“Reverse discrimination” being an oxymoron typically used by bigots with a sense of entitlement, I expected to read of such a case when I saw this headline: “Prosser couple claims reverse discrimination.”
Turns out, by my lights, Charlene Honeycutt and Charles Weems were discriminated against. They live together and had until 2007 received healthcare benefits through Weems’ employer, Batelle Labs. The couple considered marrying, but that would have cost Honeycutt, a widow, her Social Security benefit from her dead husband. In October 2007, Honeycutt was just finishing up radiation treatments for breast cancer when Batelle informed its employees that it would no longer offer opposite-sex domestic partner benefits.
The discrimination seems pretty clear. It’s too bad that Honeycutt and Weems (and their lawyer) have chosen to call it “reverse discrimination,” implicitly blaming gays for Battelle’s misbehavior (quite the “What’s the Matter With Kansas" moment). There’s nothing reverse about it. It is part of the web of injustice woven by a) our employer-based healthcare (non) system and b) patriarchy (not unrelated systems). They’re being punished for not being married.
Although the modern nuance of offering same-sex partner benefits adds a wrinkle, Battelle is quite clear that marriage is being enforced: “’The company only extends medical benefits to same-sex domestic partners because they "have no other legal way to obtain health care benefits,’ [Battelle spokesperson Staci] West said.” That is, marital status is the proper way to deliver benefits—not, say, as a right of citizenship (or of simple humanity). People should get married, and if they fail to do so, they lose their claim to benefits. Those who can’t get married are a special exception.
There’s also the unsurprising fact that Battelle was looking to save money by denying benefits to anyone it could by law or social code get away with not insuring. That's called capitalism, and it's one of the many reasons delivering healthcare via employers is bankrupt.
None of this is the fault of gays, though the “reverse discrimination” language suggests they’ve hogged an unfair share of some scarce resource. However, the movement for “marriage equality” does bear some blame. It contributed to the social acceptability of Battelle’s behavior by furthering the idea that marriage is the ideal and the proper unit for allocating social rights and benefits. Time was when, instead of demanding their right to the benefits allocated through marriage, gays questioned the institution of marriage altogether—and I for one mourn that earlier incarnation of the movement.
And then there’s the issue of Social Security, a system designed to support the primacy of the male breadwinner and which discriminates against working wives and single women (see my earlier post).
I would agree with marriage equality advocates that the state of Washington’s domestic partnership law, which grants many of the rights of marriage to same-sex couples and opposite sex couples over the age of 62 is no solution. Now, when 40 percent of babies in this country are born to unwed mothers, most women spend most of their lives unmarried, and we are on the brink of overhauling the employer-based healthcare system, is hardly the moment for the state to renew its enforcement of marriage.
Showing posts with label marriage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marriage. Show all posts
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Monday, June 16, 2008
Gays: not all galloping down the aisle
Just when I was beginning to worry that the gay community had gone all square on us:
The New York Times’ article on gays who married in Massachusetts started off peddling the soothing line that gays are no threat to conventional marriage. (They’re just like us! They get divorced. They can’t get their boyfriends to commit. They dream about their wedding outfits.) I began getting depressed.
They saved the good stuff for after the jump. There we get Eric Erbelding and Michael Peck, whose “rule is you can play around because, you know, you have to be practical.” Most married gay couples Erbelding knows are “for the most part monogamous, but for maybe a casual three-way.” Phew.
And after I was embarrassed by the statistic that two-thirds of same-sex weddings in Massachusetts have been lesbian marriages—see, every woman’s life goal really is that white wedding dress—I read of Joyce Kauffman, who aims at a more creative definition of family and considers marriage a patriarchal institution that “politically makes me kind of queasy.” Thank you, sister.
Weddings tend to make me kind of queasy, too—so smug, they are—and I always felt the air lightened by knowing gay folks looked at them askance too. The gay subculture provided alternative models for living that expanded the sense of the possible in intimate life. Much as I agreed that it was a matter of human rights that if straights had the right to marry, gays should too, the world felt narrowed when gays began clamoring for marriage.
But this conversation isn’t over, not among gays and not among straights.
The New York Times’ article on gays who married in Massachusetts started off peddling the soothing line that gays are no threat to conventional marriage. (They’re just like us! They get divorced. They can’t get their boyfriends to commit. They dream about their wedding outfits.) I began getting depressed.
They saved the good stuff for after the jump. There we get Eric Erbelding and Michael Peck, whose “rule is you can play around because, you know, you have to be practical.” Most married gay couples Erbelding knows are “for the most part monogamous, but for maybe a casual three-way.” Phew.
And after I was embarrassed by the statistic that two-thirds of same-sex weddings in Massachusetts have been lesbian marriages—see, every woman’s life goal really is that white wedding dress—I read of Joyce Kauffman, who aims at a more creative definition of family and considers marriage a patriarchal institution that “politically makes me kind of queasy.” Thank you, sister.
Weddings tend to make me kind of queasy, too—so smug, they are—and I always felt the air lightened by knowing gay folks looked at them askance too. The gay subculture provided alternative models for living that expanded the sense of the possible in intimate life. Much as I agreed that it was a matter of human rights that if straights had the right to marry, gays should too, the world felt narrowed when gays began clamoring for marriage.
But this conversation isn’t over, not among gays and not among straights.
Monday, March 24, 2008
"Single mothers ruining society"?
I’ve had it up to here with headlines like this: “Out-of-wedlock births are a national catastrophe” (said Slate), with their not-so-subtle subtext that, as Broadsheet put it sarcastically, “single mothers are ruining society.” I’m sick of hearing this line assumed as given fact even in liberal circles. I take this personally—that would be my mother—a fact that always startles the liberal men who spout this crap in my presence. I think they assume that single mothers are a) African American, b) teenagers, c) poor and ignorant, or d) all of the above. None of which fits my Harvard-educated mother who chose to have me at 24 (but who did briefly go on welfare after I was born).
The central argument is that because poverty is so high among single mothers, lack of marriage must be the cause of their poverty. “Some researchers identify out-of-wedlock births as the chief cause for the increasing stratification and inequality of American life, the first step that casts children into an ever more rigid caste system,” Slate’s Emily Yoffe says.
This makes me think the right headline should be, “Failure of education in basic statistical principles is a national catastrophe.” As any stats prof will tell his undergrads, correlation does not equal causation.
Here’s some pretty easy-to-come-by evidence that lack of marriage isn’t what’s causing child poverty: Sweden for over a decade has had the world’s highest rate of out-of-wedlock births—they’re now a majority of Sweden’s births—and yet one of the lowest rates of child poverty in the world. In several other Northern European countries with low child poverty rates, unwed mothers also are in the majority. France just last year joined this group.
A few other facts Yoffe and others of her ilk ignore: An American child is 79 times more likely to become a victim of child abuse than a Swedish child, although (because?) far more American children than Swedes are born within marriage. More than one third of all impoverished young children in the U.S. today live with two parents. And here's a zinger: Among African-American families, children from single-parent homes show higher educational achievement than their counterparts from two-parent homes.
And about that income stratification: It’s likely the causation goes precisely the other way. That is, because income is distributed far more unequally in the United States than in most other developed countries, it is difficult for low-wage workers (male or female) to support a family without a second income. And—duh—the shortage of affordable child care makes it difficult for single mothers to support themselves, whereas Western European nations provide publicly subsidized day care, not to mention myriad other supports to parents. The real catastrophe that we Americans should be talking about: the economic toll parenting exacts in America.
In addition to staggering ignorance of logic, the single-parenting-is-a disaster arguments always seem to me to expose a nasty cynicism about marriage. Given the lower rates of marriage among mothers in countries with rich social supports for parents, it appears it takes economic coercion, vulnerability, and shame to get a majority of mothers to marry. Apparently that’s the state marriage promoters want women to be in—that’s the kind of marriage bargain they’re for. Yuck.
The central argument is that because poverty is so high among single mothers, lack of marriage must be the cause of their poverty. “Some researchers identify out-of-wedlock births as the chief cause for the increasing stratification and inequality of American life, the first step that casts children into an ever more rigid caste system,” Slate’s Emily Yoffe says.
This makes me think the right headline should be, “Failure of education in basic statistical principles is a national catastrophe.” As any stats prof will tell his undergrads, correlation does not equal causation.
Here’s some pretty easy-to-come-by evidence that lack of marriage isn’t what’s causing child poverty: Sweden for over a decade has had the world’s highest rate of out-of-wedlock births—they’re now a majority of Sweden’s births—and yet one of the lowest rates of child poverty in the world. In several other Northern European countries with low child poverty rates, unwed mothers also are in the majority. France just last year joined this group.
A few other facts Yoffe and others of her ilk ignore: An American child is 79 times more likely to become a victim of child abuse than a Swedish child, although (because?) far more American children than Swedes are born within marriage. More than one third of all impoverished young children in the U.S. today live with two parents. And here's a zinger: Among African-American families, children from single-parent homes show higher educational achievement than their counterparts from two-parent homes.
And about that income stratification: It’s likely the causation goes precisely the other way. That is, because income is distributed far more unequally in the United States than in most other developed countries, it is difficult for low-wage workers (male or female) to support a family without a second income. And—duh—the shortage of affordable child care makes it difficult for single mothers to support themselves, whereas Western European nations provide publicly subsidized day care, not to mention myriad other supports to parents. The real catastrophe that we Americans should be talking about: the economic toll parenting exacts in America.
In addition to staggering ignorance of logic, the single-parenting-is-a disaster arguments always seem to me to expose a nasty cynicism about marriage. Given the lower rates of marriage among mothers in countries with rich social supports for parents, it appears it takes economic coercion, vulnerability, and shame to get a majority of mothers to marry. Apparently that’s the state marriage promoters want women to be in—that’s the kind of marriage bargain they’re for. Yuck.
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