WHICH IS WHY THERE ARE ABORTION AND GAY MARRIAGE MOVEMENTS:

Divorced from reality: The left's hostility to family and marriage has had some profoundly unprogressive results (Tristram Hunt, 1/08/10, guardian.co.uk)

From socialism's earliest days, there existed a profound hostility towards traditional family forms. The French socialist Charles Fourier regarded marriage as a desperate hypocrisy that subverted the natural urge for sexual variety and resulted, at his count, in 32 different types of adultery. In Fourier's utopian future, citizens would be allowed full sexual freedom, women would have control over reproduction and children would be given the opportunity to choose between real or adoptive fathers.

In Britain, the socialist Robert Owen – who married into his New Lanark money – was equally opposed to wedded bliss. "Marriage, religion and property are the sole causes of the calamity that has existed since the world began." To move from the immoral world of selfishness to the moral world of fellowship demanded an end to the traditional marriage contract. His communes emphasised group education and doggedly resisted any "family interest" developing in opposition to the community.

To this tradition Marx and Engels added some materialist rigour. For them, the modern family was simply a product of private property and the nucleus of capitalist inequality. An abusive system of sexual inequality underpinned the practice of marriage comparable to the exploitation of the workers. "Within the family he is the bourgeois, and the wife represents the proletariat."

Marx and Engels chronicled the slow, steady loss of female power since the earliest societies, when gender equality was the norm as land and partners were held in common. But with private ownership and the advent of inheritable wealth, men demanded female monogamy. To pass on property to their biological offspring, paternity had to be established beyond doubt.

There was nothing God-given or natural about sexism; it was the inevitable result of capitalist economics. So behind the contented veneer of Victorian family life lurked "a conjugal partnership of leaden boredom, known as 'domestic bliss'". Its predictable accompaniment was widespread prostitution and relentless unhappiness. Indeed, Engels could see little difference between a street whore and a bourgeois wife, who merely "does not let out her body on a piecework, as a wage worker, but sells it once and for all into slavery".

But come the revolution all would be different.

As Camille Paglia puts it in Vamps and Tramps:

Homosexuality is not 'normal.' On the contrary, it is a challenge to the norm; therein rests its eternally revolutionary character. Note I do not call it a challenge to the idea of the norm. Queer theorists - that wizened crew of flimflamming free-loaders - have tried to take the poststructuralist tack of claiming that there is no norm, since everything is relative and contingent. This is the kind of silly bind that word-obsessed people get into when they are deaf, dumb, and blind to the outside world. Nature exists, whether academics like it or not. And in nature, procreation is the single, relentless rule. That is the norm. Our sexual bodies were designed for reproduction. Penis fits vagina: no fancy linguistic game - playing can change that basic fact. However, my libertarian view, here as in regard to abortion, is that we have not only the right, but the obligation to defy nature's tyranny. The highest human identity consists precisely in such assertions of freedom against material limitation.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 9, 2010 8:55 AM