Patriarchy: The Next Generation
Patricia Goldsmith
What’s the opposite of patriarchy? Hint: it’s not matriarchy. The answer is
equality.
That’s the way it’s always been. Whenever some oppressed group manages to obtain a measure of equal justice under the law, the retrograde forces immediately go to work to limit the damage to entrenched privilege and, if possible, roll back the gains.
Consider the Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War to insure that black people would never be forced back into slavery.
The abolitionist and universal suffrage movements had worked hand in hand up to that point. But in
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020707B.shtml">a tactic that carries down to our own day, the amendment was interpreted as narrowly as possibly, extending (theoretical) voting rights to black males only and leaving black and white women to fight on into the next century.
Way back then, the Bible said the woman is subject to the man. The Bible’s still saying it, but in our day, thank god, it’s not also the law of the land.
It also says spare the rod and spoil the child. How far could a biblical patriarch go? Leviticus gives him authority to stone a kid who mouths off. Also illegal now, luckily for me.
These days the Bible says that lying with a man as with a woman is an abomination, a theme that is being taken up by some black preachers who declare that the Bible is the final word on the subject, case closed. Homosexuality is wrong, wrong, wrong. And yet we don’t hear anything from these preachers about all those passages, in both the Old and New Testaments—many more than those prohibiting gay sex—where slaves are ordered to obey their masters. No more slavery, but those passages are still in the unchanging, absolutely infallible, timeless Good Book.
The Bible is, among other things, a historical document that endorses slavery as an institution, just as it accepts the radical subjugation of women and children to men. Women and children were property, and biblical patriarchs could dispose of them any way they saw fit, up to and including putting them to death. But we only seem to notice those passages that have to do with preventing new groups from achieving equal status. Once the culture has assimilated the change, Bible passages arguing against equality become dormant for most people.
This selective biblical amnesia has prompted a gay man named
http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070506/NEWS/705060336/-1/SPORTS04&template=printart">Mitchell Gold to start a national campaign to educate people about the way the Bible has been used to support bigotry throughout history.
Although many churches are participating in Gold’s campaign, some black preachers see it as an unfair attempt to equalize the sufferings of blacks and gays. Consider this comment by the Reverend Keith Ratliff of the Maple Street Missionary Baptist Church in Ames, Iowa, where the campaign kicked off:
Even though there have been hate crimes against homosexuals, which is wrong, and discrimination against homosexuals, which is wrong, in my opinion the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement are not parallel.
Gays aren’t denied the right to vote. Gays were not considered to be three-fifths of a person. Gays did not suffer through Jim Crow, separate restrooms and water fountains, sitting in the back of the bus and segregated schools. Gays were not enslaved for more than 200 years in America, lynched and bombed by the thousands, like the black people were.
Reverend Ratliff apparently feels that the push for gay equality somehow takes away from the monumental struggle and achievements of the black civil rights movement, but nothing could be further from the truth—or further from the soul of the civil rights movement. It was Dr. King who said, “<
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwji7g_VK0U">Injustice anywhere threatens the cause of justice everywhere.”
In my opinion, Rev. Ratliff would be better off if he stopped worrying about who’s suffered more—is that a contest anyone wants to win?—and concentrated instead on the fact that the same warped idea of equal protection is being used against both people of color and queers. This warping began almost as soon as the Fourteenth Amendment became law, when railroad robber barons were successful in using it to argue that
http://www.thomhartmann.com/restoredemocracy.shtml">corporations are legal persons, who therefore deserve all the constitutional rights belonging to living, breathing human beings—a ruling that’s helped make corporations first among equals for the past century and a half.
Because of that upside-down ruling, the amendment became a vehicle for protecting entrenched privilege rather than fulfilling its original intent of remedying injustice, and it’s still happening.
Conservatives on the Rehnquist Court used
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0103.raskin.html">equal protection, of all things, to argue that counting votes in Florida in 2000 damaged George W. Bush’s interests. As for the interests of the thousands upon thousands of voters, many of them minorities, whose votes were tossed out like garbage, the Court said there is no constitutional mention of the individual vote. That’s just a custom.
In the same way, marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution is merely customary—it’s never needed to be written down. That’s why states are scrambling to amend their constitutions to explicitly confine marriage to one man and one woman. The difference is that arguing against voting rights, as the Court’s conservative majority did, benefits only the powerful few, while challenging the custom of exclusively heterosexual marriage legitimizes gay relationships that have always existed and are
http://www.nysun.com/article/53975">equally deserving of respect.
In fact, the institution of marriage has been evolving for hundreds and hundreds of years, away from the days when a father could sell his daughters and buy all the wives he could afford; when a husband could sign a recalcitrant wife over to an insane asylum just on his say-so; when a wife who left her husband for any reason lost all claim to her children; when married women could not own anything in their own right.
Within our own lifetimes, the birth control pill, legalized abortion, feminism, and no-fault divorce have moved the institution toward
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1569797,00.html">much greater equality. That’s a good thing, as far as I’m concerned, but it’s upsetting to some who have lived their lives according to the old rules of patriarchal marriage, where the father has more status and decision-making authority, if not intrinsic worth, than mother and children.
These traditionalists argue that same-sex marriages can never be equal to heterosexual marriage because only men and women can have children. Since people have children without marriage, and marriage without children, I would argue that what is and always has been of concern is establishing paternity.
In that sense, abortion and same-sex marriage present exactly the same threat to marriage understood as an institution for establishing paternity and passing on paternalistic values.
The Roberts Court’s recent upholding of a federal ban on late-term abortions without exceptions for the health of the mother—in contravention of settled precedent—confirms what many of us have long suspected: when it comes down to a choice between the actual life of the mother and the potential individuality of a fetus, the right wing chooses the proto-human fetus, hands down. And the reason is basic: the mother shares no genetic material with the father while the fetus shares half. In other words, the fetus is part of the father, but the mother is not.
So when social conservatives wail that gay marriage will destroy the institution, I guess I have to agree. Marriage equality really could go a long way toward dooming marriage as a patriarchal institution. The more images of legally-sanctioned equal relationships that we see in our society, the less attractive unequal relationships are likely to become.
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