Archives: April 2011

Executive director of the National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting, Hampton University psychology professor, and senior fellow here at the Institute Linda Malone-Colon has an op-ed in today’s Richmond Times Dispatch:

We’re fascinated by what’s different about a royal wedding, but we’re drawn by what’s the same. The story that’s center stage in London is the same one that plays out in our hearts and our dreams: Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl live happily ever after.

…For many people, though, that dream has become an illusion. Fewer Americans are marrying, and fewer are staying married. In 2009, the National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting and the Institute for American Values released the Marriage Index, which takes the temperature of marriage and child-bearing in America over four decades.

According to Robert George et al, the reason same-sex couples can’t marry is that they’re unable to perform “conjungal acts” or “coitus”:

The spouses seal (consummate) and renew their union by conjungal acts – acts that constitute the behavioral part of the process of reproduction, thus uniting them as a reproductive unit. [...] Indeed, in the common law tradition, only coitus (not anal or oral sex even between legally wed spouses) has been recognized as consummating a marriage.

Note that it’s only the “behavioral part” — that is, “coitus,” which the dictionary says is a “sexual union between a male and a female involving insertion of the penis into the vagina” — that matters to George. Whether or not pregnancy actually occurs is not relevant (which is why infertile het marriages are real marriages).

Which makes me wonder: If Lucy and Schroeder get married; and if Lucy is a cis woman (“cis” is short for “cissexual,” and means, in a nutshell, “not trans”) and Schroeder is a trans man; would their marriage be a “real” marriage, according to George and his cohorts?

It certainly should be, since Lucy and Schroeder fulfill the requirement; they can consummate their marriage with “acts that constitute the behavioral part of the process of reproduction.”

But my guess is that Robert George and his fellow-travelers would come up with some rationalization excluding trans people from marriage. I wonder what the rationalization would be?

(Vocabulary note for FSB readers who aren’t up on the lingo: “Trans” should be used as an adjective, not a noun. So there’s no such thing as “a trans.” Instead, “trans” is used as a modifier; so someone is “a trans person,” “a trans woman,” or a “trans man.” Pronouns should match the gender a person self-identifies as, so a trans woman is always called “she,” a trans man is always called “he.”)

by Michelle Drayton

Afro.com

African Americans seek committed relationships and marriage just as much as any other ethnic group. They, too, long for the pomp and circumstance that the world will witness April 29, when England’s Prince William weds his bride Catherine Middleton.

It’s become standard practice in recent generations for Black couples to ceremonially jump the broom at their weddings. The act exemplifies a delicate link between contemporary African Americans to the slave culture of their ancestors who resiliently sustained precious native marriage practices. Though weddings between slaves were not officially recognized, the dogged continuation of matrimonial ties reflected marriage and family’s central position in Black culture and community. ?And yet, recent surveys suggest that young African Americans, devoid of stable relationship role models, see marriage as something Whites do, not Blacks. The percentage of married Black Americans ages 20-54 dropped from 70.3 in 1970 to 39.6 in 2008, according to the 2009 Marriage Index, a joint study by the Institute for American Values and the National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting (NCAAMP). more

I had to read this Dallas Voice missive several times – explained first as a ”trans marriage ban” and then as an ”opposite sex marriage ban” before I could even understand it.

Senate Bill 723…would remove a court-ordered “change of sex” from the list of identifying documents which Texans can use to obtain a marriage license, potentially voiding all opposite-sex marriages in Texas where one partner has changed their legally recognized sex.

I believe this is another post on which I can only comment, Happy 2011, all.

A controversial poster claiming “Jesus had two Dads” will appear on Dublin transport today to highlight the continuing campaign for gay marriage.

Pollmaven Nate Silver “charts the trend from all available public polls on same-sex marriage going back to 1988.” The results don’t look good for opponents of same-sex marriage.

Silver writes:

There is a margin of error associated with the calculation of the trendline, so it is too soon to say with confidence that support for gay marriage has become the plurality position (let alone the majority one). Other polls — like a Pew survey released in March — continue to show opinion split about evenly.

However, opponents of gay marriage almost certainly no longer constitute a majority; just one of the last nine polls has shown opposition to gay marriage above 50 percent. [...]

At the same time, the people who turn out to vote are considerably older than the population as a whole, so gay marriage will not perform quite as well at the ballot booth as in surveys of the general population. In addition, whenever a position is gaining ground, its newly won support is often tentative and can be peeled away by an effective counter-campaign.

But Republican candidates, who have placed less emphasis on gay marriage in recent years, probably cannot expect their opposition to it to be a net electoral positive for them except in select circumstances.

The same-sex marriage fight isn’t over, but I’m very confident in the eventual outcome. In the long run, victories at the ballot box are driven by victories in public opinion; if the trendline doesn’t change in the next ten years, I don’t see how the anti-SSM position will remain viable policy except in the most conservative states.