? Give up this partial struggle?  Would you offer the same advise to 
black and white heterosexual couples who bravely fought for legal recognition 
against race mixing laws?  

As for marriage being a failed institution, have you no analysis outside an 
ultraleft cutural radicalism borrowing Marxist verbiage of 1968 to offer the 
gay and lesbian masses? 

--- On Mon, 9/15/08, David Thorstad <binesi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From: David Thorstad <binesi@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Marxism] Same Sex Marriage Gains Threatened in California
To: "Adam Richmond" <adambrichmond@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Monday, September 15, 2008, 5:33 PM

Adam Richmond wrote:

Non monogomy is perhaps the basis for divorce, but it is not on the 
marriage license application.

Civil marriage is progressive compared to church marriage.  Denial of 
civil marriage based on sexual orientation is antidemocratic.  The vast 
majority of homosexuals want the right to marry without restraint.  If 
Propostion 8 succeeds, it will be a reversal of a right highly valued by 
the huge majority of gay people.  In fact the majority of all people in 
California appear to be ready to resist this obvious right wing 
assault.  But not David Thorstad.

=======================================================================================
1. If civil marriage is "progressive," why don't you respond to
my point 
that couples/marrieds should not be given special status and treatment 
by the state? How is that preferable to equality, whereby every citizen, 
regardless of conjugal or marital status, is treated equally before the 
state and the law? You avoided this democratic comparison to your 
pro-state stance altogether.
2. On what do you base your contention that "the vast majority of 
homosexuals want the right to marry without restraint"? I am not aware 
of any poll or any democratic decision making body of the gay movement 
that determined this. The demand for same-sex marriage was first 
advanced in recent history by the Human Rights Campaign, and, to a 
lesser degree, by the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force. These are 
thoroughly bourgeois organizations that have never held a national 
conference to debate this issue, and, in fact, marriage surfaced only 
after any semblance of a grassroots gay/lesbian movement had 
disintegrated. (In part, I attribute this to the death of so many 
radical gay male activists and sex liberationists from AIDS over the 
past twenty years.) Your assertion is, so far as I am aware, completely 
unsubstantiable, a figment of your imagination. Why would a so-called 
leftist group wish to tailend the gay bourgeoisie on this issue instead 
of taking a Marxist approach to marriage? Why would you support special 
rights for couples over those of singles? Do you oppose the democratic 
idea that every citizen should be equal before the state and the law? 
Why should some citizens be more equal than others? Why would you join 
with the clearly antidemocratic demand for state privileges extended to 
marrieds/couples at the expense of singles (both gay and straight)? This 
kind of approach proves the irrelevance of the liberal left, in my 
opinion. Socialist, Schmocialist/
3. Californians may in the end decide to uphold same-sex marriage 
rights. That is their right. But it is delusional to argue, as Richmond 
does, that a defeat for gay marriage would be a defeat for 
homosexuals--and certainly not for gay liberation, nor for the working 
class as a whole, which ought to have no interest in this issue, beyond 
getting the state out of the bedroom.

Richmond's response is typical of liberals in that it avoids addressing 
any of the points raised against what has become a party line for them. 
What interest do heterosexual leftists have in justifying marriage? I 
wonder. Engels and other Marxists must be turning over in their graves.
    For a critique of leftist tailending of the gay bourgeoisie on the 
marriage issue, see my article "Marriage, Marketing, Tailending: The 
U.S. Left and Same-Sex Marriage":

http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/index.php?title=Marriage%2C_Marketing%2C_Tailending:_The_U.S._Left_and_Same-Sex_Marriage

Richmond's article and his "response" to my critique show how
vacuous 
and irrelevant much of the liberal-leftist approach to this issue is, 
and how superficial its treatment is. It raises the question as to 
whether the heterodominated left groups find gays aping a failing hetero 
institution somehow comforting. But it is the height of arrogance for 
them to claim that they know what homosexuals want. What special 
pipeline do they have to this "knowledge"?
David

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