The role of marriage and the family
I AGREE with Peg Rapp's point that the institution of marriage is used to pass the burden of raising the next generation of workers on to working-class couples and single parents ("Marriage is a patriarchal institution").
It's important to point out that this is done not to avoid the responsibility of child-rearing falling on society as a whole, but on the ruling class, those who seek to exploit that next generation without having to bother to pay to raise it.
The burden of reproducing the working class already falls on the working class itself, although some individuals and couples face a greater burden than others. And social services like welfare, child care and public education that socialize some aspects of reproduction are under attack.
To a certain degree, child-rearing is collectivized by workers on a local level in order to make it bearable. For example, when I was little, my mother received baby supplies from neighbors with older children, and she and other single mothers helped each other out with child care.
As long as we live in a society where workers are robbed of the value that we collectively produce and do not have a say in societal-level decisions like whether or not to raise children collectively, arrangements such as these, even though they do not fit the norm of the heterosexual nuclear family as the unit of reproduction, remain survival mechanisms and do not effectively challenge sexism or homophobia.
Gay people who decide to marry are not the ones responsible for the stigma or the extra burden and discrimination placed on single parents, especially single mothers. Individual working-class people (or couples) do not have the power to shape policy or ideology. That power is held by those who control the media, and by politicians like Clinton, Bush and their financiers--who demonize single mothers as "irresponsible" while slashing social services like welfare and child care.
Whether or not individual workers emulate "the patriarchal values and institutions of traditional patriarchal marriages," the notion of the nuclear family endures because of its usefulness to the ruling class that controls the media and institutions such as schools, which manufacture the ideology of our time. And this ideology will be used to justify the oppression and exploitation of women, gays, single parents and working-class people generally.
Finally, although gay marriage is a reform and not a revolutionary solution, the two are not entirely separate. Homophobia, like racism, sexism, xenophobia and transphobia, is used to divide the working class so that it doesn't unite to face the real enemy: the ruling class. Reforms that guarantee equal rights, such as gay marriage, are vital stepping-stones on the path to revolution, because they break down these divisions and give workers a greater sense of their own power.
Because of struggle, in a few generations, gay people went from being classified as mentally ill to being able to marry in two states. Not only does winning the right to gay marriage challenge homophobia and thereby make it easier for workers to unite across lines of sexual orientation, it shows us that struggle can change the world.
This can help inspire the future struggles that can create a world where people are free to love whoever they want, and where no parent or child is forced to go without simply because they exist.
Gary Lapon, Northampton, Mass.
