In the presidential candidate debate last night, NPR noted that Dems speak with one voice of agreement on all gay community issues — except allowing the choice to marry.
Democrats claiming to be “pro-choice” while opposing marriage choice (and school choice — see rants like this one) put me in mind of Thinking Homeschoolers comparing marriage choice with education choice, during the 2004 prez campaign.
Valerie had astutely observed that education is compulsory, marriage is not — thus education choice is opting OUT of the mainstream but marriage choice is opting IN.
Which inspired me to try a thought experiment:
Valerie, you made a great point!
The big difference between education law and marriage law is indeed which side of the closed [public] door people are banging on.
What if we could address the problems on both sides of the door — those who want in and those who want out — by simply switching compulsory attendance and civil marriage?
(Planting tongue in cheek)
So the civil marriage option would become “compulsory public marriage for child-rearing” — we legally declare that marriage is good for children and therefore, if there’s a child or children, marriage is automatically imposed upon its parents. This legal marriage mandate applies to every family with children, but would allow various alternate statutory family structures to satisfy the mandate. Alternatives would be required to register and be confirmed annually, through CPS or the Church perhaps.
There might be mandatory performance measures. Failing public marriages would be placed under State supervision, and failing alternate arrangements would be cancelled with public marriage imposed by a court in its place. As a stiff deterrent to noncompliance, marriage “truancy” would incur criminal penalties.
Because the State values children as a public good, the government will fund public marriage on a per child basis (but no funding for alternate arrangements that don’t qualify as “public marriage” unless maybe some sort of voucher is legislated.) Families who opt out of this funding will call what they have private marriage, or homemarriage, or marriage-at-homers, or unmarrieds. No one will be quite sure of the differences, or what difference they make in any case.
How would this shift the dynamics of “marriage protection” issues? Which side would HSLDA take? Rob Reich? Hillary Clinton? Rush Limbaugh? Which side would anarchofeminists take? Would the debate divide homosexual partners into those who favor marriage and those who don’t, or those with children from those without?
Meanwhile, public education becomes a simple civil choice imposed on no one. (It would however be denied to anyone not demonstrating compliance with compulsory marriage.) No public funding would go toward “civil education” but there would still be libraries and museums equally accessible to all under civil rights protection, even to those out of compliance with compulsory marriage laws (marriage truant officers would hang around these places though, to try to catch their quota of non-compliant families with children.)
How would this shift the dynamics of home education politics and protection? Would HSLDA support or oppose it? Would Rob Reich and Hillary Clinton? The anarcho-feminists? Would it unite home educators in mutual safety and assured autonomy, or cause us to drift apart and our advocacy to languish without purpose?
Removing tongue from cheek and heading off to supper, JJ
From last night’s news story –
“Obama supports only civil unions for gay couples.
He cited the need to ‘disentangle’ the issue of legal rights for gay couples from what ‘has historically been the issue of the word marriage, which has religious connotations to some people.’ “
Okay. And I cite the need to disentangle the issue of legal rights for families supporting children, from what has historically been the issue of “compulsory school” which has totalitarian connotations to some people . . .
I was sent a link today, from some extremely conservative homeschool advocacy it seems, to one state’s history of homeschool freedom, written by a husband-wife team of convicted Christian soldiers — in a state other than mine, although it reads eerily as if written by the married couple who led the movement here in Florida.
The wives talk about homeschooling and prayer and the 80s (and their righteous sacrifices for the sacred cause) the same way:
the threat to the family is life-and-death and constant, in every knock at the door; the almost obsessive focus on factual detail; the moral certitude in making the most trivial decision; the shared persecution mentality that helped cement necessarily clandestine relationships; the pitched estrangement from the dangerous mainstream of society; the crediting of miracles for every favorable event however simple; and of course the actual political-legislative record of arguments, tactics and events — all are similar.
Oh, and the paternalistic overlay on top of the whole thing, although I admit it’s hard for me to read religious homeschool stuff much less anything about political hardball and not feel the heavy hand of paternalism pushing down on my chest.
Anyway, I read the whole thing just marveling at the parallels, down to a homeschool-peculiar pronouncement of the difference between “choice” and “conviction” — choice is pooh-poohed as nothing more than ordering one meal rather than another, while conviction is elevated to uncompromising faith worth dying for.
(So reproductive choice for example, is a wickedly trivial mater of taste for which choosing women must be condemned to death, but reproductive conviction is blessed and religious, because it involves no choice and no compromise, to the death? Where’s the family freedom in that again, much less the miracles of life? I actually think this is a valuable insight into Christian homeschool dogma I’ve been missing — need to think about this more.)
[...] apart from one’s lizard-brain feelings about how its political critics and champions line up. Intelligent feminists and journalists need to do this with “education” issues, for examp… on public schooling, homeschooling and parent-family privacy [...]
Suppose gays define and worship a god who creates them as they are and commands them to marry out of love — would that power of story elevate their relationships to religious “conviction” then, and give constitutional status for marriage “choice” fully equivalent to marriage “protection” ?
I wonder if they’re going in that direction, and that’s the next thing coming?
And I wonder if legal but politically targeted reproduction options like contraception and abortion would ever go in that direction, toward something explicitly “convicted” parenthood planning and conduct over a lifetime like, say, founding a Church of the Immaculate Contraception? - imagine how finely SCOTUS decisions would need to sift through conservative religious constructs then.