Odd Company

According to today's wandering along the "Next Blog" link, Nobody in Particular has been hanging out with Christians, punk rockers and people who quit blogging between 12 and 48 months ago.

I must admit to a level of curiosity as to how the "next" algorithm works. While I do opine about topics touching on religion here on a fairly frequent basis, I don't pontificate about Biblical topics or the while Christian movement. On the other hand, I hardly talk about music at all, and I don't think I've ever mentioned Punk.
But most strange were the significant percentage of blogs that were no longer active. Some seemed to from people who simply didn't have the time and/or inclination to keep up with them. Some had moved to other providers, and so their final post was something along the lines of: "Follow this link to the new home of this blog." But many just seemed to stop, with a final post that gave no real indication that the author never intended to come back and write more. You'd think for all that technology journalists had latched onto the idea that Google+ was a "ghost town," that Google would be sensitive to having the "Next Blog" link take a surfer to a page that hadn't been updated in months or years.

But their party, their rules, I suppose. But the neighborhood seems less vibrant, when the lights are out in so many of the houses. Of course, tomorrow is another day, and by the time it occurs to me to have a peek into the local weblog scene again, the rabbit hole will lead someplace entirely different.

Opened Doors

"If the law redefines marriage to say that fathers are optional, then it's hard to make the argument that fathers are essential," says Ryan T. Anderson, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
[...]
But the state does have an interest in seeing that relationships that result in children are permanent and monogamous, to ensure their care and feeding, he says. Otherwise, the state might have to help with their support.
"Marriage is the way the state non-coercively incentivizes me to be in the institution that does best for children," Anderson says.
[...]
Caitlin Seery shares Anderson's concern that weakening the "marriage culture" could lead to more government intervention and expenditure of resources to aid children who would have been better off raised by a mother and a father.
[...]
"Most of use grew up thinking marriage is about romantic love and living happily ever after, whereas when we grow up, we realize it's about raising children and providing them with a mother and a father," Seery says.
[...]
Still, [Sam Schulman, a journalist who has written a number of articles on the subject over the past decade] says that because marriage is an essential part of the broader kinship system that protects women and children, redefining it so thoroughly could weaken it in ways as yet unforeseen.
Granting marriage rights to gay couples "dilutes the currency that makes a woman married to a man a wife," Schulman says.
[...]
Procreation is necessary for the species, and marriage is the best way to ensure thriving families, says John C. Eastman, a Chapman University law professor and chairman of the National Organization for Marriage.
Allowing gays to marry, he says, would be "almost the nail in the coffin" in terms of a trend toward the "delegitimizing of marriage," through no-fault divorce, out-of-wedlock births and other phenomena he says weaken marriage.
[...]
Although there were broken homes long before the political and legal debates about gay marriage began, marriage as a socially sanctioned institution is meant to ensure children are raised by a mom and a dad, [Minnesota state Sen. Warren Limmer(R)] says. Gay marriage lacks that "unique" quality that is beneficial to society.
'Severing Love From Diapers': The Other Case Against Gay Marriage

The logic of these arguments seems to be that as long as same-sex couples are barred from marriage, there is still a chance to roll back the clock and re-impose the old marriage as wedlock institution on a society that appears to have been in the process of walking away from it for several years, if not the past several decades. Not only has that horse bolted from the barn, but the barn has burned down, the farmer has packed it in and taken up mobile application programming and the land has been redeveloped into condominiums. Even if you could find the barn doors, closing them now seems quixotic.

"No-fault divorce, out-of-wedlock births and other phenomena [that] weaken marriage" aren't the fault of same-sex couples wanting to be married, and despite having asked any number of people, I have yet to hear a coherent argument for why simply denying the term marriage or state sanction to same-sex relationships will "correct" said phenomena. People, both as individuals and as couples simply aren't as dependent on the small communities of people around them to get by. And that freedom from reliance on an immediate, localized group for sustenance has lead to the inability of the community to indoctrinate people into their mores and values, and from effectively sanctioning people for non-compliance. But just as importantly, couples that are engaged in traditional marriages don't understand these "weakening" trends as realistic threats to their own marriages anymore. And this is, in part, a result of the very factor that the proponents of traditional marriage decry - the idea that marriage serves, first and foremost, the interests of the married adult couple. If one's own marriage isn't held together by the threat of social sanction in the event of a separation, why should someone care if other people are free to separate? Why should someone care if someone else has children outside of a marriage if they themselves have not been forced into being married as the price of having their own children? As the idea of marriage (and perhaps parenthood, as well) as an unwelcome, burdensome requirement has faded, the perceived need to force others into the institution has also faded. To be sure, it hasn't gone completely away. But today, finding someone who will condemn an unmarried adult as somehow immature or irresponsible based on nothing more than their status as a single adult is actually fairly difficult. Freed of the requirement to subject oneself to the institution of marriage, whether they want it or not, in order to be viewed in a positive social light, people are less likely to impose that requirement on others.

Whether same-sex marriage critics such as Anderson, Serry, Schulman, Eastman and Limmer simply don't realize that the underlying social currency has changed or if they actively intend to re-institute broad, or even universal, public opprobrium for the single and/or childless is not for me to say. (And personally, since I understand their task to be even more Sisyphean than Sisyphus' original punishment, I don't really care.) Their attempt to stand in the path of history and shout "Stop!" seems pointless at best, and painfully deluded at worst. Virtue is born of necessity. Marriages have been, for a very long time, less about children, than they were about property rights (children were, at times, included in said property) and political alliances between families. Yes, public marriage ceremonies did establish who the father of any given child was. But in any place and time where people were mobile enough to be able to leave the immediate community of people who knew them it didn't make too much of a difference. A father who had left for the next valley may as well have fled to another planet. The community may have been aggrieved that they had to pitch in his share of support for his children, but that didn't mean that they considered it worthwhile to have him tracked down and brought back in chains. And once the value of women's work and the social safety net increased, women were no longer as dependent on male support. And as the necessity for marriage eroded, so too did the virtue assigned to it.

This is not to say that those days will never return - after all, a comet might hit the Earth, and blast us all back into the Stone Age, at which point it's likely that a LOT of things that we've left behind - like stone tools, animal furs as common clothing or Disco - may make a comeback. But, as was mentioned in a conversation I had yesterday, 1850 isn't with us anymore. And pretending that one can stop tomorrow from coming won't bring it back.

Echoing Points

According to a lengthy report released by the Republican National Committee, the “Grand Old Party” needs to make some changes if it wants to start winning presidential elections again. But, like all things, a change in the status quo is going to be easier said than done. Republican primary voters have been demanding a high level of ideological purity from their candidates, spurred on by popular, activist, media personalities. As what it takes to be a viable “April” Republican drifts further and further to the political right, it becomes more and more difficult for anyone who can win in that arena to be a competitive “November” Republican.

“The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself,” [the report] says. “We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue.”
Republican Review of 2012 Losses Calls for Many Changes

However, as with any system that doesn't work, you have the fact that in some ways, it does work - and the people for whom it works are unlikely to embrace changes that have costs for them, while bringing benefits to others. Especially when they to don't feel that they need to.

One of the complaints that Democratic lawmakers and activists have had since the last presidential election is that “elections matter.” But the Republicans have put a lot of time, money and effort into making sure that they didn't, and they aren't about to let go of it. Despite the fact that, nationwide, Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives won 1.4 million more votes than their Republican rivals, the fact that after the 2010 elections, the Republicans were the ones often drawing the district boundary maps meant that the G.O.P. was able to maintain their majority of seats.

This most recent process of gerrymandering (the name should be considered a grave insult to the whole of order Caudata) has produced congressional and state legislature seats that are reliably Republican. And the tendency of Democratic voters to live in densely-populated urban areas makes it easy for those drawing the district lines to group them into a few overwhelmingly Blue districts, while retaining the rest of the state to be divided up between themselves.

This process has likely contributed to the creation of a Republican base that feels little need to open up. The seats their lawmakers hold are safe, and those of the Democrats are even more untouchable. Given this, it seems reasonable that the Republicans will continue to converse with themselves in their echo chambers. Because it is the people who are those echo chambers with them whose votes they rely on to stay in office. Unless those people are convinced that the Oval Office can only be gained with changes, and that is worth those changes, they won't pressure their candidates into a different direction.

Crime Culture

To an extent, there is a "Rape culture" in the United States, as it doesn't take much digging to find places, groups and institutions within the broader culture that react to rape with tolerance, indifference or even acceptance.

But in this regard, rape is not unique - there are any number of crimes about which this can be said now, could have been said in the past and will be said in the future. Mainly because we (and I use this in the sense of the generalized we) don't commonly follow the rules around personal valuations that say:

• A non-criminal who is not useful to you should be counted as having a higher worth than a criminal who is.
• Victims, and people like the victims, should have a higher worth than the perpetrators and people like the perpetrators.

And isn't this what it really comes down to? Of course, things are rarely that simple. When people have something we want, whether it's money, talent, social currency, a key to our own self-approval, or what have you, we are often willing to make allowances for those people - so long as they are willing to share - that we are unwilling to make people without these things.

Social approval has always been important for almost anyone who isn't completely independent and self-sufficient. While we are interdependent in many aspects of our society, that interdependence is not balanced. The individual tends to need the greater society much more than the greater society needs any one individual. This is especially true for vulnerable populations and has, in fact, often been the cause of said vulnerability. And there are countless historical examples of that imbalance having harmful or even fatal consequences. Laws and strictures are, ultimately constructs created by people, and without people being ready, willing and able to enforce them, they are often worth less than the paper they are - or perhaps are not - printed on.

To the degree that someone feels that their health, welfare or even their life depends on their being counted as worthwhile by the society around them, they may then understand that they are entitled to that valuation, and become very sensitive to anything that hints that it's being lowered. Examples abound; too many to touch upon them in any real detail. The concept of "Rape Culture," as I understand it, is a manifestation of the real and rational fear that women have of being marginalized by a culture that they cannot adequately punish for mistreating them. Especially when it appears that they are being marginalized over things that we are commonly expected to regard as being trivial, like sports, or ephemeral, like social standing.

But, not being a woman myself, I don't have a clear enough picture of the issue. As an African-American, the closest that I come are the lynching stories that I was told as child. But these are, to a degree, ancient history, rather than an everyday reality. Once, I unintentionally gave a female friend the idea that I intended to assault her. I've been in some real knock-down-drag-out altercations with people - but I've never been concerned that it would lead to my murder at the hands of an angry mob. My understanding, that in the face of enough social disapproval, my life may be forfeit, is simply an abstract concept. So I'm not going to claim, by any stretch of the imagination, that I can relate. I'm simply an outsider, looking to put something into a larger context.

I don't know that I've found it, but I think the pieces fit.

All About Me

"Portman says he changed his mind because he looked at his son and wanted him to have a happy life. But the gay people to whom Portman was denying marriage before his conversion—those people were also someone's sons and daughters. Does Portman only care about suffering when it occurs in his family?"
Rob Portman's Selfish Reversal on Marriage Is a Triumph for Gay Rights

If so, I'd be willing to bet that he's not alone.

I downloaded this from PostSecret some years back. I suspect it's a pretty common "secret" here in the United States.

Normally, I would think that a politician would avoid making so overtly selfish a statement. But maybe he's doing as we expect politicians to do: echoing the sentiments of their constituents. Despite the fact that the United States has long stood for "Liberty and Justice for All," the definition of "All" has rarely been as expansive as most of us presume it to be. In a lot of ways, the most surprising thing about Portman's statement is that he seems unashamed to actually own up to that reality - especially given the amount of time and energy that we commonly put into denying it.

But this is another one of those things that, rather than seeing as being a capital offense in others, that we should simply recognize when it's present in ourselves and move on. There's a reason why "All politics is local," and it's because, for the most part, that all politics is also personal.