A young couple in Pakistan were tied up and had their throats slit with scythes after they married for love, police said Saturday.
[...] The girl's mother and father lured the couple home late on Thursday with the promise that their marriage would receive a family blessing, said local police official Rana Zashid. "When the couple reached there, they tied them with ropes," he said. "He (the girl's father) cut their throats." Police arrested the family, who said they had been embarrassed by the marriage of their daughter, named Muafia Hussein, to a man from a less important tribe.
[...] Pakistani law means that even if a woman's killer is convicted, her family are able to forgive the killer. Many families simply nominate a member to do the killing, then formally forgive the killer. That's what happened earlier this week, a lawyer said, when a tribal council in central Pakistan's Muzaffargarh district sentenced another young couple to death for marrying for love.
[...] The 19-year-old girl's family came to take her from her husband's family, swearing on the Koran that they would not harm her and would hold a proper wedding ceremony, he said. "During this the girl shouted, cried and mourned for her life and her husband's life because she knew that they will kill both of them," he said. The girl, named Mehreen Bibi, was shot by a member of her family when she returned home, police said. Her husband went into hiding and her father registered the murder complaint so he could forgive the killer, Kiyyani said. "That will end the case," he said.That first case really gets at the core issue: the freedom to marry undermines parents' ability to use their children as economic and political tools. Many, many societies throughout most of history have had some form of arranged marriage, and violation of the parental prerogative to control their children's marriages has been punished with varying severity. The more politically and economically useful arranged marriage is to the broader family, the more severe the punishment in that culture ends up being. The burden of this usually falls hardest on daughters. The man involved is frequently seen as an interloper or thief.
Such systems of marital control are deeply tied historically to the desire to control people's sexuality. (And they can even survive the advent of entirely new religious world views.) Traditionally sex and reproduction were controlled through marriage. When marriage is seen as a fundamental part of how the social order perpetuates itself - how parents, elders, and elites ensure their own survival and accrue power - then any sexual or romantic behavior outside of certain bounds violates society's sexual control of its members, and thus the ability of elites to control their children's reproductive lives. If the forbidden sexual behavior is also preferred only by a minority, like consanguinamory or homoromanticism, then its rarity also helps construct the view that it's abnormal and disgusting.
This is why, in societies with very tightly controlled arranged marriage, you're much more likely to see the cultural denigration of romantic love and love marriages. The rise of Protestantism coincided with the rise of absolute monarchy and the eventual rise of the Nation State. It's no coincidence that Protestant monarchs seized Catholic assets and annulled Catholic laws. It's also no coincidence that Henry VIII's Protestant Anglican church made the Monarch its head. It jived perfectly with the idea of absolute Monarchy: that the Monarch was granted authority by God.
It was during that time that marriage laws in Europe became their most onerous. When one violated the will of one's parents, one wasn't simply violating custom or religious doctrine (which one technically wouldn't be under Catholicism), one was violating the will of the State. By controlling something as fundamental as the right to build families, the State was establishing its newly constructed, centralized authority. The Catholic church and Catholic nations followed suit.
And this gets at what marriage freedom is all about: the right to construct one's family as one sees fit, and the right to have that family validated by the state and be allowed to participate fully in civil society. When regressives talk about gay marriage, and how children need "one father and one mother," what they're really talking about is the reproduction of a certain kind of society, generation upon generation, through a certain kind of family. To acknowledge alternative family structures, particularly in the context of reproduction and adoption, is to acknowledge the validity of an alternate kind of society.
Unfortunately for regressives, that battle was lost hundreds of years ago. We're already living in that alternate society. Their conception relates to a specific vision built in the 1500s and 1600s. Enlightenment and Romantic thought have already transformed the way we envision ourselves. By returning power to the individual, the legitimacy of authority has been stolen from the State and other large, coercive social institutions. It doesn't mean individuals don't have a broader obligation to their fellows or to society, but the State no longer has a monopoly on how that obligation is defined.
This is tangentially related to a prohibition on homosexuality. The idea of controlling people's sexuality, and in particular their long term romantic relationships and families, is related to the desire to determine who gets to build what kinds of families. However, homosexual sex is not in-and-of-itself a challenge to that order, any more than concubines are. Homosexual sex cannot produce children, and thus the real danger is not homosexuality, but homoromanticism. This is why some very patriarchal societies, which relied heavily on arranged marriage, did not have any problem with homosexuality.
Consanguinamory is tied directly to the heart of this. When the econo-political status quo was maintained by strictly defined racial categories, interracial marriage became banned. To intermarry across racial lines is to blur those racial lines, and thus to integrate the two communities and subtly over time bring the whole system crashing down.
Similarly, since "incest" taboos are historically related to who you're not allowed to marry, and especially who you're not allowed to have children with, it has functioned as a key delineator of social groups, and a weapon by the elite. They could violate it themselves, enhancing their appearance of being above natural and social laws, while enforcing them against everyone else based on what served their own interests. As the political structure and economic needs of societies have changed, so have their taboos, with consanguineous marriage sometimes being disadvantageous, and sometimes being advantageous.
We're already in a brave new world. There's no going back. And thank god for that, because the world's a better place for it. Now we just have to finish the job.
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