Comment on Help, help, I'm being oppressed!

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:18:42 GMT

Well, one could certainly argue it.

For example, one could argue that refusing to recognize any marriages and therefore, implicitly, refusing to recognize (aka "outlawing") same-sex marriages was a net benefit.

Or one could argue that common forms of heteronormativity signalling include anti-queer violence, bullying, discrimination in employment and residential selection and etc., and various other more substantial issues, and that those things are worse than discrimination in the recognition of marriage, so if official recognition of queer marriages results in more heteronormativity signaling and thus more violence, bullying, discrimination, etc. it causes more harm than good.

In fact, people do argue these positions in the real world.

As always on this issue, I feel a certain compulsion to reference my husband. He's actually completely irrelevant here, but I generally expect people to be so primed to pattern-match on heteronormative privilege when I talk abstractly about queer equality that they don't actually read what I say unless I do something to break that pattern.

Discuss