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A Word from Richard Risemberg for December, 2004Traditional Values Bush's next war will take place in US cities-not just in the streets but in the bedrooms and living rooms of our very homes: it will be a crusade against so-called "nontraditional lifestyles"-not just gays and lesbians, but eventually anybody caught "shacking up," any woman having had an abortion, maybe-who knows?-the divorced and the terminally single among us. None of these fits into the neocon definition of "traditional families" having husband, wife, and 2.3 kids.
The problem is that the neocon/convervative/evangelist definition of "traditional family" itself is not in line with the traditional families of the recent past, which include three or four generations living together in a state of semi-self-sufficiency-hello, mom-in-law, thanks for the hand-me-downs! (Oops, there goes constant-growth consumerism!) And this Waltons-TV-series traditional family also does not fit in with the concept of family that has been traditional for most of history, over most of the globe. Let's bypass with only a brief mention the hypocrisy of the party that claims to support "individualism" dedicating its energies to preventing individuals from entering into voluntary covenants with other individuals, and the promoters of "family values" obstructing gays from forming families, and move on directly to a brief overview of the real The Bushies call for a "traditional marriage" of one man with one woman. Unfortunately for them, for most of our history, over most of our world, the "traditional" marriage has been not one man and one woman, but one man and four women. China from ancient times to the communist revolution; the Jews in the era of the Temple; Arabs both before and after the Muslim conversion; the Lakota, who occupied the red-state Midwest till we blasted them with bullets and smallpox; most of sub-Saharan Africa even to this day…. The rich may have had more wives or numerous concubines (King David had several hundred of each, after all), but, in almost all traditional cultures, even highly advanced ones, the wise average man was expected to make do with four. Among our historical forbears, only the Greeks, as far as I know, considered a one-man-one-woman marriage typical--and they're the ones who gave us democracy and science, the twin pillars of secular humanism today. They also not only accepted but glorified homosexuality, and considered it a "purer" form of love than what took place between man and woman. So, what do the Bushies really mean by "traditional families" and "traditional marriage"? They mean, purely and simply, values put forth by very recent revisionists of Christian dogma-not, to be sure, the Paulist advice that men should never marry or have sex at all, but later theories that deprecated and subordinated women to men, and put all men into rigid hierarchical structures that subordinated everyone, ultimately, to the authority of a few infallible rulers who led by divine right---a concept for which Bush's own statements betray an affection. "Traditional marriage," in this context, is the first step in a return to faith-based feudalism-a neo-feudalism that I have examined earlier in these pages [link]. But, if they really mean they want to institutionalize marriage as it has been understood almost everywhere for some ten thousand years…it could be quite amusing for some of us…. Traditional marriage? Bring it on!
Richard Risemberg Go to A Word from Eric Miller
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