More on the Other Ohio
I grew up pretty much in ignorance of the rest of Ohio, despite one pathetic 7th-grade unit on Ohio history during which I think I did a report on Gnadenhutten. I guess I just assumed that the rest of Ohio was also a decaying industrial urban center, where zoning laws disallowed you from having chickens and ponies (which was always my mom's response to our fruitless crusade to get them.)
In a way, I can't blame myself for thinking that my experience was the only experience – I think it's a natural human impulse. (In "The Indian Upon God," Yeats suggests that perhaps even the beasts of the sea and forest think that way.)
We never took vacations in Ohio, my parents preferring to expose us to exotic lands like Michigan and Ontario. Perhaps this is further evidence that we're Great Lakes people and not Ohioans, as our vacations almost always centered around a major waterway – just as New Yorkers are often afraid to venture into the Heartland, we were afraid to venture into The Heart of it All.
It wasn't until I went to college – one ill-fated year at Oberlin – that I began to realize the Other Ohio was even there. This was because all the children of the coastal elites had cashed in their trust funds (is that what you do with them? I'm not sure) and were coming in, looking around, and passing judgement. Like, "it's so flat. How can you stand to live here?" (Honestly, I'd never noticed that Ohio was flat because in My Ohio, there were a lot of buildings blocking the view.)
I suppose my Ohio dichotomy is essentially the same as the Red State/Blue State divide. From Wikipedia:
But even casting it in terms of Red and Blue Ohio is still imprecise…what troubles me is the subset of Red Ohio voters that seems to be preoccupied with "moral values," the Red Ohio that banned gay marriage. I have real trouble imagining a place for that way of thinking in a civilized society. But does that just make me intolerant of the intolerant?
What a conundrum.
In a way, I can't blame myself for thinking that my experience was the only experience – I think it's a natural human impulse. (In "The Indian Upon God," Yeats suggests that perhaps even the beasts of the sea and forest think that way.)
We never took vacations in Ohio, my parents preferring to expose us to exotic lands like Michigan and Ontario. Perhaps this is further evidence that we're Great Lakes people and not Ohioans, as our vacations almost always centered around a major waterway – just as New Yorkers are often afraid to venture into the Heartland, we were afraid to venture into The Heart of it All.
It wasn't until I went to college – one ill-fated year at Oberlin – that I began to realize the Other Ohio was even there. This was because all the children of the coastal elites had cashed in their trust funds (is that what you do with them? I'm not sure) and were coming in, looking around, and passing judgement. Like, "it's so flat. How can you stand to live here?" (Honestly, I'd never noticed that Ohio was flat because in My Ohio, there were a lot of buildings blocking the view.)
I suppose my Ohio dichotomy is essentially the same as the Red State/Blue State divide. From Wikipedia:
The county-by-county and district-by-district maps [of the 2004 presidential election results] reveal that the true nature of the divide is between urban areas/inner suburbs and outer suburbs/rural areas. In "solidly Blue" states, most of the counties outside the major urban areas voted for Bush. In "solidly Red" states, most of the urban areas voted for John Kerry….
But even casting it in terms of Red and Blue Ohio is still imprecise…what troubles me is the subset of Red Ohio voters that seems to be preoccupied with "moral values," the Red Ohio that banned gay marriage. I have real trouble imagining a place for that way of thinking in a civilized society. But does that just make me intolerant of the intolerant?
What a conundrum.
posted by Christine Borne at 9:14 PM
2 Comments:
Christine,
Generally speaking, my views stem from my belief and observations that men and women are substantially different, not just in the "plumbing," but emotionally in the way they interact with the children they are raising. It's not that Dad cannot Band-Aid a skinned knee or that Mom cannot play catch with her daughter, it's just that men and women bring different things to he table.
This has nothing to do with the Bible, or the "Religious Right" (all dutifully shutter on cue). I do not have a photographic memory so I cannot quote an extensive bibliography, but nonetheless I have come across too many reviews of
studies showing boys and girls without fathers being substantially more prone to violence, drug use, bad relationships and out-of-wedlock pregnancies than those raised in homes with fathers.
I don't know of any studies dealing with the absence of moms, but speaking with personal experience (my parents divorced when I was a kid, fortunately on relatively good terms), they matter as much as fathers.
The fact that many heterosexual couples do get divorced, bad as that is, is no excuse for the state to deliberately put children in homes where they are deprived of both a mother and a father. Economic conditions matter, but so do emotional and psychological development.
Anyway, I know that many gay couples who aren't officially married adopt children already, and I know that being married won't necessarily mean that a couple will adopt, but publically recognized marriage hardly makes that much sense without some expectation that most couples will wind up having children. (Though obviously there are other aspects of marriage, like spousal companionship and the extra responsibility that goes with marriage).
If voters decide they want this, whether I think it makes sense or not, I'm not going to allow myself to lose too much sleep over it. But I do care when undemocratic institutions make those public (marriage, unlike simple relationships, is not merely "private") decisions for us, and I especially don't appreciate the state bullying private charitable organizations to directly violate their moral beliefs by forcing them to place children under the care of same-sex couples. In Europe, activists have actually gotten laws passed that send people to prison just for publically disagreeing with this. I worry the same thing may happen in this country, and that is way too totalitarian for my taste.
Anyway, this post is getting too long and probably not appropriate for this blog. Just wanted to clarify my concerns.
-Rob
Thanks for commenting again, Rob. I agree with you that males and females have different, unique, and equally important energies to add to the human equation. I'm not sure I'm convinced that a kid needs to get those things from Mom and Dad, though, and not, say, Grandpa, Uncle Steve, Mrs. Kowalski down the street, etc.
Brings to mind a few things to ponder....
Why *is* there such a lack of studies about the absence of mothers in a nuclear family? I think the role of "father" is somewhat fetishized as a societal cure-all, and perhaps the body of research is meant to "prove" that the family falls apart without him. There may not be enough single fathers to base a study on, or maybe single fathers are more likely to get remarried (women might find divorced men with kids more "dateable" than men would find divorced women with kids). Interestingly, in 19th century American family life, it was the mother who was idolized as "the gatekeeper of family virtue." Though women had no legal claim on their own children until the Married Women's Property Act (first passed in New York in 1848; by 1900, every state had adopted some form of it), a family "sans Mom" was seen as vulnerable to corruption and vice (and was, thus, usually "remedied" quickly via remarriage).
What if it isn't the absence of Dad, per se, that causes all these problems? What if it's the absence of a support network? After all, if it were Dad, in particular, that kept everyone in line, wouldn't it theoretically be *better* for a kid to have more than one? I think it could reasonably be argued that the nuclear family is more socially isolated than 50 years ago (not that the 1950s should be considered the "golden age of families" - see The Way We Never Were). Kurt Vonnegut had said - I think it was in Timequake - that the reason marriages don't last anymore is because "it used to be" that when you got married, you inherited this whole other family, all these other people to talk to - now it's just you and your spouse, driving each other nuts. Extended families = more people for the *kids* to talk to, as well. It might do well to expose kids to more adults anyway (see: The Case Against Adolescence.)
And what about societies where children aren't/weren't raised by the nuclear family? Classical Sparta comes to mind. Spartan moms and dads didn't live together, didn't even see each other except to make more Spartan babies.
How much have these studies have taken other factors into consideration, like the income level and education of the parents, I wonder? I can only speak anecdotally - out of all my friends, growing up and now, I am the only one whose parents are still married. I grew up in a middle class suburb, and but maybe for 1 or 2, all of my friends' moms graduated from college, at least. So out of all these children of divorcees - I'm talking about a sample of maybe 30 or 40, so not huge, but not tiny, either - no one is in prison or ever caused any serious trouble, and most of them have also graduated from college and/or gone on to graduate school. So, if single parenthood were the sole predictor of crime, drug use, etc., in teens, shouldn't *someone* from my circle have gone awry?
As far as the images of maleness/femaleness that parents might impart on their children go, I wonder how having two gay parents would be any worse than having a meatheaded, chauvinistic dad and/or a shopaholic, thinness-obsessed doormat of a mother (not to mention all the stereotypical images of male and female in the media, the so-called "third parent"). I hate to talk in negative examples like that, but it might be worth considering.
I can concede that it's a reasonable expectation to think that a married couple, straight or gay, might want to have children. It depends on what you think the "point" of marriage is. Call me unromantic, but I see marriage as more of an economic institution, to be undertaken so that both partners have certain legal claims on each other's property, in the event one should get hit by a bus, to have access to the other's medical benefits, etc. I suppose if gay couples could be, in the name of the law, granted those things in equal capacity as straight couples, I could be satisfied that things were fair, without having to call it "marriage." But then again, I'm not a gay person.
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