#marriage abolition

[metamatar]

i think no fault divorce is great but it doesn't solve the problems with marriage.

some context: it sucks that indian feminists oppose no fault bc they are conservatives who think the marriage is the site to rescue women from poverty. right now divorce law in india requires married couples to prove (1) abuse, (2) failure to fulfill conjugal duties (oh yes this also means the court can sometimes require women to try to fulfill their conjugal duties, like a bit of state mandated marital rape) or (3) atleast a year of physical separation to get a divorce that both parties consent to (obvious economic barrier to get proof, difficult to do with children). ofc most middle class couples in india just lie about it and get divorced anyway. note the the historical interest the state has had in preserving the marriage form. india's status quo has long been the norm, no fault divorce is very new in the west, and couples can be required to attend mediation when they have children to fix their relationship even when both agree to divorce in many countries.

despite this, the cultural message in the pro marriage crowd to women alienated by the failure of the institution to grant them promised safety, much less satisfaction, is that no fault or other forms of divorce by mutual consent are now easy to access. so marriage is no longer a fraught or dangerous question for women in a heterosexual relationship, the party most likely to be in a subordinated position both during and after a marriage. this is a liberal fantasy that ignores that it is not merely the marriage contract itself that creates the duties, responsibilities and relationships of domination and economic dependence but the marriage as social form. so even if breaking the contract was easy, breaking up a marriage is not.

[darkfalli]

Friendly reminder Marriage Will Never Set Us Free

maybe consider adding Marriage Abolition to your beliefs, turns out Gay Marriage is assimilation into the existing hierarchies rather than liberation from them

Non-traditional family structures (single parents, found families, queer-platonic partnerships, polycules, etc) will continue to be disadvantaged so long as marriage as an institution has any material meaning

[runedscope]

Marriage bad and reinforces amatonormativity. A portion of the population should not be punished because they don't desire to partner up. Marriage equality is an improvement over what had existed and i dont want to destroy marriage tomorrow and hurt all the people that rely on the benefits, but i dont like it and ultimately it should be abolished and not needed as an institution.

[golden--flowers]

I'm officially becoming a marriage abolitionist. State doesn't need to know your relationships. The legal qualifications and privileges associated with marriage now don't have to be and the system could be replaced with a new ranking one that makes them less rigid and also removes blood family assumptions at the same time. "These people can visit me in the hospital, this person can't. This person can make decisions for me if I'm unable to (for a legitimate reason), these people can't. These people could not inherit custody of my children, these people could." And if you want to engage in marriage traditions that's completely fine, but the state doesn't need to know.

[hyperlexichypatia]

As advice to monogamously partnered people for surviving in the current legal context, this is sound.

As a public policy issue, this is a really good argument for abolishing marriage, or at least unbundling marriage.

And the focus of marriage abolition needs to be on equal rights for unmarried people (whether partnered, single, polyamorous, "it's complicated," or whatever), not on reinventing marriage alternatives for unmarried couples.

There was some really good writing about marriage abolition, legal family abolition, and getting government contracts out of our interpersonal relationships in the early 2000s -- most, but not all, coming from queer people -- and then... I guess Obergefell happened and people just concluded "Well, we have Marriage Equality now, so we never have to critically examine this legal institution again."

this might be because I’m a family law lawyer and also an old crone who remembers when marriage equality wasn’t a thing (as in, marriage equality only became nation-wide two months before I went to law school), but I have Strong Feelings about the right to marry and all the legal benefits that come with it

like I’m all for living in sin until someone says they don’t want to get married because it’s ~too permanent~ and in the same breath start talking about having kids or buying a house with their significant other. then I turn into a 90-year-old passive-aggressive church grandma who keeps pointedly asking when the wedding is. “yes, a divorce is very sad and stressful, but so is BEING HOMELESS BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT ENTITLED TO EQUITABLE DISTRIBUTION OF MARITAL PROPERTY, CAROLINE!”

[b-lysia]

what the fuck is "romantic" love anyway?

If love is a feeling then what's the difference between the feeling you get when you see one of your partners after a long day and your childhood dog?

Wouldn't you cry over your best friend's death just as easily as your mom, husband, or surrogate grandmother? Does anticipation not turn into a rippling throng of beating wings in your chest when you wait for a grade on a paper for class, just as much as a call from your crush, or an audition for a play?

Feelings we experience are all physical processes in our bodies though. We are our flesh until we can concretely describe "the soul" as anything more than the emergent result of a living creature's existence. And scientific developments so far tell us that love is our experience of a set of chemicals flooding our brain after an orgasm, or when we see someone we're "genetically compatible" with.

That only describes a handful of situations though, and I don't think it's very adult to call what's very clearly just lust/infatuation, "love."

That sounds more to me like our sex obsessed and yet negative society has just obfuscated lust with flowery excuses to ensure that people are getting married and popping out babies in neat little families that companies can sell shit to.

Sounds to me like "romantic Love" might just be Lust, but layered in our society's pathological embarrassment of the concept of sex and vulnerability. Elevated to ridiculous importance to keep people feeling inadequate and broken unless they're working towards a white picket fence, a husband, and 2.5 kids.

Sounds to me like a social standard that got a lot of women and little girls fucking lobotomized for hysteria, stoned, or burned at the stake, and drowned as witches for not cow-towing to.

Sounds to me like a social standard that got a lot of men and little boys slathered across jagged, bullet scarred, and rotting earth as black red paste, and crushed between the gears of industry to prove themselves worthy of.

Sounds like people should be less concerned with trying to make "ace/aro" people fit in to an idea of "normal," and more concerned about why they're so focused on ensuring people fit into a society that we know is built to extract as much life out of you as possible to line some lazy fuck's pockets.

Anyway, Merry PRIDE

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Phoebe Petrovic at Wisconsin Watch:

Wisconsin Pastor Matthew Trewhella has an affable routine when he’s trying to persuade government officials to abolish abortion, ignore gun laws and question election results. The 63-year-old opens his talks with a photo of “Trewhella nation”: his wife of over 40 years, their 11 home-schooled children and dozens of grandchildren. He cracks jokes. He quotes history and scripture. He floats secession as a regretful possibility. With half-rim glasses and collared shirts, Trewhella looks and sounds more like a professor than a provocateur.

But when addressing his congregation at an Embassy Suites in suburban Milwaukee, he sneers and shouts, deriding his enemies as wicked dogs, whores and tyrants.  “When you see sodomy running rampant, when you see women in government, when you see men behaving like effeminate little squirrels, judgment is in the land,” Trewhella said during a 2020 sermon.  Last year, he said homosexuality should be treated as a crime, noting that the Bible called for the death penalty for “the filth of sodomy.” For much of his public life, Trewhella has made a career of denouncing the law while railing against abortion and gun restrictions. Twenty years ago, that made him a political pariah. His reputation for blockading abortion clinics, calling for churches to form militias and defending the murder of abortion providers was so extreme that two state chapters of Right to Life, the anti-abortion group, condemned him. 

But today, the world has changed. He has been invited to speak by local Republican parties and other groups across the country. He gave a prayer breakfast sermon to one of the nation’s preeminent law enforcement associations. And a prolific booster of election conspiracy theories has used his work as the basis for a campaign to disrupt elections.  Trewhella’s ability to tailor his message for different audiences has helped. He’s gracious to the women who introduce him at political events but tells his congregation that the idea of women in government is “sickening” and “perverse.” In the cast of characters who might influence the upcoming election, he’s not rallying crowds like Steve Bannon, the former Donald Trump strategist, or Charlie Kirk, the founder of the conservative student group Turning Point USA. Trewhella is more behind the scenes, providing a religious justification for some far-right policies and causes. With the political establishment shifting, he exemplifies how in this splintered landscape, even the most fringe figures can become influencers.

Trewhella gained his newfound acceptance with a self-published 2013 book, “The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates,” which relies on a theory developed by 16th-century Calvinists seeking holy justification for fighting political oppression amid the religious wars of the Protestant Reformation. Trewhella has applied it to today’s political battles, writing that government officials have a divine “right and duty” to defy any laws, policies or court opinions that violate “the law of God.” To him, that means outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage, or even violently resisting the government if necessary, noting in his book that there are times when men “must redden their swords.”

In recent years, Trewhella’s teachings have popped up in legislatures and local boards as the Christian right has increasingly influenced Republican politics. A Missouri state representative applied the doctrine when he proposed banning abortion in 2020, when Roe vs. Wade was still in effect. Commissioners in western North Carolina invoked it when they declared their county a “gun sanctuary” to protest state laws.

[...] Trewhella’s acceptance into more mainstream circles has surprised extremism researchers who have tracked him for decades. It’s important to pay attention to a man “creating the ideological rationalizations for these ideas,” said Devin Burghart, president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a nonprofit that tracks the far right. “I think that the public needs to know that he’s a dangerous theocrat who would fundamentally alter the United States in irreparable ways that would harm many, including women, people of color and the LGBTQ community,” Burghart said.

[...]

Trewhella’s transformation

Trewhella tells his own life story in biblical terms: A fallen man finds redemption. Trewhella said he wrote it all down in a 23-page conversion testimony after his 5-year-old son asked him, “Dad, when are you going to write a book where you can tell us how you went from being a bad guy to a good guy?”  [...] Growing up in a Catholic family, Trewhella wrote, he was forced to attend “nearly unbearable” Sunday Masses. He described his mother as a “classic merciful mom” and his father as “short on words and quick on corporal punishment.” When Trewhella was 11, his parents divorced, which he called an “ugly thing” that “removes all innocence.”

As a bad guy, Trewhella wrote, he joined a Detroit gang and “dealt drugs, stole cars, firebombed houses, robbed businesses, burglarized homes, fought other gangs, and fenced stolen items to the Mafia.” Then, he said, he landed in an evangelical rehab program at 17 and had an epiphany during church. “Understand, I had told the shrink at the psyche ward just three days earlier that I would burn down more houses when I got out of jail,” Trewhella wrote. “But sitting there — I saw my sin for how truly reprehensible it was. I was in the presence of a holy God.” As a good guy, Trewhella got married, graduated from a Pentecostal college and, in 1989, founded Mercy Seat Christian Church in the Milwaukee area.  He also became one of the nation’s most militant anti-abortion activists. He joined the so-called rescue movement, in which activists blockaded clinics. In 1990, he founded his own organization, Missionaries to the Preborn, whose members chained themselves to cars parked in front of clinic entrances.

[...] Trewhella’s ideas also gained favor among gun rights activists as a wave of counties declared themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries,” some of which state that local law enforcement will not act on any gun laws they deem unconstitutional. The hard-line Gun Owners of America has consistently cited Trewhella and his book in its support of such resolutions. At least 10 resolutions across the country specifically refer to lesser magistrates. One of the earliest, issued in 2019, was authored by a county commissioner who has described reading Trewhella’s book as a “turning point” in his leadership. [...]

Like many leaders on the right, Trewhella suddenly found a much larger audience when the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. As some people questioned public health measures like masks and vaccines, they began looking for ways to resist government officials they saw as trampling their rights. They found answers in Trewhella, who pumped out short-form videos and spoke on conservative podcasts and other platforms. “In light of the tyrannical acts by the state regarding COVID-19, we are rebooting our efforts,” he posted on social media in April 2020.  The doctrine appeared in local meetings in Indiana and Tennessee as officials challenged public health measures. Andy Ogles, then-mayor of Maury County, Tennessee, south of Nashville, invoked the doctrine when he took steps to allow unvaccinated health care workers to keep their jobs. Ogles is now a Republican member of Congress. His office did not respond to requests for comment. 

Frustrated by pandemic measures like restaurant closures and masking in schools, Republican activists in Ottawa County, Michigan, west of Grand Rapids, invited Trewhella to speak several times. In 2022, one group that invited him, Ottawa Impact, helped flip the county board of commissioners to Christian control. Since then, the board has tried to fire its health administrator and declared Ottawa a “constitutional county.” The largely symbolic resolution states the board will not enforce any measure that it believes infringes on constitutional rights. Trewhella called Ottawa “a blueprint for counties across America.”  Two Ottawa Impact founders denied that Trewhella influenced their work. But that sort of denial is common: When asked about their relationship with Trewhella or his ideas, people often distance themselves or are reluctant to give him credit.

Wisconsin Watch has a major exposé on radical anti-abortion activist Matthew Trewhella’s extremism influencing the GOP. Trewhella was once fringe, but over the past decade, his positions became mainstream in the party.

Read the full story at Wisconsin Watch.

[frereamour]

continuing on from lrb tags; this is exactly what I mean by incest is normalized as long as it's heterosexual. and the incestuous nature of the family is the point. the daughters are the father's property, the sons are the mother's husbands.

[sophia-epistemia]

you. you get it.

i feel like the truly repulsive thing about marriage isn't the "til death do us part" bit, people lie to themselves and each other all the time, if you really love someone you should want it to last i think. no, the truly repulsive bit is the "oh honey, let's go get the legal system involved so we can make it harder to escape from each other. and maybe a cleric can bless this legal contract to add a religious element to our codependency"

[fulltransmetalgenderist]

Thoughts on people getting married young? I’m in my twenties and don’t mind when lesbians do it but I see steights do it and have betted 10 bucks they get divorced

lmao yahhh I kinda agree with you 🤭

gay people of any age should get married because when we do it we’re perverting the church and sticking it to the straights. and then we get sexy divorces and get to be all camp about it.

and straights of any age shouldn’t get married because it makes gay people who are married seem less cool.

[metamatar]

ngl the end of my cishetero era was precipitated by doing gendered labour in the midst of discussions about marriage. it ended for good during the marriage of a friend where the bride was also leaving her job to move to another country for her husband.

[ribombeee]

“social justice warriors” is actually just a statistical error. Social Justice Diana, who does over 10,000 social justice a day, is an outlier and should not have been counted

[selkie-on-land]

Gender roles were created to Enslaved girls and women. All of them.

There are only the Slavers who can say and believe that it's a cool thing.

Marriage was the name of the slavery contract for buying a little girl to be your domestic and sexual slave. Most buyers are the age of their grandpas. They could obviously buy any slaves as they could afford them.

Does seeing a little girl married to an old man ring a bell??

''oh but it's just marriage Drifts.''

No it's not. It's actually the closest form of marriage for what it actually is and why it was invented.

It HAS to be ABORT. As all of the pornoprostitutions system. It goes along with it. It's not separated.

The free women of the temple were turned into the public sexual slaves and the ones not priestress were sold for private rapists.

There was no other options, just being a sexual slave to men.

The first category was for them to freely torture women and girls, rapes them as they wanted. To arouse themselves with their domination pleasure. Also to nourish their god complex (and fetish about their mum) as the priestresses were considered as the Mother Goddess herself.

The second category were for established their womb envy so they could claim that ''they are pregnant'', ''they are having a child'', ''they are father''. They are OBSESSED with this one.

Both are WOMB ENVYYYYY, God Complex and mom issues and wanting to have an incestuous relationship with them.

Nothing has changed. They are still the exact same. They also were agp back then.

it's created by straight men to oppress women and homosexual people

it enforces a strict hierarchy and justifies the enslavement of certain people

it invariably positions men on top

men will try to prevent you from dismanteling the system

it has to be completely abolished for liberation of all people

[djuvlipen]

controversial radblr opinion: the left isn't just as bad as the right and leftist men aren't just as bad as right-wing men. It is absolutely true that there is a liberal left and an antifeminist left that wants to decriminalise prostitution, that embraces porn, that deplatforms and boycotts women and lesbians for defending sex-based rights, that supports abusers and tolerates sexual violence, but there is also a left that wants to abolish porn and prostitution and supports women's rights (and yes, there are men advocating for this. I am not pulling a 'not all men', just stating the fact that there are leftist men who oppose TRA politics and the sex industry). Right-wing parties have absolutely never offered women that kind of support. Pretending that left doesn't exist anymore is plain wrong and frankly disrespectful to leftist activists who advocate daily for the abolition of prostitution and for holding abusers accountable (I am in such a party).

Claiming the left is just as bad as the right when it comes to women's rights is so disingenuous and irresponsible given the current political climate in Europe, where fascist parties have been steadily growing and becoming the #1 political force on the continent. It's not leftists who want to deprive women of their reproductive rights, who want to establish religious authoritarian regimes, arrest prostituted women. It's the right.

Feminism is a left-wing political movement and overemphasizing the differences between the feminist movement and leftist politics is irresponsible. Claiming you are 'politically homeless' is irresponsible and a pretty privileged thing to call yourself when poor women, disabled women, woc and lesbians don't have the luxury of not voting for the left. Divesting from left-wing parties because you disagree on their support of transactivism is irresponsible.

Politics won't wait for you, we shouldn't leave the entire leftist political platform to men and TRAs. Feminists have to invest leftist parties (and be active in those parties) if we want to have a political platform.

Feminism has its roots in Marxist thought. Read de Beauvoir, MacKinnon, Firestone, Federici - they all extensively rely on Marxist theory to analyse men/women power relationships. You can't be a serious feminist if you refuse to engage with Marx's work because he was a man. You can't be a serious feminist if you don't know some basic Marxist concepts (dialectical materialism is the one that comes to my mind) and if you disregard absolutely everything Marx ever did or said and even reject the label 'marxist'. Anti-leftist sentiment is very prevalent on here, and I absolutely get where it's coming from, but it's a misrepresentation of reality to say all of the left is just as misogynistic as the right. And I'm so sick of hearing they are one and the same when my country's far-right party (who opposes gay marriage, wants to restrict abortion access, and such) has been winning all our recent elections

[pharawee]

If you are in Thailand or following Thai politics you probably already know that today Thailand's Constitutional Court has ruled to dissolve the Move Forward Party for "attempting to overthrow the Thai political system", barring current leader Chaithawat Tulathon and former leader Pita Limjaroenrat from participating in politics for the next ten years. [source]

This is, of course, some major bullshit (but what else is new). Move Forward is responsible for pushing for many if not most progressive policies in Thailand, including marriage equality. This is the party that won the 2023 general elections and, although not part of the current government (which is also bullshit), it's currently the biggest parliamentary party.

Move Forward's remaining MPs have already announced that they will join a new party and continue in their efforts for democracy and reform in Thailand. This is what Move Forward MP Rangsiman Rome has to say (you can find his original tweet here - I'm only providing a somewhat clunky English translation because I think it's such a powerful and important message):

[No matter what the name of our new party will be, in 2027, the whole country will be orange.] Throughout the time from Future Forward Party to Move Forward Party, we have pushed for progressive agendas for the public, including advocating for the abolition of military conscription, marriage equality, a new constitution, as well as policies to promote freedom and protect human rights through various party policies. However, we have faced severe accusations such as overthrowing the government and subversion, culminating in today's Constitutional Court decision to "dissolve the Move Forward Party." In a democracy, each political party has a set of values, ideologies, and the hopes and dreams of the people who choose that party, conveyed through policy creation and implementation as the people desire. We affirm that the only acceptable way to dismantle a political party is through the verdict of the people in the election booth, according to democratic principles. The legal warfare process of dissolving a party erodes public confidence in democracy and does not strengthen democracy in Thailand. If we persist in pretending that the process of party dissolution, which is disconnected from the people, is normal, it will continually destroy the dreams of the people. This implies that if a group of people with similar dreams and ideas come together to form a political party and propose policies to the public but differ from the state or the elite, they will be destroyed mercilessly, right? We must affirm that the policies of the Move Forward Party are what society needs. We must affirm that what the Move Forward Party has done to solve problems is what Thai people need, whether it is exposing the patronage system, human rights violations, corruption, or various progressive policies. These are what Thailand needs, and we affirm that we, as citizens, will be the ones to fan the winds of change. We will ensure that the Move Forward Party is not just a political party but represents the people and the journey of all of us. No matter what the name of our new party will be, in 2027, the whole country will be orange.