Friday, July 08, 2005

London Blitz

In August 1940, Trotsky wrote: "History teaches us that when ad-venturist organizations lack sufficient political forces to solve a task, the idea of terrorist acts arises by itself. This is the classic formula of individual terrorism."

Terrorism is the last act of the desperate organization, an appeal to chaos. If we ignore historical instruction that those who have mastered this foul art form provide, we will become the grave-digger of U.S. freedom and national survival. Trotsky taught that terrorism is a calculated, though misguided and misanthropic, approach to addressing the helplessness of the masses.

Defending against it is a permanent societal posture. The only historically effective short-term solution to terrorism is to deal with its symptoms terroristically. For the long term, state-sponsored, institutionalized terrorism must witness its breeding grounds defoliated by a process of expanding social and economic justice. When common people, in whose behalf the terrorist acts, renounce violence and dare to hope for a better future, terrorism withers away. In navigating a complex, interdependent, yet economically polarized world full of apocalyptic weapons, these are the only roads. MR

Combined Arms Center-May-June 2002 English Edition -Cashiering Freedom for Security: Lessons in Modern Terrorism -J. Michael Brower

This then is the counter-intuitive American policy adopted after 9/11. The irony is the use of Trotsky's analysis of Terrorism to justify America's 'War on Terror'. Which has resulted in Imperialist War in Iraq, and Afghanistan that has done nothing but exasperate and expand the now existing asymmetrical terror war plaguing Europe-not America.

The exortation is that somehow 'the common people' of the Middle East will 'renounce' terrorism, when it is inflicted on them by Osama Bin Laden Inc. on one side and U.S. Imperialism on the other.

Whether a terrorist attempt, even a 'successful' one throws the ruling class into confusion depends on the concrete political circumstances. In any case the confusion can only be shortlived; the capitalist state does not base itself on government ministers and cannot be eliminated with them. The classes it serves will always find new people; the mechanism remains intact and continues to function.

But the disarray introduced into the ranks of the working masses themselves by a terrorist attempt is much deeper. If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one's goal, why the efforts of the class struggle? If a thimbleful of gunpowder and a little chunk of lead is enough to shoot the enemy through the neck, what need is there for a class organisation? If it makes sense to terrify highly placed personages with the roar of explosions, where is the need for the party? Why meetings, mass agitation and elections if one can so easily take aim at the ministerial bench from the gallery of parliament?

In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission.

The more 'effective' the terrorist acts, the greater their impact, the more they reduce the interest of the masses in self-organisation and self-education. But the smoke from the confusion clears away, the panic disappears, the successor of the murdered minister makes his appearance, life again settles into the old rut, the wheel of capitalist exploitation turns as before; only the police repression grows more savage and brazen. And as a result, in place of the kindled hopes and artificially aroused excitement comes disillusionment and apathy.

Leon Trotsky: 1923 -- Why Marxists oppose Individual Terrorism

As the peoples movment in Lebanon has shown the only way forward is a mass movement for democracy. It's greatest threat is not Osama Bin Laden Inc. but the State Terror of those who seek hegemony over the area and their Imperialist enablers. As we have seen in the brtual repression of the revolts of the 'common people' in Kyrgyztan and the other 'Stans that are now the authoritarian client states of US Imperialism in it's war against Osama Bin Laden Inc.

Osama Bin Laden Inc. is a corporation, a combination of banking and engineering enterprise one of the largest in the Middle East, after Bechtel and Halliburton.

Amid globalization, Al Qaeda looks a lot like GM


The CEO of Terror Inc.
Osama bin Laden's corporation is unique. Its only product is mayhem
By David E. Kaplan and Kevin Whitelaw


"Having lost his deeply religious father while he was still a child, bin Laden would, throughout his life, be influenced by religiously radical older men," Peter Bergen writes in Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden. The first of these were professors of Islamic studies at Jeddah's King Abdul-Aziz University. One was a founder of the global jihad movement, the other the brother of a man who'd written the movement's key text. "It's as if Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman's brother had taught him about capitalism," Bergen

Osama Bin Laden Inc. is in inter-imperialist competition with his former employer the United States Government and its spy agency the CIA.

Oil and power make for strange bedfellows. In June 1977, George W Bush started his first drilling company, Arbusto Energy, with a $50,000 investment from Houston businessman James R. Bath. Bath, along with Bush, had been suspended from the Texas Air National Guard for "failure to accomplish [the] annual medical examination" (in Bush's case he refused to be tested for illegal drug use). In their award-winning 1993 expose The Outlaw Bank, Time magazine writers Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne reported that Bath "made his fortune by investing money for [Sheikh Kalid bin] Mahfouz and ... Sheikh bin Laden." Since Bath had "no substantial money of his own at the time," Beaty and Gwynne suggest that Arbusto Energy was financed by Bath's Saudi Arabian clients. And who was bin Laden? The billionaire father of ex-CIA "freedom fighter" Osama bin Laden. Earth Island Journal; March 22, 2002;

As such Osama Bin Laden Inc. is an extension of the Saudi Arabian State in its competiton to maintain its hegemony in the Middle East.

By the end, Osama bin Laden was running Al-Qaeda like a company, according to Bergen, and hence why he put the "inc." in the title of his book. Like a CEO, bin Laden sends orders down the chain of command so the eventual perpetrator may never know his orders came from bin Laden himself. Secondly, bin Laden himself may use corporate tools; for example, writing a statement on a computer, faxing it to an associate who then broadcast it by satellite to newspapers who then posted it on their Web site. Thirdly, Al-Qaeda is like a traditional holding company in the sense it was comprised of numerous groups and nationalities all under an umbrella leadership. Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden

Osama Bin Laden Inc. is engaged in an asymmetrical war of terror,one that is set out to determine the future of the Middle East in favour of his Saudi masters over their neighbours. And lets not beat around the bush (pun intended) about this, Bin Laden Inc. is the military arm of the Saudi Ruling Class and their imperialist endeavours to dominate the Arab world with their brand of Islamic fundamentalism.

According to Jordanian government sources and European intelligence documents, Zarqawi first set up Jund al-Sham in Afghanistan in late 1999 with $200,000 in startup money from bin Laden. The group's objective was to operate in a geographical area known as the "Levant," which encompasses Egypt, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan where al Qaeda's presence was deemed too weak. Headed by Zarqawi, Jund al-Sham federated about 150 jihadis, including Jordanian Islamic militants exiled by the Jordanian government earlier that year, as well as various recruits from Syria (some holdouts of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood), and Lebanon (mostly Palestinian refugees of the movement "Asbat al Ansar"). These militants were trained in explosive, guerrilla warfare and chemical weapons techniques at a training facility ("Al Matar Training Camp") operated by Zarqawi near the Afghan city of Herat, close to the Iranian border. ABC News: The New Head of Jihad Inc.?

The London bombing yesterday, the Spanish train bombing last year, the massacre in Beslan and 9/11 are not reflections of class struggle or even a clash of cultures, as Thomas Friedman would have it. They are reflections in a mirror darkly of the inter-imperialist rivalries that have existed since the Middle East was carved up by British and American oil interests in the 1920's.

Nor should anyone mistake them for Anti-Imperialist struggles or struggles for National Liberation. They are the last gasp of a fuedalistic empire, that of the Saudi's, biting the hand that has fed it for almost 100 years, Anglo-American Imperialism.

In short it is a fascist movement, as are all such movements that prey upon civilian populations. Such was the case in the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War and the bombings yesterday in London. These muslim fascists; Osama Bin Laden Inc., Hamas, Hezzbolah,Chechen rebels, the Iranian State, the Saudi State, are Anti-Semite's disguised as Anti-Zionists, who use the Palistinian plight as cover for their defense of their medivalist empire. Like all the other little potentates in the region they fear a real peoples movement, a real peoples revolution. They offer the illusion of Anti-Imperialist struggle against U.S. hegemony, while being opposed to any real revolutionary struggle that would liberate the masses from their authoritarian oil masters.

    "You can't blow up a social relationship. The total collapse of this society would provide no guarantee about what would replace it. Unless a majority of people had the ideas and organization sufficient for creation of an alternative society, we would see the old world reassert itself because it is what people would be used to, what they believed in, what existed unchallenged in their own personalities.

    Proponants of terrorism and guerrillaism are to be opposed because their actions are vangaurdist and authoritarian, because their ideas are wrong or unrelated to the results of their actions, because killing cannot be justified, and finally because their actions produce either repression with nothing in return or an authoritarian regime."

You Can't Blow up a Social Relationship - The Anarchist case against Terrorism

As the United States Government continues to give succour to the Saudi State, in effect gives succour to the fascist terrorists of Osama Bin Laden Inc. In effect America's war on terror has become a terrorist war across the face of Europe, and the Empire is just as responsible for yesterdays terror attack in London as the actual perpetrators are.

As the United States and Britain have privatized their invading armies in Iraq and Afgahnistan, so do fascist regimes like the Saudi's in their use of the private services of Osma Bin Laden Inc. to maintain their regional hegemony.

Some misguided writers are looking in all the wrong places for why this attack on a civilian population in London occured. They are looking at the mystical eschatology of dates, was July 7 significant etc., was this the anniversary of some event significant in the mind of these terrorists?

The anwser is simple, no.

It was to disrupt the G8 meeting, which it did effectively, including disrupting the protest movement that had gathered demanding aid for Africa and ironically an end to the War in Iraq. It detracts from the issues of African Poverty and Global Warming, since these are of no concern to Osama Bin Laden Inc. and his employers. In fact any positive moves in the direction of aid to Africa would end the Islamic hegemony over the continent. And any moves towards reductions in green house gases would of course impact on Saudi oil exports.

As George II likes to tell the American people; "better to fight a war abroad than at home". Well his war against terror has three fronts now, Afghanistan (the forgotten war), Iraq, and now Europe. The Europeans should take no comfort from the compassionate words of the American Empire, its they who have brought the terror to Europe. Anywhere but their backyard. Whatever the cost in loss of civilian lives in Iraq or Europe , George II will continue his corporate war against his corporate rival in the Middle East.

Those who fight a war on three fronts, historically have failed. Lessons learned by Napolean and Hitler but lost on Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush.

Comment

The price of occupation

Tariq Ali
Friday July 8, 2005
The Guardian

During the last phase of the Troubles, the IRA targeted mainland Britain: it came close to blowing up Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet in Brighton. Some years later a missile was fired at No 10. London's financial quarter was also targeted. There was no secret as to the identity of the organisation that carried out the hits or its demands. And all this happened despite the various Prevention of Terrorism Acts passed by the Commons.

The bombers who targeted London yesterday are anonymous. It is assumed that those who carried out these attacks are linked to al-Qaida. We simply do not know. Al-Qaida is not the only terrorist group in existence. It has rivals within the Muslim diaspora. But it is safe to assume that the cause of these bombs is the unstinting support given by New Labour and its prime minister to the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One of the arguments deployed by Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, when he appealed to Tony Blair not to support the war in Iraq was prescient: "An assault on Iraq will inflame world opinion and jeopardise security and peace everywhere. London, as one of the major world cities, has a great deal to lose from war and a lot to gain from peace, international cooperation and global stability."

Most Londoners (as the rest of the country) were opposed to the Iraq war. Tragically, they have suffered the blow and paid the price for the re-election of Blair and a continuation of the war.

Ever since 9/11, I have been arguing that the "war against terror" is immoral and counterproductive. It sanctions the use of state terror - bombing raids, torture, countless civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq - against Islamo-anarchists whose numbers are small, but whose reach is deadly. The solution then, as now, is political, not military. The British ruling elite understood this perfectly well in the case of Ireland. Security measures, anti-terror laws rushed through parliament, identity cards, a curtailment of civil liberties, will not solve the problem. If anything, they will push young Muslims in the direction of mindless violence.

The real solution lies in immediately ending the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Just because these three wars are reported sporadically and mean little to the everyday lives of most Europeans does not mean the anger and bitterness they arouse in the Muslim world and its diaspora is insignificant. As long as western politicians wage their wars and their colleagues in the Muslim world watch in silence, young people will be attracted to the groups who carry out random acts of revenge.

At the beginning of the G8, Blair suggested that "poverty was the cause of terrorism". It is not so. The principal cause of this violence is the violence being inflicted on the people of the Muslim world. And unless this is recognised, the horrors will continue.

· Tariq Ali's latest book is Speaking of Empire and Resistance.

This in not a war

By TIMOTHY GARTON ASH

Author of eight books of political writing, most recently Free World: Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of Our Time.

Saturday, July 9, 2005

Globe and Mail Update

While these bombings have produced the largest single casualty toll in London since 1945, this is not a war in the sense that American commentators like to imagine it.

Wars are won by armies. Armies backed by strong societies, economies and intelligence, to be sure; but still, armies. This one never will be.

There will be more of this. Terrorism is not a single army that can be defeated, like Hitler's Wehrmacht. It's a technique, a means to an end, made more widely available by those "advances" in the technology of killing. It will be used, and used again. To some extent, we will have to learn to live with it, as we do with other chronic threats.

How much freedom are we now prepared to sacrifice in the name of security? There is a real danger that countries like the United States and the United Kingdom move toward a national security state, with further curtailment of civil liberties. That must not be -- for it will cost us liberty without bringing us any guarantee of security. I, for one, would rather remain more free, and face a marginally higher risk of being blown up by a terrorist bomb.

This does not mean being passive in response to these atrocities. But the right response does not lie, as commentators on America's Fox News would have us believe, in more military firepower to zap "the enemy" in Iraq or elsewhere. It lies in skilled policing and intelligent policy.

Quietly refusing the melodramatic metaphor of war, London's Metropolitan Police described the sites of the tube and bus bombings as "crime scenes." That's right. Crimes. Working in the most ethnically diverse city in the world, they have developed patient techniques of community relations and intelligence-gathering, as well as detection after the event.

These days, events that happen faraway, in Khartoum or Kandahar, impact directly upon us, sometimes fatally as we commute to work, sitting in the Underground train between Kings Cross and Russell Square. There is no such thing as foreign policy any more. This is perhaps the deepest lesson of the London bombings. this is not a war in any familiar sense of the term.

It is, however, the beginning of a long struggle, in which the conventional distinction between domestic and foreign policy no longer applies. For example, the way we treat our immigrants affects what happens in the Middle East, and our policies in the Middle East affect the way our immigrants will behave. No developed liberal democracy in the world can afford not to have a foreign policy in regions vital to our security. Europe and the world's other English-speaking democracies need to learn the lessons of London, and fast. But let's be sure we learn the right lessons.

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Thursday, July 07, 2005

Left Libertarian Blogs

Larry Gambone long time Canadian anarchist and an old pal has launched his own blog; Porcupine. You will find him commenting on my articles here and at Vive Canada!

Recently he has blogged about the Zapatistas, a libertarian peasant movement in Chiapas, Mexico that has been the most successful organizing attempt since the FAI (Federation of Iberian Anarchists) organized in Spain during the Spanish Revolution and Civil War 1936-39. The Zapatista's have put out a call to move towards greater broadbased community and political organizing. Larry points out, correctly, that the movement is more libertarian than lenninist. Which bodes well for models of revolutionary struggle in the newly capitalized world, also known as the Newly Industrialized Nations (oh, he says, is that what NIN stands for).

Kevin Carson runs mutualist.org , Free Market Anti-Capitalism, and has his own blog. Quoting from the libertarian right and the marxist left is a hard balancing act to do, yet he does it admirably. As I wrote here about the need for a real Movement of the Libertarian Left, Kevin fits that description admirably.

An example of Kevin's analysis from left/right libertarian perspective is in his blog comment that Toyota will be developing another new car factory here in Canada, because of our state subsidized infrastructure. And how some American commentators who have taken note of this news, were offended when Toyota explained it was because Ontario had a skilled workforce. It's not because workers in the Southern U.S. right to work states (read non-union) are dumber than unionized Canadians workers, perhaps less well trained was the actual statement from Toyota, as Kevin points out it was actually because;

In addition to lower training costs, Canadian workers are also $4 to $5 cheaper to employ partly thanks to the taxpayer-funded health-care system in Canada, said federal Industry Minister David Emmerson. "Most people don't think of our health-care system as being a competitive advantage," he said.

While Americans give tax breaks that are greater than those offered by Ontario and the Federal Government, we have medicare, and a social welfare system that is a real economic advantage to monopoly capitalists, as Kevin points out.

For instance the only profit GM made last year was from its Financial Credit business and auto sales in Canada. GM sold more cars here than in the U.S., but not nearly as many as Toyota has. And Toyota will be scooping up a laid off workforce from shut down operations of the Big Three in Ontario. In otherwords thanks to the Big Three and their policies of downsizing, outsourcing and refusal to build smaller cars, Toyota has a capitve pre-trained workforce that is unemployed and ready to work. Big advantage that.

"The level of the workforce in general is so high that the training program you need for people, even for people who have not worked in a Toyota plant before, is minimal compared to what you have to go through in the southeastern United States," said Gerry Fedchun, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association, whose members will see increased business with the new plant....


And they can thank NAFTA for having opened up the market by ending the Auto Pact. While CAW like other Canadian Unions opposed NAFTA, and sort of still do, the result was the expansion of the non unionized Toyota operations in Canada and secondary parts companies. The auto belt in Canada is home to the successful non-unionized Magna parts company, which daddy gave to Belinda Stronach to run before she was seduced to run for the Conservatives, which is critical to just in time supplies to automakers who have outsourced those operations.

And while the CAW has lobbied for state funding for the Big Three which it has contracts with, the result of those efforts have also opened the playing field to Toyota. So the CAW will have to get busy doing what unions are supposed to do, organizing Toyota and Magna, and worry less about brokering deals between the NDP and the Liberals .

Ah the great thing about blogging you can add information to the page as you find it. And upon wandering in the blogosphere I came across another Libertarian blog that call itself CLASSical Liberalism, "a blog for all things CLASSical Liberal, with an emphasis on educating about aspects of classical liberalism (hence, the "CLASS" in CLASSical Liberal)--history, theory and, of course, practice." He has a series of biographies on line of Robert Anson Heinlein, Emma Goldman, Harriet Martineau, Liberal Economist and Sociologist, whom I hadn't heard of, and a great summer reading list. He's putting Class Struggle back into Libertarianism. Congrats on a thoughtful and good reading blog.

Anyways just a way of introducing a couple of great libertarian blogs to read in our little corner of the blogosphere.
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Wednesday, July 06, 2005

The Sexual Revolution Continues

Stephanie Coontz is a socialist feminist and an academic she has written a controversial essay in the New York Times, which I have reprinted below, reminding us that it was the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties that opened the doors to Same Sex Marriage.

The Social Origins of Private Life; A History of American Families 1600-1900, her excellent social history, I reviewed back in 1996 for Labour News. I used it as a critique of the right wing definitions of 'family' of the time. It is online at: Whose Family Values? The Clash Between Middle Class And Working Class Families .


As I wrote a decade ago:

For the past decade the battle cry of the right wing, in both religion and politics, has been; " return of Family values". Every Reform or Tory politician raises the banner of the Family as the solution to the social problems of their own creating. While the business agenda has been to make Alberta and Canada a lean and mean competitive economy modeled after the United States and wrapped in the rhetoric of laissez fair capitalism, free trade and survival of the fittest. The apologists for the ensuing unemployment, poverty and destruction of social programs hearken back to some golden age of the family as the solution to all our problems.

If the issue is declining education, the solution isn't better funding or ending cutbacks, the solution is the family, giving money to parents to fund their child's education. If John or Jane aren't doing well in school its because they aren't being taught traditional family values.

If there is crime and poverty its probably because of the insidious machinations of the left wing to steal children from their parents and put them into day care centers. If there is unemployment its probably because there are too many women in the workforce, or taking advantage of that insidious day care, and its all the fault of the government which has failed to support the Family.

Canada and Alberta would be a better place if we all returned to the industrious traditions of family values. If we had these values, say its proponents, those lazy bums would get off welfare, the other lazy bums would find jobs and quit draining UI and women would return to their proper place; the home. But whose family values are these that we are assailed with in the Hansard, on the Talk Back radio shows and in the letters and editorials of the newspapers? Are these the family values of the First Nations? The extended families of Canada's aboriginal peoples? Are these the family values of the farm families of immigrant Canadians from before the depression? Are these the family values of the post war era and the nuclear family of mom and pop, two point five kids, a dog, a cat and a two car garage? Are these the family values of the extended families of recent immigrants who come from non European non Christian backgrounds? Are these the family values of the single mother or the gay family?

No this family is the social creation of the Canadian and American middle class. It is a family whose values are thrift, self-help, charity not welfare, pick yourself up by your bootstraps and get the job done, mom in the kitchen, the pleasant patriarchal father and the well behaved children out of the Dick and Jane reader. This family is a myth, a useful political tool of the right wing to blame social problems on us as individuals rather than blaming the capitalist system.

The Origin of the Family, as Frederick Engels pointed out over 100 years ago, is in private property. To understand the different kinds of families, and their class nature it is important we understand their property relations. There are no neutral family values. All values and roles reflect the very material reality from which they originate and which they reproduce. The so called "traditional family values" being extolled today are the middle class values of Dickensian world of dog eat dog. These are not, and never have been, the values of the working class. Our values reflect the traditions of mutual aid and solidarity, values that are not found in the world of high finance or the back benches of the Klein Government.

And in this whole sanctity of marriage debate I come back to my same conclusions as I did then whether the issue is gay marriage, family values (sic), women’s role in society, daycare, etc. What I said back then, still applies today. This can be clearly seen in the vitriolic rantings of the right wing and its religious allies over Same Sex Marriage in Canada. And in the attack on women's rights that I wrote about here in Whose Family Values? Women and the Social Reproduction of Capitalism

Stephanie Coontz also comes back to her original arguments from her 1991 work and those she has published since. In her essay from the New York Times yesterday she reminds us of the forgotten revolution of the sixties, the sexual revolution and its importance in setting the conditions for Same Sex Marriage.

The family changed with the sexual revolution that Wilhelm Reich documented back in the 1920's and by fifty years ago it was in full blown assault on so called traditional family values. Jews were no longer discriminated against by the WASP country club set, Civil rights were being demanded by Afro Americans, and Playboy had just published its first edition.

But inter-racial/ inter-religious marriage was still taboo, whether it was between Jews and gentiles, or between Afro-Americans and whites. Ironically in post war America soldiers returned from the war with Japanese brides, which helped break down the inter-racial marriage taboo, as did the gentrification of the Jews. But it was the sexual and social revolution along with the civil rights movement of the Sixties that the conscious recognition of this taboo appeared in popular culture with the movie Guess Whose Coming to Dinner.

And the same arguments against Same Sex Marriage were used back then to deny inter-racial or inter- religious marriage. You wouldn't want your daughter to marry one applied to the Jewish Doctor, as well as the Black Stevedore and today it applies to the Divorced mother of two.

Common law relations were a sin, divorce was a sin and hard to get. The same arguments about the break down of the family that have surrounded the Same Sex Marriage debate occurred then too over the sin of divorce and the sin of common law relations. No Fault divorce was going to bring down the family and destroy society.

Birth control was a no-no, even after the discovery of the Pill. Always in initial caps, the Pill released women from having to merely have sex for reproduction. Controversial, for the decade of the sixties it was essential to women's freedom and to their pleasure as the feminists advocating birth control in the early 1920's like Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger knew. The Pill began the modern sexual revolution.

And with it came the outing of the most noxious of the anti-sex secrets of the day; abortions. They were conducted in secret by back alley butchers, with women's sexual freedom came the demand of safe medically delivered abortions, this was a key demand in the new Sexual Revolution. And it remains a demand today as the forces of darkness and moral pulchritude attempt to force women back into the alleys.

And not much has changed with the Catholic Church teachings on these matters even today.

Sex education books were being published in the sixties which discussed 'petting and necking' and whether one should go 'all the way'. Definitely not before marriage, they advised. Sex education then WAS abstinenance education, and that was all it was.

Homosexuality was a deviance that could be cured these little pamphlets explained, and having a crush on your gym teacher was natural and did not mean you would grow up to be a homo.

As Coontz outlines in her essay it was the sexual revolution of the sixties that liberated us from all the old shit that dominated sexual relations. And not without controversy and the usual detractors from the right, who still to this day blame that revolution for all of society’s problems today.

And it was the 'hetero'-sexual revolution that did influence Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation back then, as witnessed even in the support these movements got from Playboy, much to the chagrin of later anti-sex feminists. But once the hetero-Sexual Revolution began it broadened the meanings given to sexuality and loving and living relationships between people. The Women’s Movement and the Gay Liberation Movement originated in the ideals of the sexual revolution of the sixties.

And it is this revolution that is still being fought against the forces of darkness that insist that their Family Values are sacred, traditional and the best for all of us.

July 5, 2005

The Heterosexual Revolution

© New York Times

By STEPHANIE COONTZ

Olympia, Wash.

THE last week has been tough for opponents of same-sex marriage. First Canadian and then Spanish legislators voted to legalize the practice, prompting American social conservatives to renew their call for a constitutional amendment banning such marriages here. James Dobson of the evangelical group Focus on the Family has warned that without that ban, marriage as we have known it for 5,000 years will be overturned.

My research on marriage and family life seldom leads me to agree with Dr. Dobson, much less to accuse him of understatement. But in this case, Dr. Dobson's warnings come 30 years too late. Traditional marriage, with its 5,000-year history, has already been upended. Gays and lesbians, however, didn't spearhead that revolution: heterosexuals did.

Heterosexuals were the upstarts who turned marriage into a voluntary love relationship rather than a mandatory economic and political institution. Heterosexuals were the ones who made procreation voluntary, so that some couples could choose childlessness, and who adopted assisted reproduction so that even couples who could not conceive could become parents. And heterosexuals subverted the long-standing rule that every marriage had to have a husband who played one role in the family and a wife who played a completely different one. Gays and lesbians simply looked at the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too.

The first step down the road to gay and lesbian marriage took place 200 years ago, when Enlightenment thinkers raised the radical idea that parents and the state should not dictate who married whom, and when the American Revolution encouraged people to engage in "the pursuit of happiness," including marrying for love. Almost immediately, some thinkers, including Jeremy Bentham and the Marquis de Condorcet, began to argue that same-sex love should not be a crime.

Same-sex marriage, however, remained unimaginable because marriage had two traditional functions that were inapplicable to gays and lesbians. First, marriage allowed families to increase their household labor force by having children. Throughout much of history, upper-class men divorced their wives if their marriage did not produce children, while peasants often wouldn't marry until a premarital pregnancy confirmed the woman's fertility. But the advent of birth control in the 19th century permitted married couples to decide not to have children, while assisted reproduction in the 20th century allowed infertile couples to have them. This eroded the traditional argument that marriage must be between a man and a woman who were able to procreate.

In addition, traditional marriage imposed a strict division of labor by gender and mandated unequal power relations between men and women. "Husband and wife are one," said the law in both England and America, from early medieval days until the late 19th century, "and that one is the husband."

This law of "coverture" was supposed to reflect the command of God and the essential nature of humans. It stipulated that a wife could not enter into legal contracts or own property on her own. In 1863, a New York court warned that giving wives independent property rights would "sow the seeds of perpetual discord," potentially dooming marriage.

Even after coverture had lost its legal force, courts, legislators and the public still cleaved to the belief that marriage required husbands and wives to play totally different domestic roles. In 1958, the New York Court of Appeals rejected a challenge to the traditional legal view that wives (unlike husbands) couldn't sue for loss of the personal services, including housekeeping and the sexual attentions, of their spouses. The judges reasoned that only wives were expected to provide such personal services anyway.

As late as the 1970's, many American states retained "head and master" laws, giving the husband final say over where the family lived and other household decisions. According to the legal definition of marriage, the man was required to support the family, while the woman was obligated to keep house, nurture children, and provide sex. Not until the 1980's did most states criminalize marital rape. Prevailing opinion held that when a bride said, "I do," she was legally committed to say, "I will" for the rest of her married life.

I am old enough to remember the howls of protest with which some defenders of traditional marriage greeted the gradual dismantling of these traditions. At the time, I thought that the far-right opponents of marital equality were wrong to predict that this would lead to the unraveling of marriage. As it turned out, they had a point.

Giving married women an independent legal existence did not destroy heterosexual marriage. And allowing husbands and wives to construct their marriages around reciprocal duties and negotiated roles - where a wife can choose to be the main breadwinner and a husband can stay home with the children- was an immense boon to many couples. But these changes in the definition and practice of marriage opened the door for gay and lesbian couples to argue that they were now equally qualified to participate in it.

Marriage has been in a constant state of evolution since the dawn of the Stone Age. In the process it has become more flexible, but also more optional. Many people may not like the direction these changes have taken in recent years. But it is simply magical thinking to believe that by banning gay and lesbian marriage, we will turn back the clock.

Stephanie Coontz, the director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, is the author of "Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage."

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